How old was I? Seven, probably. I do not remember exactly what I said or what I did. Whatever it was, my father seemed angry about something, and where I stood he hit me across both cheeks, without warning — back and forth, back and forth. I could not tell you how many times. Ten of them, near enough.
I want to be plain about what that was, because plain is the only useful way to say it. I was handled however he liked, by an adult who could not take responsibility even for his own feelings. That is the whole of it. The feeling was his. The face it landed on was mine.
And that was only one incident. It happened repeatedly. Each time, I could not protest, escape, or ask the adult to take responsibility. The anger, grief, and resentment therefore had no expression and no witness, so I learned to suppress them and continue as if nothing had happened.
What is stacked up does not stay still
Suppressed anger did not disappear. It returned as constant bodily pressure, destructive thoughts, and reactions larger than the immediate situation. I was not responding only to what was in front of me; each new frustration activated the anger from all the earlier times when I could do nothing.
Here is what I could not do with it: soothe it. I did not know how, and I could not have told you what it was if somebody had asked. So through my teens I went off the rails, and that is how I got through those years. Not by handling the rage. Just by outlasting it.
Why I went looking for bad water
Then I was a young man, and I started doing something that must have looked strange from the outside. When a storm came through — a real one, a typhoon, the kind of day when the sea goes wild and heaves — I would go down to the sea.
I was not there for the view and I was not there to calm down. Going down there was how I struggled to get in front of the thing and look straight at it. There was nothing considered about it. It was a thrashing about rather than a plan.
The storm gave visible form to an experience I could not name. The violent movement of the waves resembled the pressure in my chest and head, so I could recognize my anger, grief, resentment, and wish to destroy as feelings rather than as an unnamed force taking over my whole mind.
Perhaps that was why. Watching that sea in the storm, I took some comfort from it, a little at a time.
The sentence, in front of the water
And standing in front of it, on one of those days, this came:
So — I was that angry too.
That is a man recognizing something. Something enormous had been surging up in me the whole time — a thing that wanted to swallow whatever it met, to sweep the lot away, to break it all. That was what it had been.
Seeing the rage represented outside me created distance. I could observe it and say, “I was that angry,” instead of experiencing myself as nothing but the anger.
The other thing that was happening, which I did not notice
Something else was going on in front of that sea, and I did not clock it at the time. It was not anything I set out to learn. Standing there watching the water heave, I think my body was taking something in while my mind was busy with the waves.
Standing before a storm also changed my sense of scale. The sea was larger and more powerful than anything I could control, and my grievance was no longer the center of the entire world. I experienced myself as one small human being inside something vast.
I had expected that smallness to feel humiliating. Instead, it brought peace because I no longer had to maintain the position that my anger, injury, and importance should organize everything around me.
What settled it was not what I had assumed
I think that was the first time I understood it.
What settled the anger was not getting it out. Not pouring it into the world, not finding the right target for it, not discharging it somewhere and walking away lighter.
What settled the anger was gradually releasing the conviction that my injured self had to remain at the center of everything. Accepting that I am a small person within a reality much larger than me did not erase what my father had done. It removed the demand that the injury must continue organizing my whole life, and that is where peace entered.
And I want to be exact about how I came to know it, because how matters more here than what. I did not work it out. It was not an insight. I think my body learned it rather than my head — slowly, standing in wind, in front of water that was bigger than anything I had in me.
Which is the awkward part of writing it down. You can read this page and have the whole idea in your hand by the end of it. Having the idea is not the thing. What changed in me was not what I thought. It was what I had stood in front of.
And then somebody was standing there
One more thing, and I will say it the way it happened rather than dress it up.
Perhaps, in that place, I was getting ready to meet God.
For a long time, grievance and resentment occupied all my attention, and I approached the world from the certainty that my injury had to be answered first. When I released that position and accepted my smallness, I became able to encounter God. God had not appeared because the past was justified; I could perceive God because anger was no longer filling the whole field of experience.
That is where it went, for me. It began with a man who could not take responsibility for his own feeling and put it on a child’s face, and it ended in front of a sea in a storm with nothing left in my hands.
Related
- I Get So Angry I Want to Break Everything, Including Me
- What Did I Do to Deserve This? Punishments End. This Doesn’t.
- Chiron’s Wound: When the Lid Stops Holding
Written by Kim Hyung-keun — Director, Seoul Addiction Psychology Institute · Director, Institute for Contemporary Psychoanalysis · Object relations psychotherapist and supervisor, 26 years in practice and teaching. Counselling Board
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