revenge and repressed anger
how a period drama unlocked my primal rage
“Revenge is never a straight line. It's a forest. And like a forest, it's easy to lose your way. To get lost. To forget where you came in.” - Hattori Hanzo (Kill Bill Vol. 1, 2004)
This quote from Kill Bill has always stuck with me.
If you care to really get into the mood for what we’re about to discuss, check out the short clip below. This one minute snippet sets the tone for a deep dive into our exploration of rage and revenge:
How a medieval warrior unlocked my own primal rage.
Over the last week, I’ve been binging “The Last Kingdom,” a period drama that takes place in the early Medieval period (between 866 AD and 918 AD) when the Vikings and Anglo-Saxons were duking it out for control of England.
The other night, as I watched one of the episodes, there was a scene where one of the characters finally gets the revenge he sought for so long. I don’t want to spoil the series for you if you haven’t watched it – or plan to – so I won’t mention the names of the characters or go into too much detail, but the scene involved lots of stabbing and gore.
The character killed in this brutal way is a real shit bag, so you don’t feel bad for him. At all. He had carried out unthinkable and horrific acts of murder and rape against innocent people, and it took almost two full seasons of the show for the character (and audience) to experience the justice of his demise.
As I watched, I felt the beginnings of burning of tears behind my eyelids. My stomach churned. My fists clenched.
Instead of pushing these feelings away (like I usually do), I got curious. I began to reflect on the fact that I’ve always been particularly drawn to movies about justice and revenge.
Kill Bill (both volumes), Deathproof, Promising Young Woman, Monster, Django Unchained, Drive, Hard Candy, Jennifer’s Body, The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo, John Wick, Pearl, Colombiana, you get the idea.
I never thought much about what exactly it was that I loved about these films, but as I watched the character in The Last Kingdom finally give this ass hole exactly what was coming to him, things started to fall into place in my own psyche.
These brutal depictions of revenge tapped into my own deep, simmering, repressed rage.
I learned the hard way very early on that it was not safe or acceptable to express my anger towards perceived injustices.
Boiling displaced anger runs deep in my family line. My father was raised by a brutally abusive alcoholic. The things my dad went through as a child are almost too horrific to describe, and it’s not my place (nor the purpose of this post) to get into detail about them here.
Having never properly addressed the trauma he endured and choosing instead to bury his rage deep in his subconscious, my father’s repressed anger continued to hold our household hostage.
It wasn’t all bad. That’s the head-fucky nature of this childhood trauma stuff, isn’t it? When no one was challenging him and he was emotionally regulated, all was well. I have many deeply fond memories of laughing and connecting with my family. I love both of my parents.
However, if you messed with my dad or somehow called his behavior into question in any way, the tides turned. You became his enemy. Instantly.
My mother and sister took the (arguably) smartest approach: they didn’t cross him. I, however, couldn’t help myself.
I remember so vividly thinking to myself as a child: “This is not how a parent should act. This isn’t right.”
And so, I fought against it. But I was no match for my dad’s anger. I was just a child. This led to many screaming matches and many nights crying myself asleep alone in my room, secretly wishing that one day I would get my Hogwarts letter and whisked away into the night on Hagrid’s flying motorbike.
Even typing this out transports me right back into those childhood emotions of deep, righteous anger, mixed with a profound sense of helplessness and despair. It was profoundly painful in a way I can’t begin to describe.
In addition to being angry at my father, I also developed a seething resentment towards my mother. To me, she was the opposite of the protective “Mama Bear” archetype.
Were mothers not supposed to fiercely protect their children? What was wrong with me to not deserve this motherly protection?
Why was my mother more concerned with protecting her dysfunctional relationship with her partner over her own child? Why couldn’t either of them see how unhealthy all of this was?
These questions would simmer unanswered within my subconscious for my entire childhood and adolescence.
I confronted my mother about this more times than I can count. Because she was the “safe” parent, I unleashed most of my most poisonous reactions out on her.
During one of these confrontations, I remember my mother telling me that it was my desire to have the last word with my father that brought on all this suffering. She told me during this conversation (and I’m paraphrasing here,)
“You know how when you swim in the ocean and the tide sweeps in and drags you under? If you struggle, you’re more likely to drown. But if you just let your body go limp and let the tide drag you around a bit, eventually things will calm down and it’ll spit you back out on shore again. Your dad’s anger is like that. You fight against it too much. You always have to have the last word. I just let it wash over me and wait for it to be over. That’s what I’ve learned over the years being with your dad.”
Hearing this, I felt dead inside. The lesson from my mother was clear: don’t fight it. Shove it down. You’re bringing this suffering on yourself.
I also learned something else: it was not safe to express my anger in a healthy and direct way.
Even the people who were meant to love me most couldn’t find it within themselves to put their own bullshit aside for long enough to do the right thing.
From that point on, the world turned into a cold, hard place. I would never have my feelings validated. I was never going to have a mother who would stand up for me. I would never have a father who would confront his own shadows. I had to harden. I had to protect myself.
This was when I entered my villain era. I’ve now come to understand this as the “repressed anger to manipulation pipeline.”
I started shoplifting. Sneaking out. Smoking. Drinking. Cheating on tests. Cheating on my first boyfriend who loved me deeply. Lying. If I’m being honest, I turned into an all-around shitty person. Because I couldn’t express my rage directly, I learned to express it indirectly by “acting out.”
I fell prey to various older men who groomed me online – leading to repeated instances of sexual abuse and victimization, which only served to prove my hypothesis that the world was a shitty place full of shitty people who would take advantage of me.
One particularly drunk night when I was 16, I found myself half-passed-out on a bed at a party.
I sensed movement near me, so I attempted to pry open my crusted-over eyes, thick with fake eyelashes and glue.
The 18-year-old guy I was currently “seeing” was hovering over me, but he wasn’t alone. I made out the shadowy figure of his brother, a man in his mid-thirties. They were whispering in hushed tones, not knowing that I was still partially conscious.
I felt his brother run his hands over my body. He was trying to convince his brother that it would be fun if they both took a turn with me. I couldn’t move. My head spun. I was so drunk I couldn’t even feel fear. All I could muster was to open my eyes and stare pleadingly into the face of the guy I was dating. He looked torn. Shortly after, I passed out. Everything after that remained blurry in my mind, until years later.
My sixteen-year-old brain couldn’t cope with the reality of what happened to me.
Helplessness. Anger. Injustice. Rage.
Little pegs, little holes.
The incredibly controversial psychologist Jaques Lacan once said that anger is the consequence of a failure of a desire to be realized in reality. French poet Charles Péguy shared something similar when he wrote, “it’s when the little pegs refuse to go into the little holes.”
The pegs didn’t fit into the holes – this wasn’t how the world was supposed to be. I could never fight back. I was always the weaker one.
This manifested in the burning rage within me going deep underground, hence why I experienced such cathartic release watching Charlize Theron’s depiction of serial killer Aileen Wuornos take brutal revenge against the rapist who picked her up on the side of the road as a helpless prostitute in the movie Monster.
I am (thankfully) not a serial killer. I have never physically put my hands on someone in a violent manner. But a fragment of that same rage is there, deep within me. I believe it lives within all survivors of sexual violence.
When we repress our anger, we engage in behaviors that are passive, evasive, and obsessive.
Repressed anger can develop into emotional manipulation, self-blame, and self-sabotage, themes that ruled my life throughout my late adolescence and the entire decade of my twenties.
I became a manipulative monster steeped in rage and shame that I could never transmute or fully digest or express. This rage and shame formed a toxic sludge inside my heart that tainted the entire lens through which I saw the world and other people. It became a barrier that repelled all good things.
I’ve been seeing a somatic experiencing therapist the last two months, which has been a profound experience.
I knew it was time to get out of my head and back into my body. I knew that the trauma I had endured was the reason I felt a complete disconnection from my own sexual energy. At this point of my life, I legitimately feel like a fucking ken doll from the waist down. Numb and plastic.
I only knew sex when it was taken from me.
I still do not know how to freely experience sexual intimacy in a safe relationship. This was a devastating realization to come to, and I am still grappling with it.
I feel anger and jealousy when I see women who embody their sexual nature freely. When friends talk to me about their sex lives, I try to play along like I’m normal. Whatever they have feels like something that is out of my grasp. What remains of my own sexual nature feels like it is hanging in tatters. Disintegrated, tainted and rotten. There is no purity and innocence left. When I think about that, I feel the rage again.
The first few sessions of somatic work with my therapist, every time she placed her hands on me, I felt a pressure-cooker of tears. Each touch resulted in body-racking sobs. She told me that this was normal for survivors of sexual abuse.
This brings me back to my binging of The Last Kingdom.
The night I watched the bloody revenge scene was the night before my somatic experiencing session. When I watched this character angrily stabbing the man who had raped his sister and murdered his entire family, something shifted within me.
It was like all the anger and rage within my body was unlocked for a brief and fleeting moment. I felt the desire to fly into a rage. Smash things. Stab something (not someone.) I wanted to get it OUT. I didn’t want it inside of me anymore. This terrified me. I didn’t want to feel out of control, and I didn’t know what to do with these feelings. I was scared if I allowed them to come out, I would be lost in them forever.
The next day, I told my somatic experiencing therapist about it. All of it. When I got onto the table for our work to begin, I noticed that there were no more tears. I told her I felt the anger. It was in my throat. It felt like a rock. Suffocating me.
I said, “I just feel like I want to scream.”
“So? Scream,” she said, “no one’s here. Just scream if you want to scream.”
A wave of fear washed over me. Scream? Now? In front of another person? That’s… crazy.
After a few more moments of encouragement, I took her advice. The scream that came out of me rattled my entire body. When I was done, there were more tears. I felt something… that I can’t describe… move through me. As she held me there on the table, I let it wash over me and felt my body regain a sense of equilibrium.
I expressed my anger. And guess what? I didn’t die. I wasn’t lost in it. I could control it and come back to center.
Shoving it down.
Revenge is a long road. It is dark, tricky, and deeply lonely.
To be successful in my pursuit of covert revenge against the world that had been so cruel to me as an innocent young girl, I had to become cold, hard, determined and very good at hiding my true motives and feelings.
Shoving my anger down into the deep shadowy well of my subconscious resulted in actions that hurt people who didn’t deserve it. It turned me into someone I hated. But I couldn’t (and wouldn’t), face the shame. So the game had to go on.
Someone seeking revenge for childhood injustices as an adult lacks perspective. We’ll throw this displaced anger onto anyone who gets in our way, because we are likely unable to aim it in the direction of the person who wronged us.
Living like this meant playing a long game of duplicity, deception, and the ability to do things that provoked strong feelings of cognitive dissonance that I was forced to remain blind to.
The Fundamental Attribution Error
The fundamental attribution error is a type of cognitive dissonance.
It refers to an individual’s tendency to attribute another’s perceived negative/harmful actions to that person’s character or personality, while attributing their own negative/harmful behavior to external situations or factors outside of their control.
In the simplest terms, it means that we tend to cut ourselves a lot of slack, while holding others 100% accountable for their actions.
A good example of this is a boss who immediately assumes his employee is “lazy” or “disrespectful” for being late to a meeting, but then proceeds to make an excuse for himself for being late that same day. He has made the fundamental attribution error.
This pattern is noticeably evident in today's online landscape, where individuals behind screens often engage in hasty virtual campaigns to "cancel" public figures, akin to witch hunts, without considering the times they themselves may have uttered regrettable statements and would appreciate being acknowledged in their complete human complexity.
When the abyss stares back
Homer was an ancient Greek poet traditionally said to be the author of the two greatest epic poems of ancient Greece. One of these poems was the Iliad.
Homer begins this poem with the following line:
‘Sing, goddess, of the anger of Achilleus, son of Peleus, the accursed anger which brought uncounted anguish on the Achaians …’
Anger is elemental.
Greek, Norse, and Hindu mythologies, and other theologies, are rife with archetypal characters of pure visceral rage, which has echoed down throughout the ages in the work of other prolific artists, writers, and musicians.
Annihilating vengeance and searing anger can be seen in the myth of Medea and Hecuba, the delirious jealousy of Othello, the insane fury of Captain Ahab, and even in the fierce and often violent-leaning verses of artists like Eminem.
One of the most profound examples of this unvarnished rage expressed through art is in Kendrick Lamar’s short film released in 2020, “We Cry Together.”
My own repressed anger and unconscious desire for revenge against the world and people who hurt and took advantage of me when I was most vulnerable and helpless meant that I was a walking example of the fundamental attribution error.
When you hate something, it falls into your blind spot. And when it falls into your blind spot, you slowly become more like it without even noticing.
We see in others what we most subconsciously dislike in ourselves. When we stare into the abyss, the abyss stares back.
Beatrix Kiddo (also known in the Kill Bill franchise as The Bride, or Black Mamba), is an example of this. Her thirst for revenge meant that she became exactly what she despised.
In the movie, Beatrix seeks revenge against the group of assassins who committed mass murder at her wedding, killing everyone in attendance, including her own unborn child (or so she thought). She was the only survivor of the massacre.
A scene that demonstrates this perfectly is early on in the first film, where Beatrix takes revenge on Vernita Green (played by Vivica A. Fox), with the death being witnessed by Green’s daughter. In the clip, you can almost see the cognitive dissonance of her own hypocrisy playing out on Beatrix’s face before it is quickly shoved back down.
“Your mother had it coming’,” she spits out as she wipes the child’s mother’s blood off the blade she used to kill her.
Beatrix cannot see that she has become what she hates. Violence only begets more violence. Revenge only begets more revenge. The snake eating its own tail.
I’ve always been the kind of person who had to learn lessons the hard way. And a lesson I’ve learned from morphing into a warped version of the monsters that harmed me was that we must become that which we despise in order to experience it, thereby bringing it into consciousness. Only then can it be transmuted. Only then can it be digested, processed, and expelled.
The gift of healthy anger
There is a lot of energy in burning rage. The thing is, when we’re overcome by too much anger, we tend to set such rigid boundaries and protect ourselves so fiercely that we make healing and connection practically impossible.
The time of my life I spent drowning in my own toxic rage, I made a lot of people’s lives miserable. But no one’s more than my own.
As a little spit-fire trauma survivor, I learned to use my anger. Mainly to keep people the fuck away from me.
Watching my father switch so quickly between rage and regret meant that I was raised in a bubbling cauldron of emotional volatility. The only other example I had was that of my mother, who shoved everything down.
The unspoken words suffocated me. The arched eyebrows. The sarcasm that told the real truth in passive-aggressive ways. The simmering undercurrent always boiling underneath the surface, never to be addressed.
Explode or suppress. No happy medium existed in our home, which meant I never learned what that looked like. I was an emotional feral child.
In the tangled and dysfunctional mess of my family dynamics, I’ve uncovered a shimmering lesson. Within the heartache and pain, a truth has begun to gleam through: too much anger, and you’re a danger to everyone, including yourself. Too little anger, and you were endangered by everyone. You must find the middle path.
I’ve come to understand that my anger has a purpose. It is the fierce guardian of my soul’s perimeter. A watchful presence. A guardian angel, looking over me, those I love, and the world I live in. When the boundaries of my being are crossed, whether that’s by a thoughtless action of others or another more serious intrusion – my anger serves me by emerging from the shadows, ready to defend against the breach and fortify my sense of resilience.
Two essential questions have become the compass of my own anger:
𓆩What do I value?
𓆩What within me needs to be restored or revived?
Asking myself these questions when I feel anger rise within me helps guide my inner process of protection and restoration.
These questions help my anger find a sense of honorable purpose. They empower me to recalibrate my boundaries and hit the re-set button on my identity and integrity.
This shift is simple but potent. It helps me transmute my anger into healthy action, bypassing the more shadowy instinct towards internal or external violence. It keeps me from becoming exactly what has harmed me in the past. It helps me pivot from extreme aggression or passive submission that keeps me stuck in repressed and toxic rage.
I’ve learned that suppressing my anger impedes the restoration of my boundaries, leaving me drained of the strength and clarity I need for self-defense, and inevitably results in further harm.
When I allow my anger full expression in this healthier aspect, it helps me clearly define my limits. It enhances my capacity for more genuine and authentic interactions. This newly awakened connection to my anger and crystal-clear perception of my boundaries also helps me better honor the individual boundaries of others.
The surprising effect of this is that I find that my relationships are flourishing. No longer are my connections to others full of power struggles, projections, and enmeshment. Repressed anger always leads to hazy and feeble boundaries, leading to deep and unhealthy enmeshment in the lives of people we love. Conversely, unbridled rage that we allow to be fiercely unleashed on the people in our lives erects towering, fear-filled barriers that destabilize everyone we come into contact with and make it impossible for us to achieve the love and acceptance we so deeply long for.
Primal Scream
When we have years of repressed toxic rage simmering inside of it, it’s dying for release and expression.
The abreactive technique is a psychological approach often utilized in therapeutic settings, particularly within the context of trauma therapy. It involves facilitating the release and processing of intense emotions, often related to traumatic experiences, through verbal expression, emotional catharsis, or other forms of release.
The goal of this technique is to help individuals confront and process deep-seated emotions that might be causing distress or psychological discomfort.
Abreactive techniques are often employed to help clients work through repressed or unresolved emotions associated with traumatic memories. By encouraging the expression of these emotions in a controlled and supportive environment, the technique aims to provide a cathartic release that can lead to emotional healing and resolution. The term "abreaction" is used to describe the emotional release and expression that occurs during this process.
This is similar to what I experienced on the table with my somatic experiencing practitioner when she encouraged me to scream.
This is the basis of the abreactive technique – as the repressed memory rises to the surface of consciousness, so does ‘its accompanying affect’, enabling the patient to describe the distressing experience and the feelings it aroused as fully as possible. This is the psychotherapy of ‘energetic reaction’, of a release of a quantum of emotion proportionate to the injury suffered.
This is a very academic way of describing what many of us have heard mentioned in phrases like, “crying it out,” or “blowing off steam.” The German phase is “sich austoben,” literally ‘to rage oneself out.’
Without some kind of physical “hydraulic” release, the distress and anger felt by victims becomes an ongoing burden on our nervous systems. As Bessel Van Der Kolk wrote (and as I’ve mentioned time and time again in previous posts here on Substack and on my podcast), “the body keeps the score.”
This idea of processing and “metabolizing” pain tucked in the deepest parts of our subconscious minds and bodies was most famously revived in Arthur Janov’s “primal therapy,” also known as “primal scream therapy,” which rose to brief popularity in the early 1970s.
Janov saw psychic pain as being lodged in the suppressed traumas of early childhood and adolescence. He believed that by discharging the trapped reactive anger in uninhibited and spontaneous screaming and ranting, one could find release and resolution.
I have found profound relief in my own version of primal therapy. One of the most cathartic (and free) things I do is to take a small pillow out to my car and scream into it. I use the car because it deadens sound quite well and helps me avoid the cops being called due to the blood-curdling screams. Sometimes I will punch the pillow as hard as I possibly can. Most times, this ends in me dissolving into tears. Every single time, I emerge feeling exhausted, but somehow… clearer.
Justice in the Tarot
As listeners of my podcast know, I’ve found an exploration of the Major Arcana of the Tarot to be profoundly illuminating and healing in my journey towards integration and wholeness.
The Justice card is typically the 8th or 11th card in the Major Arcana, depending on the deck you’re using. I’ve found that this card carries profound archetypal imagery that resonates with my journey of healing from the repressed anger and resentment that arose from childhood trauma and sexual abuse.
In the card, the figure of Justice sits on a throne, holding a sword in one hand and scales in the other. The scales symbolize the need to restore inner equilibrium. This process involves acknowledging and integrating both the wounded aspects of myself and the innate potential within me for healing and growth.
Healthy anger is an essential component of this process.
Embracing my anger, without suppressing or projecting it, is the step forward I need that will allow me to restore the balance that was so deeply disrupted throughout the various traumatic experiences in my life.
The sword held by the figure of justice represents the capacity to cut through illusions. It signifies the psychological strength I will require to confront and process the memories that haunt me. Integrating the trauma I endured will require me to differentiate clearly between the past and the present, to examine the truth of what happened (doing away with the false narratives of shame and self-hatred), and to challenge the distorted beliefs I developed as coping mechanisms along the way.
The figure on the justice card reminds me to treat myself fairly.
What this card has helped me realize is that justice is not simply about revenge or getting back at those who hurt me. It’s also about self-compassion and self-care. It’s about restoring a sense of inner harmony and creating a safe space within myself. This means acknowledging the pain and anger I hold deep within, while also nurturing my wounded inner child, who I abandoned and neglected for far too long.
Carl Jung often spoke of individuation – the process of integrating both the dark and the light, leading to the transformation and emergence of a whole and authentic self.
Pursuing justice at this point in my journey involves delving into the shadow realm of my own psyche. Bearing witness to the pain, rage, and vulnerability that still reside there. By bravely staring into my own inner abyss, I can begin to transform these energies into sources of personal empowerment and growth.
Through this work, I am beginning to transform and transmute suffering into strength, bitterness into wisdom, and anger into healthy assertiveness.
I am ready to let go of my covert and repressed thirst for revenge for what happened to me. I am ready to accept that those who hurt me are complicated and messy human beings who endured their own victimization and pain.
The Bassa people are a West African ethnic group primarily native to Liberia, rich in reverence for their ancestors and supernatural spirits. They have a saying often repeated in their culture:
“If you are never angry, then you are unborn.”
This saying reminds me of the phoenix rising from burning fire reduced to ashes.
I, too, am ready to be reborn.
𓆩ᥫ᭡𓆪 Molls
Resources for healing and transmuting repressed rage
For my paid subscribers, I’ve decided to include some additional resources that have helped me in my journey towards integrating my repressed anger stemming from emotional and sexual abuse.
Below, you’ll find a wealth of both free and paid resources including books, YouTube videos, podcasts, and articles that you can use to jumpstart your own journey. I spent years sifting through an insane amount of content. I know how overwhelming beginning this process can be, so I hope I can ease the process by curating this list for you.
Click the button below to to unlock the full resource list.
YOUTUBE VIDEOS
✧ You will become what you hate about yourself
✧ Unprocessed anger and complex trauma with Tim Fletcher
✧ Dr. Gabor Maté Explains The Root Of Emotional Suppression of Anger and Why People Die Before Their Time
✧ John Bradshaw Homecoming - #1 Problem Of the Wounded Child
✧ How to Release Emotions Trapped in Your Body 10/30 How to Process Emotions Like Trauma and Anxiety
✧ PRIMAL THERAPY: EMPTYING THE PAIN TUB - DR. FRANCE JANOV
BOOKS / AUDIOBOOKS
✧ Sexual Healing: Transforming the Sacred Wound (Transform the Sacred Wound)
✧ Healing Trauma: A Pioneering Program for Restoring the Wisdom of Your Body
✧ In an Unspoken Voice: How the Body Releases Trauma and Restores Goodness
✧ Dear Sister: Letters From Survivors of Sexual Violence
✧ Healing Sexual Trauma Workbook: Somatic Skills to Help You Feel Safe in Your Body, Create Boundaries, and Live with Resilience
✧ Believing Me: Healing from Narcissistic Abuse and Complex Trauma
PODCAST EPISODES
✧ This Jungian Life: Anger
✧ Buddha at The Gas Pump: Interview with Ken Wilber
✧ Healing from Within: How Trauma Creates Disease
✧ Working with Anger: Costs, Benefits and Repression
ARTICLES
✧ Repressed Anger: The Highly Sensitive Person and Anger
✧ Feeling the Anger, You Were Denied in Childhood
✧ Recovered Memories of Sexual Abuse
✧ How to Cope with Trauma-Related Anger
✧ Signs that your body is holding childhood sexual abuse
✧ Fascia and the Vagus Nerve | Dr. Arielle Schwartz