What did the memory of being hit by my father leave in me?
How old would I have been? Probably about seven.
I don’t remember exactly what I had said, or what I had done, but my father seems to have been angry about something. Right where I stood, without warning, he struck me hard across both cheeks. I can’t remember exactly how many times his hand swung back and forth across my face. I think it was probably ten blows or so.
In this way, I was treated roughly by an adult who could not take responsibility even for his own feelings.
But this was only one incident. That kind of “rough treatment” happened again and again, and each time, anger, sadness, and resentment piled up, layer upon layer, deep in my heart.
How did I endure an anger I didn’t know how to soothe, and how did I face it?
There came a point when the anger that had piled up this way whirled in my chest and in my head as if it were about to explode. There was always an energy boiling up inside me, so intense that I wanted to swallow something whole and destroy everything. I didn’t know how to soothe that anger. So there was a time in my teens when I endured that anger by going off the rails.
As a young adult, in a desperate struggle to face that anger, I sought out the sea on days when a storm was raging, a typhoon was blowing, and the water was heaving wildly.
Why did watching the sea in a storm comfort me?
Watching the fierce waves surge up and the sea leap and plunge wildly, I felt as if I were looking from the outside at whatever it was that had been boiling up in my chest and in my head. It was as if the anger and sadness, the resentment and destructive energy I could not put into words, had turned into huge waves and were moving out there, outside me.
Was that why? Watching that sea in the storm, I found comfort, little by little.
“Yes. So I was that angry too.”
An enormous energy had been surging up inside me, one that seemed ready to swallow something up, sweep everything away, and destroy it all.
When I grew small before the vastness of nature, what did I let go of?
And I think that, without realizing it, as I watched the sea heaving in the storm, I was feeling something with my body.
Whenever I stood before that vast sea and that storm, my very existence grew smaller and smaller, without end. I had thought myself so important, yet before the immense, majestic movements of nature I was no more than a single tiny speck.
But strangely, the more I came to accept, little by little, that I was such a small being, the more my heart began to fill with peace instead.
It was then, I think, that I first realized.
Resolving this anger was not a matter of pouring it out on the world.
Rather, it was only when I let go, little by little, of the “I” that I had been holding on to as if I were the center of the world, and accepted that I was a small being in a vast world, that peace finally came.
I think this was not something I understood with my head, but something I learned, over time, with my body.
And perhaps, in that place, I was getting ready to meet God.
When I let go of everything my hand had been clutching, when I had become nothing at all, only then was God standing in that place.
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