I couldn’t sleep last night because I felt sick about the way my reflexive hostility poisons my FB posts, my blogging, and my life. I have not directly expressed my anger at anyone in my adult life. I’ve never expressed anger at my father in my life. I just store the anger inside and it swills around and I let it go in sneaky ways and usually at innocent people. I used to express a lot of rage as an infant but I was quickly taught that was not the Christian way, so I learned to swallow those dark emotions.
I grew up watching my father incapacitate vast numbers of people. He just drove them out of their minds. I saw him reduce his critics to helpless fury. They would become incoherently angry. I thought it was funny. I still do. I grew up taking great delight in incapacitating people with anger. I learned how to say a few words and just drive them out of their minds. It’s always been my sweetest pleasure. I wouldn’t know how to live without my rage at my father. It’s like the rocket fuel that has always powered my rocket. My life would be unimaginable without it. I would have no idea about how to live. This fuel is also a poison that has nearly destroyed me and those touched by me.
I notice myself feeling hostility and rage much of the time. I just want to stick it to people. It’s not that it feels good, it’s like an addiction, like it’s out of my control. I can tamp it down, tamp it down, but there’s all this rage dying to be released. I suspect this rage goes back to my early childhood, possibly directed at my father, but what makes it so bewildering is that I have no conscious anger against anyone.
I find myself lashing out at people, but I know my rage is directed against events in my childhood. I feel in the grip of this unwanted hostility. I have my father’s attitude that the outside world is the enemy to be debunked (according to an SDA Bible scholar).
