A Guideline on How to Get Mad at Your Abuser

Often abusers are loved ones, people we’ve known, probably for years. How can you get mad at someone you love?

I used to never get mad. I didn’t even know for sure if that was possible for me. Getting angry, to me at least, is linked to aggression. Aggression is linked to my abuser, my dad. My dad caused a lot of pain. So getting angry is equal to pain for me. It explains why I blocked that emotion.

In my therapy, I tried to work hard on this subject. I needed to realize getting angry isn’t a bad thing. Even in society, getting angry is a bad thing. Most girls learn to cry when they are angry. Now I choose to be angry. It was hard but after a lot of practice, I managed to do it. I threw eggs, I ripped paper apart, and I broke a lot of branches. All these times, I chose to be angry because I learned it could be something positive.

Getting angry is a form of self-worth. It means something crossed your line. Your norms and values are broken. If you can get angry about it, it means you feel like your boundaries matter, you believe enough in yourself to stand up and say “you crossed my boundaries.” Isn’t that scary to say out loud? But if you love yourself enough, you’re can decide to get angry.

Even the smallest situations can trigger this feeling. My reason to hold it back was the fear of losing it all. But my therapist taught me something.

If you have a bottle of sparkling soda and you shake it, it will start to fizz. If you keep the bottle closed and you keep shaking the bottle, eventually the bottle will either explode or you will never to be able to open it.

But if you choose to open the bottle slowly after every time you shake it, nothing will happen.

In this story, you are the bottle and the sparkling soda is your anger. The shaking is every time someone chooses to cross your boundaries.

There are ways of safely releasing anger. So there is no need to be scared of your own anger anymore. I know it’s hard to feel it that way, but you have to practice in order to gain your own trust.

Now I'm learning to get angry at other things, more serious things. I practiced on small situations to learn how to get angry in a healthy way. Now I need to get angry about everything that happened to me. I'm not the victim anymore, now my reality is different; I am older and wiser. And now I know those things were wrong, those things shouldn’t have happened. I don’t feel it that way yet, but I want to feel it that way.

I do think it was unfair. I was a child, I didn’t do anything wrong. It all has harmed me, my life would have been different without all the shit that happened. And, of course, I'm sad about it sometimes. But I need to learn to get angry about it. I tell myself over and over, it wasn’t my fault, not even a tiny little bit.

I really try to love myself, and part of that is letting go of the guilt I'm carrying with me. The feeling that I betrayed my dad isn’t true. And I'm allowed to be angry.

If anyone would do this to another little child—one that I love, for example, my niece—I would destroy that mother fucker! I would do the cruelest things to that person! Because that’s not how you raise a child, how you touch a child, what a child should hear…

So why wouldn’t I feel that way about myself? I'm learning to protect that little girl from years ago as a grown woman, as the woman I am now. It’s my father I should be angry at; he didn’t act like a father at all! I am allowed to be angry.

You’re allowed to be angry as well.

Be angry because you love yourself

Be angry because you deserve to take care of yourself

Being angry is okay, it shows the way you respect yourself.

My dad took my life, my innocence, and vulnerable youth. And sometimes I'm sad about it. But now I'm mad about it. And that is totally fine!

~Written by Namasté allday~