Sometimes when I get really angry, I can’t help it, it completely overtakes me and I let it just rage on through. Sometimes I don’t even try to control it. That can feel good, and often I don’t take a breath and try to make a different choice, like I should. Even if I cannot stop myself, afterwards I start thinking. I’m always in my head, I think that’s why I’m a bad dancer.

Anger tells us something. More and more, I think there is nothing on this earth that is meaningless. So afterwards, I start thinking. About why I got so upset, why I let that heat just ride through me and spark into words. Jung talked a lot about shadow work but I have never tried it. But now I might be ready. There is a pattern to my anger. So, I’m going to try to answer some questions. If you feel like it, copy these and put your own responses in the comments.

Shadow Work Questions:

What is a trait that you hope people never notice about you? Why?

One trait I hope that people never notice about me is that sometimes I think I’m smarter than other people. I don’t want people to notice this. I don’t like to congratulate myself in my head. If I say something that I think was a good idea, or it was phrased well, this little voice sometimes spews compliments in my head. And I hate that. It actually makes me angry. Because I think it’s a waste of a thought. I want to be thinking about big things, and solving problems with my brain, not engaging is self-flattery. I don’t want people to know this about me, because I want to give everyone a chance to speak, and I think if people know they will think less of me. I’m afraid if people know this about me they will think that I’m arrogant.

In what situations do I feel like I am wearing a mask to be accepted?

As a kid, and a teenager, I felt like this a lot. I had a whole collection of masks and I swapped them out depending on the occasion. One was the mature, “good girl” that my parents expected, one was a social butterfly, one was a dark, brooding, melancholic. That one felt closest to “me”. I knew instinctually what the situation called for, and I delivered. There did not seem to be a choice. As I grew older, the masks would exhaust me. If I spent months as an extrovert, the next six months I’d become a recluse, keeping my social circle very small, letting just a few people in, completely withdrawing, not taking people up on social invitations and even engaging in self harm. I don’t think it was until I reached my late thirties I was able to integrate the masks and behave in a way that was more true to myself and did not exhaust me. I feel like all those masks were a part of me, but not the whole. Now I have found a way to integrate them into a holistic identity. I am more assertive, I’m no longer afraid of standing up for myself or being seen as a total weirdo and dying of embarrassment.

When was a time that you felt helpless and weak and what did you promise yourself in that moment to ensure that it never happened again?

As a woman, and especially as a young woman, I felt helpless a lot, because I would get into situations I did not want to be in, situations that felt wrong, but I was too afraid to do what was required to get out of them. I think you probably know what I’m talking about. One thing I need my daughters to understand is, other people’s feelings are not your responsibility, and being polite, in the scheme of things, is really not that important. Interestingly, I did not extricate myself from these situations, I just stopped letting them get to me. I built up a wall in my mind, I became mentally tougher, and I let everything go on in my body, to my body, I let it all happen, but I was mentally behind a wall.

What qualities in other people irritate me the most? Why?

Now this one is easy. The quality that irritates me the most in other people is laziness and the inability to change their own lives. There were times, decades even, when I was lazy and entitled and arrogant and I could not get myself out of negative patterns. I could not drop my bad habits. I was a smoker, I was a drinker, I really did look down on other people. Men that showed me any vulnerability made me sick and I treated them like shit. The men that I could not have were the ones I gambled away my soul for– and those relationships ultimately turned out to be meaningless. What really irritates me now is people that don’t try to grow personally. Especially if they are experiencing the negative impact and suffering of their own choices and they just throw their hands up in the air. That’s what makes me the most angry. And that’s why I’m trying to do this work. I know it’s wrong on an intellectual level and I try to stop myself but sometimes I just can’t. So I’m trying to dig this out. I think I’m angry because that’s a tender spot for me; I have been a victim to my vices but I overcame it. So it’s hard to understand why other people can’t. Also, it reminds me of my own fragility, that I also struggled with big life changes, and that I too was weak. That scares me, that tender spot. Just being reminded of it is difficult and painful and scary, and fear often leads to an angry response. If you are dealing with an angry person, sometimes the smartest thing to do is to start asking or guessing what they are afraid of. What is underneath the anger is fear, even if they don’t understand it yet. We get scared and we lash out. So truly my anger at people who can’t do the work on themselves is about me, my own fear of giving into something that I thought I overcame, but now it’s right in my face again, in another person.

What this work reminds me of is that we are all connected. Not in a woo woo new age kind of way, but in a scientific, embodied way. If another person’s behavior triggers something within you, and your response then sets that person off, we are not really separate at all, not even what we consider our “internal” lives. The internal becomes symbolic in the external. The visual stimuli buries itself like a sliver within our unconscious and triggers an internal chain of events, and vice versa. The internal is not entirely internal and the external is not entirely external. The membrane between us is thin, the veil between you and I is like rice paper, and sometimes when it rains, sometimes when it pours, that separation disappears completely.