Fear and Anger:
My Growth Process

In my August 2009 newsletter I talked about the process of letting down my professional persona and being on journey of discovering who I was without the protective mechanisms I used in my work as a university administrator.

As I have spent the last three years spending more time with Martel and Greyson and consulting part-time, I have had the opportunity to learn more about who I am. In my career, I had to maintain a certain protective armor that kept my feelings at bay, in particular when dealing with crisis and student emergencies.

I also spent much of my adult life trying to reign in my emotions. I learned at a young age that my parents were not able to handle expression of any emotions except happiness, or perhaps neutrality. I had a lot of anger, which I now realize was partly due to how much I was controlled and forced to behave in particular ways by adults in order to receive the acceptance and love I needed. I felt my anger was all consuming and I worked for many years to push the anger below the surface and hold it there.

As I let go of the professional persona and began the process of re-forming a life that had more integrity and authenticity, I have struggled with allowing myself to feel the full range of emotions that I had suppressed for so many years. In many ways, learning to unconditionally accept the emotions of Martel and Greyson has been freeing for me as well.

But with the freedom has come a lot of fear. Fear of unleashing my anger and frustration from a life lived according to others’ and society’s rules. Fear that my anger would hurt those around me. Fear that they would find me unlovable. Unconditional acceptance and love for Martel and Greyson would mean little if I could not apply that to myself.

As I come to uncover my feelings and fears one by one, I am slowly learning to accept them as part of who I am. I am challenging and exposing the socialization and conditioning process that led me to believe that it was not legitimate to feel the way I felt. As a result, I am able to reduce the ways I am triggered by the children in my life and approach them more authentically and lovingly.

In some ways, that is the paradox. I need to embrace my anger and fear, in order to lessen its hold on me. Accepting who I am, fully, is part of the process of deconstructing the paradigm of control that I had accepted as a child and as an adult and that I have perpetuated as an adult.

At times, this acceptance process seems so slow to me. I want to be able to say, yes, it is okay for me to angry or hurt or upset. My feelings are legitimate. And yet it goes back and forth: acceptance – control – acceptance – control. I want to be at the end of the journey and be in a place of acceptance, and yet, it is through the journey that I am learning what it means to be who I am.

Read about the power of resistance to negative feelings....

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