Who am I when I am not perceiving myself?

Navigating deep feeling, anger and identity

Cat’s Cradle by Cynthia Zhou

When did I become my parents? Maybe it was in my attempts to be the opposite from them that I simply turned the coin over.

From a young age, I learned to associate anger with negative consequences. My father was good, but he could be loud and scary. I feared his quick, temperamental responses to small things. I began to associate the emotion with fear. I felt triggered when my own anger arose in fear that I might inflict similar harm on someone else. I did not express my anger and often repressed it, hoping not to resemble the authority figure I feared as a child.

Carl Jung’s personality theory involves the shadow, a portion of the unconscious mind that contains aspects of our personality that we reject or deny. In attempts to repress our shadow personality, it is likely to overpower us. In an absence of accountability and self-awareness, we lose self-control.

Therefore, a person who attempts to repress their own anger may have more difficulty recognizing and controlling it as it arises.

I learned from the Bible that acting angrily was a sin. I internalized the lessons I learned as a child, and came to see anger itself as a bad thing. In psychology, we call this introjection. I had a difficult time saying no. If someone upset me, I told them it was alright, “no worries.” I said this more so when my worries were in fact very significant. I let people pick and prod at me until my identity became pleasing others. My enneagram personality type is literally type 2, the helper. By the time I realized that I had allotted pieces of myself to everyone except me, I had so much tension in my back, so much repressed anger in my chest that needed to be screamed out to “King For A Day” by Pierce The Veil.

Eventually, I learned to accept that anger is an emotion, like any other. It is not a sin to feel, as long as I do not act on that anger. Unfortunately, now that I allow myself to feel, it is difficult to navigate my newly surfaced emotions. Sometimes I catch myself becoming like my father, arguing and raising my voice over something that feels like an attack but is simply an opposing viewpoint.

In trying to be loving and kind, I have become the very thing I fear. I have manifested my own capricious temperament.

I used to associate empathy with compassion. I used to believe that my deep emotions were a result of my kind, loving nature. I used to think that my deep feeling and sensitivity was the opposite of my father’s anger, but I have come to believe that it is just the other side of the same coin. Anger resides in me too.

I am not my perception of myself. I am human and messy and flawed. I am more like my father than I thought, and that is okay.

I feel ≠ I am

Maybe if I acknowledge and work through my emotions now, while I am young, I can learn to steer this myriad of feeling without crashing.