Fury: As a magic mirror to self

[This is an excerpt from my forth-coming book, Marriage As Mystery School: The wise woman’s guide to sacred relating. You can read part one on fury here.

The book explores thirteen difficult emotions common in long-term relating such as blame, shame, grief, and fury. We enter each chapter through the upset, with a Choose Your Own Adventure invitation to meet your own emotional experience through narrative, belief, body, and with ceremony.

*NOTE: All vignettes are fictional based on my 20,000 hours of working with real life humans.]

Fury, a powerful clarifier, illuminates your otherwise hidden beliefs. Like a rototiller in your garden, fury is an un-earther. Kicking up unconscious contracts and surfacing unspoken agreements with yourself and others so you might explore them in the light of day.

Your obligations, busy schedules, and habituated family patterns, lock your attention outside of yourself preventing you from touching the unconscious beliefs scaffolding your marriage and your life. Fury will present those beliefs to you in a blaze of gory glory!

Fury, my friend, will show up you to you.

For years, women have been spilling their unconscious beliefs on the floor of my office. Their words tell tales of women who believe the needs of others must come before their own.

And speaking of needs – you might just feel like you don’t get to have any!

And speaking of not having any needs – you were possibly raised to be an independent and self-reliant woman, so even if there happened to be someone who might fulfill your desires, you don’t have any idea what your desires would actually be except for wanting the house to be clean, dinner to be made, and to have a solid month alone. ;-)

When women share themselves with me, I watch beliefs lift off the life pictures that they paint:

• that the price of belonging is muting their own voice,

• that full expression is dangerous even with a sister or mother (and sometimes especially so),

• and that it’s frankly impossible for them to have the kind of life or marriage that they would really want due to the circumstances or obligations they must endure.

As women, mothers, wives, and keepers of community, we shoulder the bulk of the relational bonds in our world and may unwittingly walk the path of the bitter martyr, perpetuating unconscious patterns of scarcity, depletion, and normalizing emotional-physical-spiritual malnourishment.

Along your journey, you’ve likely encountered many of fury’s close cousins: agitation, annoyance, and anger. These nudgers flag you pointing out that something is amiss because it feels bad: that this is too much or you really need to say something about that or why are you saying yes to another thing!? While annoyance and irritation attempt to wave you down like a pedestrian hailing a cab, fury tackles you like a fourth-quarter lineman sacking the quarterback at the goal-line.

Fury will knock the wind out of you, leave you breathless, and demand a sober look at the conscious and unconscious agreements that are causing emotional desiccation in your life. Many women are long overdue from setting and holding boundaries in their marriages, work, and with themselves. The parched underbrush of their day-to-day life is like brittle, decayed foliage primed for a lightning strike that ignites wildfire.

As in all things in your personalized Mystery School Curriculum, the parts of yourself that you relegate to the basement of your psyche will find their way to the main floor eventually. If you don’t make space to unpack your own shadowy baggage proactively, the murky-lurky tag-a-long will show up one way or another. One of the easiest places to enter the portal of fury is with your spouse. Because your spouse is going to piss you off several times a month or week — which means you will have much to explore! When you meet this fury with a grounded orientation of curiosity and compassion, profound transformation can be had! Meeting the moment as a student of your own life will afford you treasured wisdom which becomes solid bedrock for your future.

Fury Tackled Me

For 18 years, my husband’s piles around the house drove me crazy. Books, bills, papers, receipts, tools, and junk mail. Why does he pile all of this up?! I’d think to myself. Just throw it away or put it where it belongs! In the beginning, I was annoyed, then frustrated, and then one day a pile fell over on the kitchen counter and suddenly, a rogue wave of fury emerged with no warning. It was a tiny occurrence on the surface but the backlog of frustration erupted well beyond what the circumstance called for. At that moment I wanted to grab the car keys, tie a scarf around my head a la Thelma and Louise, and drive away music blaring to Who-Cares-Where but never come back, solving the damned pile problem for good.

I didn’t though.

I stuffed it and fumed for a week and shortly thereafter I learned about projection. Projection is a psychological process of unconsciously attributing one’s own disowned, hidden, denied, or unrecognized traits (whether positive or negative) onto another person. In other words, you will see in others (I’d argue especially your spouse) aspects of yourself that you cannot see because you’ve unconsciously repressed them in yourself.

When I learned about projection, I applied it to the situation with my husband and I thought, Well, I don’t have piles! I’m super tidy and neat so this has nothing to do with me.

What I discovered later was that if you are going to engage in working with your projections, colloquially known as shadow hunting, it requires more contemplation, curiosity, and consideration than simply looking at the surface.

To be clear, my husband had four or five piles in the house. For some people, that would be considered a nothing burger. He’s not a hoarder and is reasonably tidy. Some might consider me to be a bit overzealous and controlling in my housekeeping (and I might just be too!). And yet, his piles drove me crazy. His piles activated a red-rage in me. His piles kept my attention on him and safely away from my own self-exploration and maturation. I well knew these stacks of papers were not grounds for divorce even though they could FEEL that way and were a steady sore spot in our marriage.

That FELT SENSE of fury, was the clue that I’d stumbled on some shadow material for myself to circumambulate. Through self-exploration with a trusted guide and in my own contemplative work, I was able to see that although I am not a piler of THINGS, I am a piler of THOUGHTS. So while my husband might collect papers for six months or six years, I have had a tendency of collecting emotional injuries, past hurts, and harbor resentments for years. I was the proud steward of well-kempt, orderly, grievance scorecards stacked quietly in my own psyche…safely hidden where no one could point them out until I employed the sacred mirror of my own marriage to see them.

Shadow hunting is not about blame. It’s a revelatory experience presenting you with raw material that would otherwise go un-accessed. This is good news! The fury that you are feeling is a response to something outside of you – AND – it’s also providing the illumination needed to meet uncomfortable truths formerly hidden from view about yourself, if you are courageous enough to see them. We all have shadow material. Only a small fraction of us will journey into these dim, dank places to experience self-reclamation and to grow self-awareness, yet that is exactly how we become wise. When you own your disowned parts you become more whole — and whole people are healed people. And healed women are the change-makers of our future.

🗝️ The Secret Key: Radical Restraint

The secret key to unlocking the portal of fury is radical restraint. Radical because it’s uncommon to wrangle the beast of fury without muffling its brilliance. Restraint because it’s not about extinguishing the unexpected clarity that is fury’s gift but rather handling the clarity with great care as it’s extremely potent and potentially dangerous.

🪞Sacred Mirror Moment 🪞

For some women, fury points OUT toward their partner and for others it turns back on themselves — usually it’s a bit of both. When you turn fury back on yourself, it can sound like: Why didn’t I listen to myself? or How could I have been so stupid?

This self-blame is an attempt at re-establishing control in a situation that feels unsafe because you were hurt by someone outside of you and therefore you feel a need to clamp down to ensure that this kind of thing never happens again. You might find yourself in a self-punishing loop, mentally beating yourself up with all of the I can’t believe I didn’t see this coming’s. When you are furious at yourself landing in a situation where you’ve been betrayed, hurt, or abandoned, you are nose-to-nose with the primal experience that unconsciously keeps women wrapped in fury: I Am Not Safe In The World.

Let’s explore, how are you walking with UNsafety? Maybe your home life is safe, you have enough food and access to adequate resources. Are you safe inside of yourself? Do you tell yourself stories of the past or the future that that promote a calm and easeful experience in life? What’s the emotional soundtrack you are play in the background of your everyday existence?

Without even knowing it when I woman shares with me about her life, I can here all of the ways that she’s creating UNsafety by not listening to herself, by ignoring what she clearly needs and wants. She KNOWS that she can’t keep working the way that she is — 60 hours a week and on a screen all day long, saying explicitly that the job is ‘killing’ her — but just three more years to save enough money for the kids’ college fund THEN she’ll stop.

I’m not saying that a woman shouldn’t work and save money but I am saying that if you told your spouse that something that he/she was doing was ‘killing you’, that you you dreaded it five days a week, and you just didn’t know that you could take it anymore and if your spouse said, “in three more years I’ll stop”, you’d probably be furious. And rightfully so.

Let’s look in that sacred mirror of fury, that hot anger that you have with someone else. What STRENGTHS do you see in that fury? There’s fortitude in fury, a clarity that is coming through. Often fury shows up our values, what is right for us and what is not permitted. Fury is exacting much like a body guard disallowing entry into the sanctum of your own heart by that which may be dangerous. It'‘s also a demonstration of a well-defined or healthy ego — the part of you who knows who are ARE and who are ARE NOT. Who is THAT woman that you see in the sacred mirror who is brave enough to allow the dragon-breath of fury to show her something about herself?

Write down the STRENGTHS that fury is showing back to you.

What parts of yourself do you NOT want to see when fury emerges? Where might you be a perpetrator of yourself in ways that are difficult to see (like the example with me and my husband — our ‘piles’ were different)? What do you feel furious about right now? That someone has betrayed you, lied to you, or abandoned you? Now gently consider where you might be betraying yourself, lying to yourself, or abandoning yourself in your own life. It won’t look exactly the same as how you’ve been hurt by the other person but there’s likely something there.

What I see most often is a woman who feels betrayed by their partner when she’s been betraying herself for a very long time. Staying in a job that she says is ‘killing her’, ignoring her desire to make time to get into nature or cook healthy food, or minimizing that it’s no big deal that she’s taking sleeping pills to get through the night and Ibuprophen to get the through the day even though she’s opposed to living that way. When your spouse’s lack of integrity or their unwillingness to put your needs first make you furious, it is wise to consider where you are lacking integrity with yourself.

Not as an exercise in blame but as a self-assessment of the unconscious systemic practices that you are BOTH participating in your marriage. If you want your partner to listen to you, you must begin to listen to yourself. And not just LISTEN to yourself, because that can be easy to listen in general. I want you to listen to yourself when it feel HARD TO HEAR and even HARDER TO FOLLOW THROUGH. I want you to listen and then follow through when it’s scary, difficult, and when you don’t want to because what would be ‘easier’ is to keep doing it the old way.

That’s way this Mystery School path of marriage, is not for everyone because it’s difficult. Most things worth doing however aren’t easy.

Next week in part three about fury, I will offer you an EMBODIED PRACTICE and a CEREMONY to meet your own fury. Remember to read part one on fury here.

Until then, comment below and let me know if you’ve walked with fury in your life? Have you glimpse the illuminative quality that fury can have for you by showing up that which you’d not seen before?