Anger After Narcissistic Abuse

A note before we start: this letter discusses narcissistic abuse, anger, and self-blame. Take it at whatever pace you need. You can stop and come back.

In her book Rage Becomes Her: The Power of Women’s Anger, Soraya Chemaly tells a story about sitting at the dinner table with her family when she was eight years old. When dinner was over, her father told her to get up and help her mother clear the table while her younger brother stayed in his seat. Her brother looked at her and grinned.

She was furious.

She knew that what was happening was unfair, and she refused to get up unless her brother had to help too. Her father eventually gave in.

I keep thinking about this story because it is such a simple example of what anger is supposed to do. Chemaly was eight years old and her anger was giving her information. She knew that she was being treated differently because she was a girl, she did not like it, and she said so.

Unfortunately, many girls receive a very different education around anger. We are taught to be nice, forgiving, accommodating, and easy to get along with. We learn that anger can make us difficult, aggressive, dramatic, bitter, or unlikable. We are often encouraged to think about why the other person behaved the way they did before we have even had a chance to decide how we feel about it.

Research shows that these messages follow us into adulthood. Victoria Brescoll and Eric Uhlmann studied how people respond to anger expressed by men and women in professional settings. They found that people tended to attribute a man’s anger to the situation, whereas they attributed a woman’s anger to her personality. An angry man had a reason to be angry. An angry woman was seen as angry. More recent research has found that women can still be judged negatively for expressing anger, including anger about gender inequality.

I think this matters when we talk about narcissistic abuse because many women have been practicing the suppression of anger long before they ever meet the person who abuses them.

Maybe you grew up in a house where one person got to be angry, and everyone else learned how to manage that person. Maybe you were the easy child, the peacemaker, or the one who never caused any trouble. Maybe you were taught that good people forgive, that holding onto anger is unhealthy, or that being compassionate means trying to understand why someone hurt you.

There is nothing wrong with being compassionate or forgiving. I value both of those things deeply. However, they become dangerous when we use them to override our own emotional responses.

By the time you enter an abusive relationship, you may already be very good at talking yourself out of what you feel.

The relationship only reinforces it.

Maybe you confronted them about a lie, and the conversation turned into a discussion about your tone. Maybe you told them something hurt you and ended up apologizing for hurting them. Maybe they gave you the silent treatment for three days. Maybe the entire story was rewritten until you were the aggressive one, and whatever they originally did disappeared from the conversation.

Sometimes pushing back escalated the abuse. Other times, the punishment came later and was difficult to connect to the original conflict, although you knew exactly what it was for.

Your nervous system learned from every one of those experiences.

Pete Walker describes fight, flight, freeze, and fawn as four survival responses. Fight is the response that helps us push back when we believe something is wrong. To use it, we need to believe there is sufficient safety to defend ourselves.

In an abusive relationship, there often isn’t.

If your anger repeatedly creates more danger, your nervous system learns to stop using it. I think of it like a smoke alarm in a house where, every time it went off, someone punished you for making the noise. Eventually, you would take the battery out. The alarm was working exactly as it was supposed to work, but listening to it had become dangerous.

This is what can happen to anger.

You stop trusting it. You stop expressing it. Often, in time, you may have trouble recognizing it at all.

The problem is that anger does not disappear simply because we stop listening to it.

In my work, I see suppressed anger show up in many different ways. One of the most common is self-blame.

Instead of being angry with the person who lied to you, manipulated you, controlled you, or abused you, you become furious with yourself.

How did I let this happen?

Why didn’t I leave?

How could I have been so stupid?

Why did I go back?

I knew better.

I hear versions of these questions constantly from people recovering from narcissistic abuse. The anger is there, but it has changed direction.

Sometimes it comes out with people who are safer. You tolerate terrible behavior from the person who has frightened you and find yourself losing your patience with your children, your friends, or strangers. This can create even more shame because now you have evidence that seems to support the fear that you are the problem.

Other people lose access to anger almost completely. They feel numb, depressed, exhausted, or disconnected from what happened. Emotional numbing is a well-documented part of trauma, and sometimes having very little emotional response is evidence of how much your nervous system had to shut down in order to get through what was happening.

This is why I think learning to access anger can be such an important part of narcissistic abuse recovery.

We spend a lot of time in trauma therapy talking about regulation, and for good reason. You need to be able to calm your nervous system when it is overwhelmed. But healing also requires being able to feel the full range of your emotions without immediately deciding that some of them are unacceptable.

I have worked with many people who are afraid of their anger. They worry that if they really let themselves feel it, they will lose control. Some are especially afraid because they have spent years watching another person use anger to intimidate, punish, threaten, or humiliate them.

When that has been your model for anger, it makes sense that you would want nothing to do with it.

But feeling angry does not give you permission to abuse someone. It also does not mean that you are becoming like the person who abused you.

Anger is an emotion, and emotions give us information about what we need.

The work is learning how to receive that information and decide what to do with it.

One of the things anger can tell us is that a boundary has been crossed.

This is especially important after narcissistic abuse because many survivors have become disconnected from their own preferences. If you have spent years monitoring someone else’s moods, anticipating what they need, and changing your behavior to prevent conflict, it can become surprisingly difficult to answer a very basic question:

What do you want?

I ask people this in my work, and sometimes they genuinely do not know.

So I ask another question.

What didn’t you like?

That is usually easier.

Maybe you didn’t like the way they spoke to you. You didn’t like being questioned about where you were. You didn’t like having your phone checked. You didn’t like being punished for spending time with your friends. You didn’t like being pressured into sex. You didn’t like being lied to and told that you were crazy when you noticed the lie.

Your anger can help you recognize those things.

Once you know what you don’t like, you can begin to understand your boundaries. You can start paying attention to what feels respectful and what does not. You can begin making choices based on your own values instead of organizing your life around someone else’s reactions.

This is what I mean by constructive anger.

Constructive anger does not require confrontation. It means that you can feel angry, understand why you are angry, and make a conscious decision about what you want to do with that information.

Sometimes you may need to speak up or set a boundary. Sometimes you may need to leave. Sometimes you may need to talk to someone you trust, document what happened, or bring the experience into therapy.

If you are still dealing with an abusive person, expressing anger directly may not be safe at all. This is especially important in situations involving coercive control, separation, stalking, or ongoing coparenting. You never need to confront someone in order to prove that you have found your voice. Your safety comes first.

You can listen to your anger privately.

You can believe what it is telling you without telling the other person anything.

Over time, learning how to work constructively with anger gives you another way to protect yourself. You can stop treating the emotion as evidence that there is something wrong with you and start asking why it showed up.

There is also research showing that suppressing emotion does not make the emotional experience disappear. James Gross’s work on emotion regulation found that people can reduce the outward expression of emotion while still experiencing physiological activation internally. In other words, looking calm and actually being calm are not the same thing.

This is important for people who became very good at looking fine during abuse.

You may have learned how to keep your face neutral, say that everything was okay, go to work, take care of your children, and continue functioning while your body was under enormous stress. That ability may have helped you survive. It does not mean that your feelings went away.

Healing gives us the opportunity to start listening to them again.

For one week, I want you to pay attention to your anger without trying to change it or act on it.

Start with small things. Please do not begin with the worst thing that happened in your relationship. Anger work can bring up a lot, and there is no benefit in overwhelming yourself.

Notice when someone cuts you off in traffic, interrupts you, asks you to do something you do not want to do, or treats someone unfairly in a show you are watching.

When you notice irritation or anger, ask yourself:

What am I angry about?

Then ask:

What is my anger telling me that I need?

Maybe you need respect. Maybe you need more time. Maybe you need someone to stop asking. Maybe you need rest. Maybe you simply do not want to do what is being asked of you.

You do not have to do anything with the answer this week.

The practice is listening.

If you have spent years believing that anger makes you difficult, selfish, dangerous, or unlovable, learning to listen without immediately judging yourself is enough.

Soraya Chemaly was eight years old when she looked across that dinner table and knew she was being treated unfairly.

You knew things once, too.

Healing is learning to trust yourself enough to know them again.

With you in the journey,

Erin