On the Spectre of Inner Rage

We all have triggers in our lives - those pop-ups that ignite reflex reactions. When they happen, we are often not prepared, and thrown off balance. We are left wobbling, and groping for our center of gravity.

The journey of recovery is rather an excavation. It brings to the surface, or closer to the surface, things that have been long covered - pressed and encased by dense layers - over eons of time. And, like the unheralded organ of skin, when this encasement is ruptured, and the encased is exposed, it's surprisingly raw, and consuming.

I find that things are never simple, on the surface. They may be simple in the core, but on the surface they tend to be obfuscated, and complex, to unravel. They never exist in isolation, and are invariably related to other things in a sort of chain-reaction or woven tapestry manner. When something pops up, due to a trigger, it's only the tip of the iceberg.

Recovery is the journey to the center of our Self, to find the source, the initiator of the chain-reaction. To find the first iteration, the central issue. The core disturbance.

And at our cores, we are surprising simple. I think there are perhaps only a small handful of elements in our very central-most cores. And I think one, for sure, is fear. This primordial fear branches out in all sorts of flavors, up through our layers to the surface. It drives secondary reactions such as anger, hatred, insecurity, resentment, indignation... a host of derivative emotions.

Shrinks might argue what the core fear is, within us. Some say fear of death. Some say fear of alone-ness. At any rate, it's existential in nature. And never addressed until we acquiesce to the existence of a higher power. We cannot address this existential crisis in the absence of believing in something greater than ourselves.

In the end, to me, it's semantics. I think we all can close our eyes and feel our inner core of fear, whatever it is. It's there, in every single one of us. If you don't feel it, you're just deeper - thicker - in denial, than I am. (This is not to say I go through life quaking in my boots, because I don't. But if I take some time for honest, quiet reflection, I will find it there, deep down.)

So, I'm mumbling on about fear, because I had a rage trigger recently. This is a known trigger to me, but the timing of the occurrences are unknown, as they are elicited by a person, a particular person.

I keep the person at a distance, and do not respond, because I'm in the process of emptying out my poison toward them, in my recovery path. There is simply a toxic chemistry there, and we both know it, and both want to work past it, but we both must stay the course on our respective recovery paths.

Problem is, by necessity, we have to have touch points of contact, in order to do the recovery work, to get past the toxicity. So we touch base, remotely, every so often, and don't directly respond. We just let each other's touch point soak in, sink in, and we take another step toward our detox. It's a very slow process, but we have the same goal, and I think we are equally committed to our respective goals but on vastly different paths to get there.

So as I was thinking out my triggered rage, this last touch point, I came to see it as a reflection of a deeper level: that inner fear. That the rage triggered by this person, and their circumstances in my life, is actually a trigger to a deeper thing, THE deepest thing, that inner core of fear.

And when I back up, or, rather down, into those layers, into the core, into the central fear, then I can again come up through the layers, through the secondary, derivative emotions of that fear, and see that my hatred toward that person is just a spin-off of my central fear.

Now, maybe this all sounds too distant, and calculating, and removed. But, for me, it's a concrete tool to use. To be able to see a hatred reaction to a trigger in a context. That is: the hatred is the re-bubbling of a fear.

This person's contacts with me trigger my central fear, which stirs my core and re-arises in the form of hatred. The energy of that hatred is proportional to the amount of core fear triggered. And, the core fear really isn't their doing, it's my issue. They just happen to be a trigger, and target for the hate that jettisons forth from that trigger. Their actual infringement, which was egregious, is not proportional to the intensity of hatred it triggers, and I know this - when I haul my ass out of denial, and take a good, hard look at it. Which I am wont to do, because I'm one to push into my fears, and explore them.

For me, to be able to see this, what feels like irrational hatred, in a rational context, helps me to get a handle on it, and see a direction to go, to finally defuse the reaction.

I have no idea if this makes any sense to anyone else. But, it sure does, to me.

-The Traveler