For about two years after the divorce was final, I told the same stories about it, all of them rooted in anger, all of them placing the blame squarely on Sean. Every time I told someone some portion of the larger narrative – whether it was the way he told me he was unhappy or the way he moved out or how he half-assed therapy (more accurately, 1/10th-ed therapy) – I could hear the words echoing in my head as I was still talking and afterward, I’d feel a little sick to my stomach. Not because I was necessarily lying, but because it felt really awful to harbor anger in my body. I think I believed that eventually, I’d tell those stories and I wouldn’t feel the reverberations in my gut, my chest, my throat. But it didn’t work that way.
I realized at some point that what I was feeling was rage, even though it didn’t show up in the way I thought rage did – throwing things, screaming from that raw place in my throat, trembling arms and legs. I began to realize that even when I could speak in a wry voice that sounded more sarcastic or disappointed than irate, I was full of rage.
For me, rage is a function of powerlessness, and the end of my marriage certainly made me feel powerless. When Sean made the unilateral decision to leave, there was absolutely nothing I could do about it. I couldn’t make him stay, and I couldn’t force him to come to therapy, or talk once he was there.
When Erin came to me one morning, several weeks after Sean moved out, and demanded to know what was going on, what was happening, what to expect, I told her I had no idea. She was as confused as I’ve ever seen her. She couldn’t imagine that he could just leave without some inciting incident, something I had done to make him leave. She also didn’t understand that I had no idea how this might all play out. Frankly, it was hard for me to wrap my head around, too. I remember trying to explain it to her first as a math problem and, then, like consent.
“It’s the ‘lowest common denominator’ phenomenon.”
“What?!” she demanded, smacking her hand on the kitchen counter. “What the fuck does that mean?”
“When two people are in a relationship and one of them absolutely doesn’t want something, they get to be the decider. They are the lowest common denominator.”
“You are not making sense. What the fuck, Mom?”
“Look, you’re not gonna like this, but this is the only way I know how to explain it. If two people are in an intimate relationship and one of them wants to have sex but the other one doesn’t, the one who doesn’t gets to be the decider. They win.”
“Ew. Do not talk to me about sex and Dad.”
“This isn’t about sex, but it is about consent. It doesn’t matter how much I want your dad to be here, to work this out, to live here while we do it. If he doesn’t want to be here, or doesn’t want to work it out, he wins. He chooses. I can’t force him to do anything he doesn’t want to do. Period.” Even as I laid it out for her, I was realizing it was true, really really true. I could only wait or accept what he wanted. I was powerless. And that was the root of my rage, as quiet and controlled as it looked.
In the beginning, I had both rage and anger, but they burned in different places in my body, and the anger wasn’t sustainable because it was so uncomfortable. It burned hot and fast and overtook everything else in my life for short periods of time. It prompted tears and a need to physically move it through – sometimes by walking, other times by shouting or punching a pillow. Anger was immediate and required attention.
The rage burned hot, but also had the ability to sit dormant. When it was activated, it flared and the stories grew and grew, braiding themselves in and around my emotions until I had created a ball of resentment that was tangled and barbed. The rage didn’t necessarily demand anything of me in the moment, but it did make me feel impotent and frustrated. It reminded me of my lack of power, my inability to go back and rewrite the story of my divorce. In this way, it was far more destructive than my anger, because being reminded of it kept me in that space and didn’t allow me to learn or grow from any of it. I was a frog in gradually boiling pot of water. I had to do something different. I had to root out the rage and honor it as the flip side of grief – the acknowledgement that I was feeling incredibly sad about the loss of all the things I’d wanted, expected, imagined from my life with Sean. With some instruction from my amazing and brilliant friend, Jen Lemen, I began.
Step 1 – The Rules
I had to figure out a way to do this without judging myself, and I had to go back to the beginning. I had to make a list of the unwritten but agreed-upon rules of my relationship with Sean. Over the years, we had created a powerful contract that determined a lot of how we interacted with each other and our extended family and friends, even if we didn’t know we were doing it at the time. What were the rules that, if they were to be broken, would have threatened the very foundation of our connection? The things we’d both brought to the relationship because of what we’d been taught by our families, by our culture, by religion in some cases – how did those embed themselves into our marriage and become foundational and unspoken at the same time? Almost immediately, I came up with eight:
Strength = being stoic and quiet
Shame comes from sharing too much (especially if what you’re sharing can’t be fixed)
Don’t “over-react”
Don’t make others witness your struggle
Be grateful for what you have
Believe what he says, not what he does
Don’t be too loud or disagree too much
Don’t hold up a mirror to the other person
These included things like not oversharing with anyone outside the marriage and not over-sharing within the confines of the marriage if what you said might frighten or worry the other person. It was also important not to become too emotional unless you were happy or celebrating. Expressing fear or extreme sadness was definitely not okay. I thought about issues like money and child-rearing, shared values, and what happened when things got hard; these were all prompts that helped me understand what the unspoken rules were in our marriage; who was responsible for what, who did the emotional labor and what kinds of things were deemed ‘valuable.’
When I missed adult conversation and the pride that comes with working outside the home and accomplishing things that felt tangible, I was reminded to be grateful for what I had and not complain. I had it good. So many of these rules were based on a binary system – things were either Good or Bad and if they weren’t Bad, I couldn’t look at them with any sort of discernment because they must be Good. When I was fighting post-partum depression, the shame I felt about it was overpowering. I had a Good Life – enough money in the bank, a happy marriage, college degrees, amazing children. How dare I feel depressed? I should be grateful for what I had. There was something wrong with me if I couldn’t switch off the despair.
Shame became the sea I swam in as I recognized and listed the things I’d agreed to – that we wouldn’t ask for help from extended family for things that were really hard, like holding grief, that we wouldn’t ‘worry’ each other by being real about depression or anxiety. It was very clear that I had agreed to compromise key values and parts of myself and what I needed to feel safe and cared for and valuable in the relationship. It was slow and insidious and not intentional at all, but there had been a starting point and the origins were buried deep in my history and Sean’s history in ways we probably both felt were wrong on some level.
From the days of not eating in front of my first serious boyfriend, Eric (because I didn’t want him to know that I had needs of any kind – I wanted to be the easygoing girlfriend, “not like other girls”), to not pushing R to wear a condom because he didn’t like it and he was sure he could pull out in time (which resulted in a pregnancy at age 17), I hid parts of myself and made compromises that were unhealthy for me. I had made some leaps over the years, like the time I broke up with Mike M when I caught him with his ex-girlfriend on the steps of his house, but I went back to making compromises I couldn’t have known would be so hard to undo. I hadn’t wanted Sean to know I had big needs, either. I didn’t want to be high-maintenance, I wanted to be fully self-contained; the fun girl.
Step 2 – The Cost
After I’d spent a couple days making my list of the Rules, I made a list of what it had cost me to follow them for so long. Thinking about what parts of myself and my integrity I had sacrificed in order to adhere to this particular contract was challenging and painful. I had to keep reminding myself that I had been served by this marriage, too. It wasn’t all hard, but in the hard moments, these things had cost me my voice, my agency, my story, my sense of trust in myself and any chance of finding or accepting support. Ultimately, it cost both of us any shot we had at building a real, honest, healthy relationship. Sitting with the grief I felt as I recognized that I had – on some level – done things that had kept me small and alone was the key to making the conscious decision to break the rules.
Reminding myself that, now that my marriage was over, I could choose differently, be more intentional going forward, I felt a freedom like never before. I also felt a tremendous amount of pain and overwhelm thinking about the years I’d wasted not being able to speak up, ask for help, listen to my intuition.
Step 3 – The Gifts
This step was about acknowledging the gifts I brought to my marriage. How had I shown up in ways that were positive and caring? What specific things had I done to show that this relationship, this person, was important to me? It wasn’t about a balance sheet – me against him – it was about identifying where I had been truly and authentically myself and exhibited my most deeply held values and principles. In doing this, I was able to open the channels of disappointment and self-love in parallel and look at how I still hold on to the core elements of who I really am as I walked the line of sticking to the rules. This was a powerful reminder that there was some unbreakable essence within me, and at first, it was hard to think of anything, but when I thought about the obsessions I’d had since I was young, the things that meant the most to me, something opened up. I could see how I had always been a fierce advocate for my sister and brother, how I was concerned with equity and justice and I sought out opportunities to care for others in meaningful ways. And gradually, I began to find things that I knew had made a difference for others.
The list I came up with was this:
True care and support for my then-husband
Fierce advocacy for his health and his work/passions
Consistent centering of our children’s well-being
Willingness to compromise
Generosity with him, our children, his family
During these first three steps, I was very gentle with myself. I took long walks, lit my favorite candles, laid in a soothing bath almost every night, spent time with the dogs, ate really nourishing food. As I laid myself bare, I made sure to protect myself from external sources of grief and frustration. I also made sure to have a witness – someone who knew I was doing this work and who was steady and loving and held space for me as I did it. Jen held space for me as I wrestled with shame, guilt, blame, judgment, and reminded me to be gentle with myself and others, to give grace and recognize that these paradigms are generational and cultural, that they are taught to us over decades and decades by family, culture, society and religion.
Step 4 – Triggers
In order to unwind that ball of rage, I had to be able to identify what gave it life and energy. I spent time remembering certain situations with Sean to try and find patterns, but I didn’t dig so deeply that I created stories that would suck me in to the rage. Over time, I was able to identify the triggers, and I felt as though I was unhooking one little burr at a time from my psyche. The point of this was not to tell Sean or try to change him. This was about being able to notice in the future when I was being treated that way by anyone, and having the presence of mind to not engage with any relationship rules that perpetuated it.
My rage stemmed from:
Powerlessness at the end of our marriage (he left and there was nothing I could do to stop him)
Believing that I was forced to make the ultimate decision about divorce after months of him being disengaged
Feeling as though I had been left with the house and the children to manage on my own in the aftermath of his departure
Taking the ‘high road’ and not broadcasting the way he left or why (him “getting away with it” and keeping most of our friends despite his poor treatment of me)
Anger at his expectation that time would erase the harm he caused to our relationship without any active attempt to repair
Feeling disrespected at the way he chose to tell me he was unhappy and his inability or refusal to speak with me in person (no apologies, abrupt FB unfriending, email to let me know he was unhappy and was moving out)
Step 5 – Affirmations
This step involved writing a new set of rules – a contract with myself that essentially declared that I was actively, deliberately, consciously choosing to break all the old rules. I pulled out the list I made in Step 1 and created a second list with the opposite of each item. Making that list felt like taking a cool drink of water after walking through the desert for a week.
I will live believing that strength = vulnerability and connection
I will tell my story with honesty and clarity to those who have earned the right to hear it
I will feel my feelings and know that they are valid
I will actively ask for witnesses and support when I need it
I will be grateful for what I have and also be aware that when I know I deserve better, I can ask for it
I will believe people’s actions more than their words
I will take up space and use my voice
I will hold up a mirror to others and expect accountability
Step 6 – Transfer of Energy (or, the part where I get to break shit)
I chose an object – a symbol of my marriage that could be broken in a dramatic fashion. It had to be something that I could satisfyingly imagine being transformed along with my rage. About ten years into our marriage, we visited a village in Italy called San Gimignano and purchased several beautiful pieces of pottery, including a large serving platter painted with olive branches. While it had been expensive and was cherished as part of a set, it had broken and been repaired once already, and that felt even more symbolic. Using a permanent marker, I wrote the rules from Step 1 on one side and what they had cost me (Step 2) on the other. I went outside with a candle, a rubber mallet, and my notes from the ritual. Holding the platter in my hand, I read my affirmations aloud, giving my new rules space and life outside my body and I inhaled deeply. On the exhale, I dropped the platter from chest-height and listened to it shatter on the driveway. I used the rubber mallet to smash the crap out of it until I could no longer read any one word from Step 1 or 2 in its entirety, swept away the pieces, and put them in the trash.
Rage was the reason I found myself in the place I was – uncoupled after 26 years, whether I recognized that or not. When Sean emailed me to say he was unhappy, I was stunned and also not stunned. Things hadn’t been easy or happy for a long time, but the disrespect I felt that he didn’t come to me in person and the disrespect I continued to feel as he resisted talking about it and going to therapy bloomed inside me. More than once, I felt rage – like when I blew up at him the night of Erin’s school formal and he texted me to say he was moving
out. I had never had the ability to lash out like that before. And when I
finally decided that I was done – that I couldn’t live in the no-man’s land of being married but not talking about why we weren’t together anymore – that was definitely rage. I refused to stay trapped in this place where I was powerless.
I continued to ride and harness that rage (instead of squashing it) when one of my “extra kids” was being treated horribly by her father. For years, I’d talked the talk – advocated for kids and teens, talked about how we need to stand up for each other, fight back. I had written about it, even. But this was an opportunity to live it, and with Sean not in the picture, it was so much easier to do. Speaking out and doing something tangible to ensure that she was safe without worrying about what Sean or anyone else would think was cathartic. Putting it into action felt amazing because I knew I was doing something that would ultimately make a huge difference in this
child’s life, even if I wasn’t supported in it by anyone else.
Rage was the reason I was able to advocate for Lauren leaving high school at the end of her sophomore year, to help her pursue her education in a completely different manner despite the people who were against it, who told me it was absurd and it would cause harm. It was the thing that made me not only listen to her, but believe her when she told me she was miserable, that she had tried it the
traditional way but it wouldn’t work any more.
Rage was the reason I didn’t gaslight Erin when she was struggling her freshman year of college and I went to her, across the country, to be there and help in the ways she asked me to. Rather than employing “tough love” or telling her she was supposed to be independent, I showed her that asking for help was normal, important, not shameful. I showed up. Rage was the catalyst for the work I did to feed people during the pandemic who weren’t being served by the systems that were already in place. Rage let me see where things could be different, where the status quo was fucked up and wrong, and begin to imagine how it could be instead. Opening the door to rage
empowered me to be the person I had always thought I was but was too afraid to be.
Rage is the actual embodiment, the living expression of who I say I am. There is a BBC documentary about a monastery where a monk who is dying is interviewed. The commentator asks him how, on his deathbed, how often he prays and he responded, “I gave up on prayer a long time ago.” It is a shocking moment before he follows up by saying, “I decided to make my whole life a prayer.” That is what unleashing my rage did – I went from talking to doing, from tucking my resentments away between my ribs and under my diaphragm and deep in my belly to listening to myself and acknowledging my desire to live by my new rules. I went from following the guidance of toxic masculinity, patriarchy, capitalism, Puritanism, to honoring my gifts and breathing in to who I really am. Thank god for rage