I was at a bicycle race called the Snake Alley Criterium in Iowa when I was 18, the last year that I raced as a junior.  The course was well suited for me, but in the past, I had floundered with the race because, as usual, I couldn’t handle the pressure that came with competing against others that weighed down on my shattered emotional system.  What was different about this day was that my parents, whom almost never attended my races, travelled up to see the race, and were there cheering me on.  Unexpectedly, this triggered a fierce rage in me, and all of a sudden I had this huge fire within me that propelled me to have one of my best performances in a race.  

Unfortunately, I was so angry that I threw a water bottle that was full of water in the direction of the judges without even thinking of what I was doing, and this led to me getting relegated a number of places in the results.  I didn’t understand until years later that my rage came from having the two people that had done so much to tear me down standing there cheering me on, as if they were really invested in seeing me succeed.  In essence, that experience was signaling a need I had to reclaim my emotional fire so I could use it to navigate the challenges of life in a healthy way.

I’ve found that I was born with an unusual amount of emotional fire.  It’s presence originally gave me the unyielding drive I needed to survive my childhood.  But by the time I finished high school and escaped my homelife by going to college (04 My desperate need to escape), I was an emotional zombie—I was a dead man walking when it came to feeling emotion.  By escaping to a world that didn’t have the inherent pressures of being in such close proximity to the people that destroyed me, I was able to breath a bit emotionally for the first time.  As I did, my anger started to gently surface. 

I was lost as to what to do with my anger because it was so new.  A friend suggested I try to journal about whatever I was angry about, and that served as the first step in being able to give some type of outlet to this outwardly driven force.  As I gave my anger an outlet, my hurt, sorrow, and pain soon followed, and I quickly found myself in a rather intense emotional bog I wasn’t equipped to deal with.  In the end, I stumbled into some simple ways of releasing the energy of these emotions, basically by way of figuring out how to do the equivalent of crying and screaming.  I was successful enough with this crude attempt to not get stuck in this challenging emotional place, and unbeknownst to me, this was my simple initiation into the world of emotional release work.

During college, a close friend introduced me to heavy metal music and explained how he and his high school friends would go on ‘rage runs’ at night, moving through an area, venting off their anger and rage however they could along the way.  Heavy metal connected me to others who were feeling angry and finding some type of outlet for it.  It gave me a sense of permission to start finding ways to express my anger myself.  I then took my friend’s example of a rage run and adjusted it to my own needs.  My version turned into putting on heavy metal music in a basement of a building we were living in and beating the crap out of an old, discarded washing machine with a broken pool cue.  That, along with a couple of other outlets I found, became the real beginnings of my anger release work.

I was full of anger and rage as a result of the abuse that I had gone through as a boy, and yet at that time, my whole childhood was still suppressed, so I didn’t understand where all my emotion was coming from.  Fortunately, I didn’t care.  I was never afraid of my anger, and it was always clear to me that it wasn’t acceptable to vent off this negative energy towards others, or towards anything living.  By way of my experiences that spanned my college years, it became clear to me that my anger needed to be released, and it needed to be done in healthy ways that didn’t hurt anyone, including myself, in the process.  So that’s what I did whenever it felt necessary.

My unseasoned attempts at releasing some of my anger and rage played a critical part in being able to reconnect with what I then called Peace, and that I now call Life during my college years.  (01 My struggles begin).  There’s a selfless love that comes from the earth as you learn to meet it that was a big part of that experience of Peace.  But you can’t experience love within yourself or by connecting with something outside of yourself if you’re so full of anger and rage.  Clearing out some of my negative fire gave me the chance to connect with and feel the earth’s love, and when I did, it was clear to me that it was what I wanted more of.

By the time I unwittingly used my pursuit of Life to break through to my suppressed past (01 My struggles begin), I had refined the way I was doing anger release work.  I was using an ax to mulch dead trees by then, and my intent had matured and clarified.  It was while doing this in the woods while I was working with a healer named Steve that I was opened to a mystical experience with the natural world and given the songs of Life (02 Finding Steve and receiving the Gift).  Once I started using song to work my way into the depths of a core healing process, the need to do focused, sustained anger release work became obvious.  It wasn’t until then that I realized how much rage I had suppressed, and how critical it was to set myself free from it. 

When you’re sexually abused, a bond is usually created between you and your abusers that’s grounded in hate.  The abuser hates the purity and innocence of the child that highlights his own feelings of worthlessness and disempowerment, and so he attacks those qualities by way of violation which generates an extraordinary amount of hatred within the person being violated.  To set yourself free from that bond is critical to being able to set yourself free from the damage the abuse has created.  I mulched many logs in my journey to accomplish this.  It started as an act of defiance, and ultimately ended as an act of embracing the powerful beauty that comes with returning to a place of core level care.  This journey was intense and long, but fully worth the effort.  I was able to disconnect myself from my abusers emotionally by resolving and setting myself free from the hate I had for them.  This allowed me to then take my care and to turn it towards a world that was willing and able to meet and engage with me without needing to hurt me.  Making that transition has been revolutionary, and it would have been impossible without anger release work and my core healing process. 

I still get angry from time to time in life, but never at a core level.  Because of where I’ve come from with this emotion, the small negative fires that ignite don’t have much of an impact on me and my world.  I simply step away and vent off the negative energy in the same way I go to the bathroom to evacuate my physical wastes.  I then deal with whatever led to the anger so it doesn’t keep grinding on me.  This allows me to learn from and get stronger from the experience and keep my healthy emotional fire burning bright within me and within my larger life.