My anger was violated

A Love manifesto

CARE check*: How has your relationship with Anger evolved over the years?

Have you gotten closer? Are you more afraid of Anger than ever?

Do you rever or despise it?

Have you ever let yourself feel your Anger until the fire can reveal its hidden yet Life-saving wisdom?

Has your Anger been violated too? And if so, when and how?

And are you ready to reclaim this allyship that can only change your but OUR world for the better, forever?

I hope this week’s letter feel like an invitation to see Anger under a new light and with a radically open heart.

ALSO: I’m experimenting with now sending those letters on Friday, let’s see how that works for us all!

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In case this letter gets cut in the email, you can click HERE to read the full post now :)

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Hi CARE friend,

How are you?

Is there something that needs extra tending within you right now? A part of you that never gets the mic and really needs your attention, maybe?

If so, how could you facilitate that?

With a walk, through meditation, by journaling, with the help of a trusted friend?

Do you know? And if you don’t, are you willing to experiment?

I couldn’t send you this letter last week.

It had been written, but it felt too tender to come back to. To edit… To share with the world. I was not ready, and so I decided to listen to my resistance for once. To tend to it instead of resisting it… and I learned so much about the depth of my wounds! And even more importantly I learned so much about the depth of my LOVE.

For the first time ever I could admit to myself that I am not okay right now, and that’s okay. I don’t have to fix it and I don’t have to fight it either. I can let it be and live by those words that I spotted in a poem on the New York subway:

“let it be the healing

And if not, let it be”

So here it goes… I’m ready now:

“That’s because your anger was VIOLATED.”

You know those moments when someone finds the exact words you needed to hear, at the exact time when you needed to hear them the most?

I was with such an angel on Sunday as we were preparing for a grief-reclaiming breathwork session.

We were exploring the blocks that stand between me and my heart, and that still hinder my self-expression.

And it led me to connect with those parts of me that never got a voice. Literally.

Indeed, until now, Grief was only allowed to live within me in the deeply repressed forest of my unconscious, in parts of me that no one can see and, even more importantly, in parts of me that no one can hear.

Because if I ever allow myself to cry, it has to be done WITHOUT A SOUND. It has to be done so silently that even someone in the same room as me would miss it.

And that makes sense. There’s a VERY good reason for that—and tomorrow will be the 27th anniversary of that event… so it’s time for a change of rules.

It’s time for me to reclaim the empire of my heart and to let her reign over my entire world. Which includes the shadow and the light. Which includes my body and my mind. Which includes what is hidden in the marrow of my bones and what the world can see in my eyes and through my Art.

I want to be an open book to myself and a very loving one to you.

And I am not there yet! This will be the creation of a lifetime… but Jung said that our lives start at 40 and I turned 40 in January, so that is what I want to dedicate my Life to.

Liberating my heart. EMBODYING my heart. Surrendering to my heart… and then let her be my offering to the world.

And I have learned that it will not happen—because it cannot happen—if I don’t grieve.

It just can’t:

Because those tears have not been freed, they keep me prisoner.

My tears have turned into an armor of ice, and that ice coffin allowed me to survive the raging fire of my youth. But it’s now keeping me separate from what I NEED and value most: my heart song.

And so I am knocking at the door of the temple of my heart, and I am praying to be reconnected to my grief.

Which means I have to reparent and nourish my nervous system as if I had literally just entered this Earth! And which also means that I need to build even more safety and intimacy with my ANGER. Because right now my unprocessed Anger stands between me and my unprocessed Grief.

What. An. Invitation.

My anger was violated.

My anger was told that she had no place in this world. My anger was met with humiliation, fists, punishment and ostracization. My anger seemed to further ignite my mother’s rage and my father’s urges to retreat. My anger was bullied, shamed, vilified and framed as a reflection of ingratitude and unworthiness.

And yet, my Anger saved my life.

Because our anger is the vanguard of our ability to Love—to love ourselves… and to love the entire world.

Our anger reminds us that we care and that we matter. And no matter how well we’ve been trained to exile it, our anger will never go away because it is part of the fire of Life. Our anger is just as needed as volcanos are to render the soil fertile and reshape the world. Our anger is the ultimate fire-fallowing device that clears out all that was toxic and all that no longer serves. Our anger wakes us up. Our anger says “NO”, “Absolutely not “Not. Under. My. Watch”. Our anger turns our current form into ashes so that we can be reborn into the magnificent bird we were always meant to become. Our anger loves us with the fierceness of a lioness, who is not only her cubs’ but the lions’ pillar of survival! Our anger knows how sacred our essence is and will protect that essence at all cost. Our anger awakens us and our anger keeps us alive.

Note that I am talking about ANGER here, not aggression.

Those are very different things:

Anger is only Anger if embodied and centered in our heart. Most of us have unlearned how to let that happen… and so we’re left with only two choices: taming ourselves and burying our anger in our fascia—where it will fester and consume us from the inside out—or projecting it onto the world—destroying in the process all that we can’t remember that we so deeply care about.

That’s one thing we got deeply wrong with ‘Anger “management”’; because the goal is not to get rid of our anger, it is to build a sacred connection with it. So that we can receive and understand its message... So that we can harness the timeless wisdom that lies within our hearts: our anger is the key to our inner knowing’s vault.

Ironically, people who never get angry have the exact same problem as those who cannot control their angry outbursts. They’re disconnected from the fire within. And that has created the world we live in, where people oscillate between states of tameness—such as fawning, freeze and functional freeze—and uncontrollable fight responses—which includes blame, self-rejection and toxic righteousness, not only physical reactions.

(I wrote about the figth/flight/fwan/freeze/collapse ladder HERE and HERE).

I mostly have a beautiful relationship with my Anger now. But two vital conditions must be fulfilled for me to feel safe while engaging with her:

• She must come from parts of me that I know and that have been integrated.

• I must be absolutely alone with her.

I hadn’t realized that until recently.

I thought Anger and I were fully reunited but—just like with my Grief—Anger only has a right to exist right now when no sound comes out of it! And IF I ever voice it to another being, I only feel safe and authorized to do so if I make it funny.

I’m committed to changing that because I understand the untapped power that is stuck beneath my skin! and because I need Anger’s lava to lovingly melt the ice structure I’m trapped within. But that’s no easy feat, because my anger has been violated.

And the parts of me that carry this untapped anger that I don’t yet know how to free are deeply repressed inner children in my psyche. Children that do NOT trust me, and how could they? I just left them there; I left them in Hell while I stepped onto their screaming heads to find a way to my dream and to New York. And until recently I hadn’t found the courage to look back. Until recently I didn’t even remember they existed. That’s how numb I had to be to make it out of there and find my home at last.

Those parts of me are raw, unruly, resentful, petty, sour, enraged and Lilithic. They despise niceness and they do not understand the impact that unkind words can have on someone or the concept of projection. They’re bruised, bloody, famished, abandoned children who do not know of love, light, tenderness or warmth. They’re stuck in a dark forest on a frozen island. They’re surrounded by relentless winds and all too aware of the never ending threat of volcanic eruptions that will only and always wound them because the fire cannot pierce the surface of their prison. They’re stuck into terrifyingly unfair narratives, because they have no notion of fairness and do not trust anything nor anyone. They’re embodied pain and the more I self-reject in their names, the more I prove to them—and therefore to myself—that I do not belong, that I’m beyond repair.

And so, again, this cycle has outlived its usefulness. I’m breaking this pattern of inner silencing and self-betrayal. I’m entering the dark forest unarmed, and I’m ready to be consumed by this unprocessed pain that is not only my heritage and my responsibility but, I believe, my privilege.

Because what an honor it is to get to fully witness someone’s pain! And whose pain can we more deeply witness than our own?

Tomorrow will be the 27th anniversary of the death of the woman that shielded me from my traumatized mother for the first 13 years of my life. When she died, I was at school taking a Latin test (of all activities!) and I felt something break at the core of my being. I started sobbing and, as you can imagine, that was not celebrated neither by my classmates, nor by my teacher who was a very stern, bitter and lonely human being. It would take a few hours for me to learn the reason for this intense grief…

When my mother came to pick me up after school, she told me that my aunt had died at that exact same time earlier that day. This is the reason why I KNOW that Love unites us way beyond the limits of our bodies.

And that is also the night when I “stopped” sleeping. Of course, since I’m still alive nearly three decades later, it’s proof that I do find a way to sleep enough for my body to function, but insomnia and nightmares have been loyal companions ever since. Which makes perfect sense given how little support I received through all of this. The only hug I received that day (and thankfully it was a very sweet one) was from the woman who cleaned our house. I loved her dearly and I am so grateful to her! But a kid also needs her parents when her entire world collapses.

My mother did not only not help me grieve, she forbade me to do so. She was so jealous of the love I held for my late aunt with whom we had shared the house I grew up in (each family owned one floor and a half), that she told me that if she caught me crying even once, she would not take me to the funerals.

Over the next few weeks, she kept on saying hateful things about my aunt that still make me shiver today… and reminded me constantly that I had been nothing but a burden for her, especially in her final years, and that my aunt had never loved me.

And that’s the reason why, as I realized during breathwork on Sunday, I did not only lose my surrogate mom 27 years ago, I also lost my bond with my birth mom.

Because I knew, I just knew at that moment that there would be no repairing such a wound. I had lost trust in my mother forever… and even if one cannot entirely lose the love that once united them with another being, let alone a parent, I knew there would be no coming back from that.

And so a part of me had been stuck in my childhood bedroom for the last 27 years, desperately holding on to my aunt’s hands and begging her not to leave me all alone on Earth… but also looking at my mother’s enraged face and begging her to make another choice so that I wouldn’t lose her too.

That’s where my repressed anger is held and why my grief process is so stuck.

I do not want to let Anger tell me that my mother broke our bond, I do NOT want to acknowledge my aunt’s passing, and I absolutely do not want to face the fact that my mother broke our bond in the aftermath of my aunt’s passing. It’s just too damn much.

That prevents me from feeling my anger, and that means that there is just no reason to grieve… Which is convenient because it also shields me from the felt experience of danger I hold in my every nerve at the idea that someone would hear me cry!

Because I did cry after my aunt died. I was a broken apart 13 yo, of course I cried.

I cried every single night for a year, once I knew for sure that my mother was asleep… but I was so afraid my cries would wake her up that I taught myself how to sob in complete silence. My body has even learned not to redden my eyes anymore.

Up until recently, you would not only not have been able to hear me cry, but you would not have been able to know that I had even cried if you had not been there at the exact second that tears left my eyes.

It’s changing now… but the thawing of this buried ocean of tears is very slow, because trauma stops time! And, for a part of me, those 27 years have not unfolded as a journey from Paris to New York but as a nightmarish “Groundhog day” spent in hell.

And a part of me still believes we can change the way that story unfolded… That part drove me to spend 15 years as an oncologist! That part of me was still desperate to save my aunt. And that part of me and I reunited through breathwork on Sunday, so something has shifted at the core of my being.

I couldn’t cry much on Sunday but I did let out one very primal scream. And I could see that young leo let go of her aunt’s hands and run into my arms. Together we watched our beloved aunt transition into the light and looked at our distressed mother raging and screaming in the darkness. Together we decided that it was time to get out of there, for GOOD.

Since then, when I think about that bedroom that had always felt like a jail (or a donjon), I see a room that is lifeless and spot a grey weather through the window. No one’s in there. Only a sorrowful energy… Only wasted opportunities for Love that need to be released and surrendered to Life’s mercy.

Before that I could only picture that bedroom at nighttime. Inside was a sobbing little me curled up in a ball on the carpet, terrified and weighted down by the shrieks of a hysterical woman, while a dark tornado was taking her sense of salvation away.

And so it has begun.

That little girl has decided to let those two women from the past go, for better and for worse… and she’s embraced a new mother:

One that will hug and love her with every inch and beat of her hearts. One that will listen and validate her. One that can hear it ALL: including her rage and her sobs. One that will never ever leave her again, and that will apologize everyday to her for not coming back and retrieve her sooner. One that will eternally be grateful to her for taking all the pain she had no idea how to carry on her own shoulders until now… One that owes her everything and that is ready to live up to her debt, wholeheartedly.

ME.

I am her mother now.

And I will surrender all that I have and all that I am to my anger’s hymn and to my grief’s chant. I will live devoted to my heart’s songs, even if I’m the only one who cares to sing it, even if I’m the only one who’s willing to listen.

I was told in a human design reading last year that the song that defined me was DEFYING GRAVITY

Yes how ironic, I know, since it is a song about outgrowing definitions (!) but also how empowering for someone who’s so in love with Broadway! How timely with what I’m living through right now… and how convenient that this song is now back at the forefront of our awareness thanks to the Wicked movie and Cynthia Erivo’s awe-inspiring take on that timeless anthem.

Those lyrics feel like soul medicine to me, more than ever before.

“I’m through accepting limits

Cause someone says they’re so

Some things I cannot change

But till I try I’ll never know

Too long I’ve been afraid of

Losing love I guess I’ve lost…

Well, if that’s love,

It comes at much too high a cost”

I’m finally ready to liberate myself from what is deemed as good or tidy or acceptable by Culture, and I pray and I hope—and I even TRUST—that this is how I will end up becoming precisely who I’ve always wanted to be… and offer.

With kindness, love and light—knowing that all three are born in the sacred darkness that we do not need to fear anymore.

leo