A Real Punch In The Nuts
“Oh, Neal, you’re so AH-MAY-ZING,” Amanda said, putting her hands on my chest and fluttering her eyelids dramatically. “It makes me want to fuckin’ punch you in the nuts.”
“It” is the overwhelmingly positive response, mostly from women, that I get when I share in blogs or on Facebook what I’ve learned on my mental health journey. I’ve spent years in therapy. I’ve learned a lot and I’ve made a lot of progress.
But the reality is that I hadn’t made as much progress as I needed to. And what makes her want to fuckin’ punch me in the nuts is the fact that I get so much praise and positive feedback from people who don’t know how much hell I’ve put my family through offline.
…
“I’m done,” Amanda said. I’m used to hearing Amanda express frustration to me about my behavior so I didn’t fully appreciate what she meant when she said it. She had to put a finer point on it in a later conversation. “I’m done,” meant, “I’m done with this marriage, this relationship, with you.”
I’ve been angry a long time. Since I was about 14, as best as I can reconstruct my emotional past. I was angry in general, then I found a musical genre and social scene where anger wasn’t just ok, it was the organizing principle. I found specific things to be angry about and maybe it was just coincidence when my anger spilled out into all my platonic and romantic relationships.
I’ve known for a long time that I wasn’t well. I thought I had made a lot of progress in my two experiences in therapy. I HAD made a lot of progress. But I hadn’t made nearly enough. And when the store hit a rocky patch and our daughter’s behavior started spinning out of control and the steady trajectory of my career went from positive to negative my anger became, as Amanda put it, the primary feature of my personality.
I exhaled anger and sweated resentment. I snapped at our kids, at Amanda. My head was filled with screaming noise that I couldn’t silence. A well-meaning friend caught a glimpse of my bullshit in action when he came over to help with a task Amanda wanted taken care of. He and his wife took our kids the next Friday so Amanda and I could go on a date. Instead, we sat in the dark and talked about how fucked up everything had gotten and if there was a way forward. Then we went to bed.
The next month we adopted pittie puppies. They were a peace offering from Amanda. She wanted to figure out how to make me happy and gift giving is one of her love languages. Shortly after we had a really rough week. I knew she was pissed at me but not why. Then one afternoon she burst into tears and shouted, “I’m pregnant!”
…
Amanda and I had talked about having four kids. After she delivered our first, that number was revised to a “maybe three.” After she delivered our second that number was revised to, “we’re done now.”
I agreed to get a vasectomy. Had it scheduled. But I was angry at…everything…and resented the little death that the procedure represented. My reproductive life, over. I was still work obsessed at that point and, well, things got busy and I just had to cancel the appointment.
Fast forward a few months and an increasingly rare night of connection later and we were facing adding a fifth member to the band. We figured we’d make it work. Whatever our flaws and deficiencies, Amanda and I have always made everything work.
We keep moving forward, through every challenge, public and private. It’s why observers think our marriage is so successful. But it brought us to a place neither of us wanted to be.
…
“I’m done,” Amanda said. We had just finished dealing with the fallout of one of my angry outbursts at our middle daughter.
After many months of disordered nights in 2020 we learned that she had sleep apnea, bad. As in, never actually getting restful sleep, bad. We had her tonsils and adenoids out. Her sleep improved but other things did not.
Someone suggested neurological diagnostic tests. The report came back - Autism Spectrum Disorder and Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder. We started behavioral therapy and occupational therapy. Over the last year she made a huge amount of progress. I made progress. Our family made progress.
But 2020 was a pressure cooker. Kids doing school from home or being sent home from school, a family business on the brink. The anger remained. Fuck, the anger. Ever present, simmering. Explosions became less frequent but no less fierce. The shouting, the seething, the slamming doors, the recrimination, the spankings, the tears. Hers. Mine.
One day, Middle Daughter was refusing to cooperate, and I pulled her chair away from the table. She fell on the floor. She told a mandatory reporter. It became an investigation.
Amanda told me that she believed I’d never hurt our children intentionally but that my anger was so out of control it seemed increasingly likely that I’d hurt someone by accident. It was a final warning that if I didn’t deal with my shit – really, truly deal with my shit – I’d lose most of what actually matters to me.
Amanda had asked me to find anger management counseling. I looked around, made calls that didn’t get returned. Apparently therapists were busy during the pandemic. I took her concerns seriously, but not seriously enough. Not until I sat across the table from a Department of Children’s Services case worker and answered questions about how much I drank, if I used drugs and how I disciplined my children. Not until Amanda looked at me and said, “I’m done.”
…
“What do you think will happen if you stop white knuckling it and let go,” my therapist asked. It was my second, maybe my third session with a counselor I picked specifically for his focus on anger management. I told him that if I let go – of my attempts to control my feelings, of whatever the hell I was squeezing the life out of – I would fall apart and my life would collapse around me. “Maybe that’s ok,” he said.
We had established that I had in my early teens, for some still-to-be determined reason, adopted anger as my default emotional defense mechanism. I was a sensitive kid with strong emotions and no ability to manage my responses to them. I was desperate for connection and mostly unable to achieve it, so I got angry. And that anger became my constant companion, my protector. My anger kept people far enough away so that they couldn’t fully see me, let alone hurt me. It gave me ready-made responses to nearly every situation.
I took his advice and surprise! We were both right.
I stopped trying to prevent myself from feeling things. I started intentionally responding to people and events in exactly the ways I had always avoided. And day after day, week after week, I had violent emotional releases.
I started saying things that I didn’t know I thought or felt until the moment they left my mouth, often coming up in heavy, choking sobs that left me gasping for air. I got comfortable sitting in the cavern in my chest, a void that only seemed to grow larger the longer I spent in it. I started having conversations with myself about the source of my trauma, who I am without my anger and what would occupy that space in its absence. My internal life was in shambles (Point: Taflinger) and it was mostly ok (Point: Therapist).
I don’t know why I have been so angry. I know when it became a significant part of my life but there’s no event or series of events I can confidently identify as traumatic. It’s more an absence of something. I’m not quite sure what. Something I think I should have been in those hollow places before the anger covered them up.
Now my daily work is to just leave those hollow places exposed. To interact with people and circumstances without pre-programmed responses designed to maintain distance and therefore safety. To be kind and generous to myself, first, so that I can be kind and generous to my partner, our family, my friends and those I simply encounter along the way.
Nearly every waking moment now is terrifying and I struggle to not fill them with distractions. I literally made a list of things I enjoy doing by myself so that when I am alone or have free time, I can be – truly be – by myself. So that when I bring people into my life I can do it as something approaching a whole person, not a collection of trauma responses.
…
Amanda started giving up on me months before she said it out loud. She started making decisions that were in her best interests, quit worrying about how I would react to things she said or did, stopped waiting for me to show care and concern for her in the ways she needs. It stings, sure, but I’m proud of her for taking control of her life, for finally admitting that I wasn’t going to change until I was ready and willing and she needed to plan accordingly.
But I didn’t want her to be done with me. And I didn’t want to be who I was anymore. So I started doing the hard work and I did it hard. After each session I felt gutted, hollowed out, lighter. And after each of my sessions, Amanda seemed lighter, too.
As my dark cloud began to disperse, more sunlight landed on her face. The woman I missed for years started to come back and I had to sit with the brutally discomfiting realization that, just like teenage Neal, I was desperate for connection but had driven away the person I wanted to connect with the most.
Much of my anger seems to have dissipated and I am left with the fear and sadness it kept me from feeling. I’m grieving its loss – anger is my oldest and most loyal friend. Without it I am unsteady on my feet, overwhelmed by feelings I should have learned how to manage as a child but didn’t. Without it I have to figure out how to respond to each person and situation as I encounter them. It’s terrifying and exhausting but I know that other people have worked through their shit and lead happier lives afterward. There’s no reason to believe I won’t do the same.
I don’t know if the damage I did to my partner and my marriage is irreparable. I don’t know if Amanda’s as interested as I am in rebuilding our relationship. I can’t control any of it. All I can do is continue to work on myself and accept that Amanda’s not done with me. Not yet, at least.