Among the limited options available to manage relational trauma as children and teens, many of us with early relational wounding took the behavioral route of being reserved, respectful, compliant, and often tuned into others’ needs above our own.  With this scripted option to manage an abusive environment, we learned to “do no harm” and, in fact, may have evolved instead to be particularly sensitive, kind, and empathic towards others.

What was less developed were the part(s) of us who needed to learn to “take no sh*t.”  We learned, or were forced to learn, to relinquish our innate “fight” response, which would have created healthy boundaries; to do anything like asserting ourselves with appropriate anger threatened those with power over us.  Back then, it invited the real possibility of dangerous reprisals.   So, we shut it down.

There’s a trifecta of choices to respond to caregiver threats

With relational trauma, there’s a trifecta of choices to respond to caregiver threats; they are commonly known as fight, flight and freeze responses. A fourth response—fawn—is a strategy identified by Pete Walker that has been the missing piece to complete the CPTSD response repertoire. In my view, “fawn” responses are adaptive responses often derisively labeled in adulthood as being “people pleasing” or “co-dependent.”

Kids who went the “fawn” route were part of the quiet brigade.  They were the ones who generally didn’t act out but were good, kind, cooperative, or responsible people.  They perhaps performed well in life and probably looked good from the outside. But, underneath appearances, these kids were really too good for their own good.  Because they had to relinquish any “fight” or self-protective anger at their mistreatment, they lost access to a key emotion that guards personal integrity and a cohesive sense of self–healthy anger.

The biological, evolutionary, and social function of anger is to help us know our boundaries and empower us to set them.  Much of the relearning in healing from early relational trauma is coming to recognize, accept, and comfortably express our anger in appropriate and clarifying ways.  Healthy anger, when reclaimed, is not only a birthright but a way through which we rebuild our vitality.  The tricky part for people scripted in the fawn response is that often, even a hint of anger is immediately traded out for another emotion, particularly shame.  This happens so quickly that one is ashamed before registering, and one might be self-protectively angry.

Shame is an emotion that can bind every other emotion.  Typically, with the fawn response, shame is managed with “withdrawal” or “attack self” scripts.  Both of these scripts adaptively served to make us smaller targets for continued abuse while regrettably shutting down our access to self-protection.

Because we came to understand anger as an emotion of “power over,” thus something wounding and to be avoided, we have to begin by redefining what healthy anger is for us.  Healthy anger does not trample over other’s thoughts, feelings, or boundaries.  Healthy anger actually seeks “power with” another person by clarifying the terms of the relationship in a cooperative, honest, and restorative way.  Begin by redefining anger for yourself by asking these questions:

How did I come to understand what anger was?  How did I see anger displayed or expressed in my family?  Or did it go underground?

What positive or negative associations do I make to having anger, my anger or another’s?

Do I feel ashamed or guilty when I feel angry?   

What is my anger “style”?  Do I shut down, lash out, or chastise myself for having anger?

What small steps may I take to begin to connect with and name my anger?  For instance, how do I know when I’m mildly angry?  What physical sensations do I feel…a clenching in my solar plexus, heat in my chest, a reddening of my face, clenching my jaw or fists?

As you identify, elaborate, and define how you experience your anger, the next step is to get clear about the issue(s) your anger is spotlighting.  Before acting on the anger, sit with it long enough to define the problem and the solution or clarification you seek.  Finally, gradually learn to “speak for your anger, not from your anger,” meaning let anger inform you while at the same time speaking from a measured place of clarity, decisiveness, and respect for yourself and the other.  None of this is clean or easy.   However, the “trial and error” effort is worth the reclamation of an incredibly important and empowering source for setting boundaries and finding a new sense of self-worth and emotional vitality.

Image credit:  Mauro Savoca/Pexels

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Jennifer Lock Oman

Jennifer Lock Oman, LISW, BCD, is a psychotherapist with over 35 years of professional experience. Her passion has been the study of human emotions, and their centrality in motivation, connection, and change.  Currently, her interests also include the study of Complex PTSD and the clinical application of the Internal Family Systems (IFS) model of therapy to healing relational trauma.