Fear, Anger and a chance of Fury

I know the title of this essay sounds like a weather report, but if your in a relationship with someone who has been traumatized. You probably recognize this as more of an emotional barometer then an environmental barometer for the weather. People who have been hurt are horrible to be around at times because they are still dealing with that trauma. And just as the title says they are full of fear, anger and intermittently the fear and anger fuse into one emotion I call fury.

I dated someone who was traumatized by being deserted at the church on her wedding day. When I first met her, she looked pretty happy, but that was just a covering like the veneer on bad teeth. Underneath there was a hurt person and hurt people hurt people. So little by little cracks in her veneer started to show and I was slowly exposed to her anger, her fear and one day her fury.

A few months into the relationship I realized what was happening and decided initially to make a run for the door, out of the relationship. It seemed like a lost cause, and the light of her anger now shone through her veneer of civility like a light in the darkness for all to see. But against my intuition I stayed to see if counseling could or would help, after all she realized what she was doing was wrong, so how hard could this be to fix?

I was so wrong about that, that in retrospect I feel foolish. A man or woman, whose suffered a thousand tiny cuts bears a thousand tiny scars. Each harbors a little bit of anger, a little bit of fear and together they produce a larger dose of fury. Subsequently her road to recovery led her away from me. Her previous fiancé returned and she broke up with me to marry the man who failed to show up at the Church the first time...and now he got to watch the weather report.

Fear, Anger and a chance of Fury...Karma is a bitch.

However, I stayed in touch, and after she changed therapists and embraced forgiveness, I was to see that forgiveness could be the salve that heals those cuts one at a time, and more importantly cuts the chains, which bind the memory of the pain, fear and angry to her conscious memory, so it no longer is the first thing she thinks about in the morning and the last thing she thinks about at night. In stead it drifts out of her conscious thoughts and becomes like any other memory, suppressed and hardly remembered. The hacksaw of forgiveness changed her emotional outlook and her emotional weather report. Now her barometer could read calm and indifferent, with a chance of joy.

And that my friend is truly a wonderful weather report.

@shortsegments