What is it with people? We seem to think that we can get close to others by just being around them and doing what the other person wants. Closeness is brought about through a sense of closeness that can only come from shared intimacy.
Intimacy literally means: in-to-me-see from the Latin root. Without letting our partner “see into” us we cannot experience intimacy.
What people are afraid of being seen. So the idea of intimacy is really scary. I believe this comes from well meaning parents who try to get us to do what they want us to do by forcing us into their model of what we should be. Who we really are is discouraged, shamed, controlled and strictly forbidden.
The lesson we then learn is that it is not okay to be who we are.
Now, of course, this varies in the extent to which it dominates each of us depending on how severe or controlling our parents were to us. But even parents, who on the surface are very sweet, can be very controlling in their own way. Don’t get me wrong; I am not, really blaming our parents, as is vogue. Because they can’t help it, they were raised in the same way they raised us.
The thing is, we learned to repress our thoughts, our feelings, our needs, our desires and our very selves in order to get along with those who raised us. Yet to be close to someone we have to unlearn what we learned. We have to learn to let ourselves risk being seen.
How do we know that what people are not going to reject who we are? That is the fear, of course, that no one will like us or want us if they really knew us. That comes from the rejection of our unpleasant feelings we received as a child.
When our parents, understandably punished us for our angry outbursts as a child, or shamed us for displaying anger instead of teaching us how to express our anger appropriately.
What if we were to learn that our anger is always appropriate? The reality is that how we express it is not always “appropriate”, but anger is like all of our feelings a normal part of being a human being!
We have feelings to provide us information. Happiness tells us that things are going well and that this is what we want. Sadness lets us know that we are in a situation we don’t like. Fear lets us know we are in danger. Anger lets us know something is wrong and that we should do something about it.
The problem people have with anger is that they don’t realize that it’s just a feeling. We might feel compelled to act on it, but we don’t have to react instinctively as our gut tells us we should. We have the option, as adults, to figure out what to do with that anger.
Unfortunately, most of us were not taught what to do with anger. Of course we watched what others’ did and that is what we learned. We might have learned that it’s okay to scream, yell, hit and beat others into changing what they are doing. We might have been so frightened by those behaviors that instead of mimicking them, we rejected them and chose to never express anger, thinking that the expression of anger was the problem. We might have learned, through watching those around us that using drugs and alcohol are how you deal with it. Many of us just learned to reject the feeling altogether and pretend that we don’t get angry.
That gets us back to my main point. If we ourselves reject our anger then we can be terrified at the idea of anyone seeing it. And since anger is a part of who we are, we then believe that if someone really knew us they wouldn’t like us.
Therefore we hide ourselves from others, especially those that mean the most to us. The more important someone is to us the less we want them to know us. The result is that we keep ourselves distant from the one person we most want to be close to!
So, stop hiding!
Tell me what you think. Which type are you? Do you hide your anger or what?