🧌 Meet-Your-Beast Fury

[This is an excerpt from my forth-coming book, Marriage As Mystery School: The wise woman’s path to sacred, embodied relationships. 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, soma, and with ceremony.

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

🧌 Meet-Your-Beast Fury

Hyena-hot, back-of-neck fur at attention.

Lava-tongued, spit fire scalding those who come near.

A seismic smolder blistering you from the inside out.

Welcome to FURY.

Can You Feel This?

You’ve suspected an affair for so many years. Your worst fear really. You’ve asked a hundred different ways and he has assured you again and again that no, he was just working late. No, she’s just a colleague. No, she’s happily married to your son’s soccer coach. But now, this. A burner phone in the bottom drawer of his nightstand tucked behind an old John Grisham novel from the Free Library down the street.

The phone is dead.

You want to just ignore it. It’s nothing, your panicked heart demands. Put it back and pretend that you never found it. But you know yourself, you could NEVER just put it back.

The Pandora’s Box weight of this moment collapses in your heart. Breath shallow, palms sweaty, skin heating up degree by degree – the hackles up, at-attention, sensing-danger hyena in you is gravely aware of the fork in the road of your marriage, of your life, that you have just happened upon on this regular old Tuesday afternoon.

You can set it down and go back downstairs and finish making dinner. You can tell yourself that it’s just that old Nokia phone from his old job. The job that he left five years ago with the schedule that he hated and the after hours calls that he took during dinner that made you crazy. Of course it must be that phone, so it’s nothing at all. You can stow it in the drawer, go back downstairs, and finish making dinner.

He’s such a pack rat and never throws anything away so that would easily explain this phone, resting in your hand. You feel like you just entered a Lifetime movie. The movie about a woman who was being cheated on by her spouse, the woman that was so good and nice and naive who had no idea, while everyone else was watching it all unfold. So basic. So predictable. Are you that woman?

You rummage through the drawer, find the charger, and plug it in. Stomach sour, mouth dry, limbs lifeless, time stopping and speeding up simultaneously as you wait to see which path your life is about to take.

It’s probably nothing.

I’m just making it up.

He’s been telling me for years that I’m just paranoid.

Frozen, fixated on the screen as it shifts from black to opaque gray, you navigate the non-iPhone technology searching for how to access past calls and text messages.

And there they are.

Hundreds of them.

You are floating, suspended, not in your body at all and yet somehow feral, musky, profoundly human at one.

Calls and messages spanning over eight months to a woman.

Erika.

“I miss you too! 💋💋💋”

“😉 I’ve been thinking of you all day. 😉”

“Last night was the most epic night of my life.🦍”

Flushed face. Heat prickling the tops of your forearms, hands, cheeks. Sick belly. The simultaneous pull of RUN and DON’T MOVE presses your seat onto the bed. Your mind, a logjamb of overlapping questions and exclamations.

When does he use a 🦍 emoji?! What the hell does that mean anyway?!

You sift through the timestamps rapidly referencing the dates: over the family trip to Telluride last year, on Labor Day when his family was visiting, during Hanukkah, New Years, on your birthday. What the fuck?! doesn’t even touch the rogue wave of rage that is lifting you out of your own center.

The crystalline betrayal, horror, disbelief, and hurt, punctuated by the fact that you knew it all along. You’d hoped that you were wrong. You prayed that you were wrong. You recently came so close to letting it go entirely, Let it go, he’d said. You have nothing to worry about, he reassured.

And now this. You throw the flip phone across the room, hyena howling, AAAAHHHHHHHH! And the tears come. So many tears. Steaming rapids rushing down your face punctuated with the primal sounds of a wounded animal. Is this even happening? you wonder. This can’t be happening, you wish.

You hear the bedroom door open and there he is.

Your stance is glacial.

Massive. Frozen. A behemoth of nature. Feeling an internal fissuring that’s about to cleave you in two.

His curiously worried face crumbles, blanches, contorts as he too witness the Nokia-phone-informed future that just swallowed up your life.

Wild-eyed-you, poised on the verge of attack, keyed wholly into him as he stands there wrestling with how to meet this moment: lying, defending, deflecting, or begging for forgiveness. There are no words, only blazing fury.

🔥 The Fury Portal

The element of FIRE is alive in fury. However, fury can feel ironically icy cold at the same time. In its inferno moments, fury is marked by hot flesh, rushing blood, and sensations turned up up UP. The heat signals GET AWAY, naturally REJECTING the people, places, or things that seem to put you in danger.

Fury, like blame, is functional and points outward in order to slam and ram away those intruders, violators, perpetrators. Fury can create safety and protection when you are in imminent danger. Handled with wise intentionality, directionality, and care, fury is a hidden truth elucidator offering clarity for a path forward. Sometimes accessed as a powerful jet fuel for quick decision making, fury can propel you through years of denial or sloth once ignited.

🕯️ Illuminate Your Fury

Fury is not bad or wrong and I’m not interested in you eliminating your fury. If you feel fury, it is healthy and wise to expand your capacity to let it join you on the journey in life. There is a critical secret key that I’ll explain in my next article necessary for a wise partnership with fury.

But before we get there, let’s shed some light on your own fury to explore where it lives in you. This is a judgment free zone, your fury is welcome here. If you disallow your fury and try to relegate it to the basement of your psyche, it will unconsciously run your life.

As Carl Jung famously says: “Until you make the unconscious conscious, it will rule your life and you will call it fate.”

Let’s explore you a bit.

Have fury’s close cousins – frustration, annoyance, anger – been loitering around your marriage without voice, action, or being presenced in your relationship? To presence something in your relationship is to responsibly bring it forward first with yourself and possibly a trusted mentor, therapist, or healer who can support you in somatically and spiritually being with the feelings. And then if necessary, taking that processed emotion through conversation and expression to your partner.

Consider the patterns that emerge when fury or her cousins arrive on your doorstep.

Do you bar the door disallowing these ‘negative’ emotions? Do you clench, grip, or find yourself holding your breath? Do those feelings turn inward, as they do for so many women, becoming a well-traveled pathway to depression, self-criticism, or self-blame? Do you rake yourself over the coals of the past, Welp, I knew I shouldn’t have married him! It’s my own fault for not listening to myself!?

Fury may highlight where you’ve relinquished your boundaries in relationship or tried to be accommodating one too many times. Where have you dropped the role of having an inner protector whose job it is to post up on your own behalf because you are valuable enough to guard? Do you tend to over-give, over-commit, and unconsciously under-value yourself prioritizing the needs of others to the exclusion of your own nourishment?

Emotional states are often scaffolded with beliefs.

What beliefs are emerging for you as I’ve been stirring fury over the last several paragraphs? Beliefs that you aren’t allowed to MAKE NOISE with your rage, take up space with your anger, or set someone straight with your words? Do you feel uncomfortable visiting this land of fury or does it feel expansive and thrilling to have space to go there? If you aren’t sure what beliefs are buttressing fury, use the following sentence starters for a bit of self-illumination.

Settle in with tea and your journal.

Reminder: This is not about THINKING your way to a right answer. It’s about allowing the words to arise in you without force. If it helps to read the sentence starters out loud and jot down the words that come afterward, try that:

What I’m most furious about right now is ___________________.

What I’m angry about is ________________________________.

When I feel these fiery feelings my body ____________________________.

When I was a child, I was told that anger was ________________________.

The only people in my life who are angry or show fury are ___________________.

If I allowed myself to really feel fury, I am afraid that I might ____________________.

My anger _______________________________________________.

I wonder if fury might be trying to show me _____________________.

Here’s an example:

What I’m most furious about right now is how I’m not setting and holding boundaries with my husband.

What I’m angry about is seeing myself do this and doing it anyway.

When I feel these fiery feelings my body I shut them down because I have too much to do and don’t have time to deal with them.

When I was a child, I was told that anger was bad. I was sent to my room until I could come out and be nice.

The only people in my life who are angry or show fury are no one. My dad when he was in a bad mood as a child.

If I allowed myself to really feel fury, I am afraid that I might yell at my husband, leave my job, and walk out of my life.

My anger feels dangerous to me. It also feels mean and unkind because I believe in forgiveness and love.

I wonder if fury might be trying to show me that I’m hurt. That it’s okay to have boundaries. That it’s important to feel what’s coming up because it’s not going away.

Ready PART TWO ON FURY and the SECRET KEY to working with fury as a magic mirror here.