Even in my nightmares I get angry, not scared

I've been talking about some of what happened in therapy and I've been having nightmares about being back there.
I wake up feeling a sinking sense of dread, feeling trapped, powerless, helpless, and full of anger.

Just to preface this, I was the one in my family who went head to head with my father. My fight/flight/freeze/fawn was very much set to "fight" with him. This is about my own experiences, not at all intended as a condemnation or judgment of those who reacted differently. We were all just trying to survive our own unique ****** situations, and there's no wrong way to survive.

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I hate that when I look back there’s nothing I can say I ought to have done differently

There were no mistakes to learn from

I can’t rewrite my nightmares with a tweak to the story to get a happy ending

There’s no way I could have changed the outcome, nothing left that I could have done

Of all the possible responses, the way I handled it was probably the best of my ****** miserable options

Placating him would have ended the rage-filled tirade du jour, but it would have broken my spirit, my pride, my dignity

Fighting back was the only thing I could do, even though it was futile

The fire in my veins was what told me that this wasn’t right, this wasn’t okay, I had worth, I deserved better, he was wrong, he did not have the right to treat me like this

And it burned

God, it ****ing burned

White hot rage from the inside out at the injustice of it all

Like fists pounding mercilessly endlessly against a wall of stone until my knuckles were bruised and bleeding but never stopping because if I stopped then he won and I couldn’t let him have that

The one thing I had left was the satisfaction that he wasn’t getting what he wanted. He could not take that from me.

There was nothing else in this world that he could not have, by bullying or intimidation or sheer determination. The man was brilliant and relentless.

The one thing he could not have was my respect, my deference, my unquestioning obedience

Anyone who treated me like a person, with kindness and respect, had no trouble receiving the same from me in return. It was only when it was demanded from me, as something to which he was entitled, that I would not give it.

Every bit of force that he put into breaking me only fanned the flames of my defiance

Appeasing him would not have saved me. I need look no further than my sister and mother for proof of that.

I could never win a single battle in that decade-long war of attrition. I guess you could say I won the war by running out the clock—I made it out, afterall—but it was at best a pyrrhic victory, if it was even a victory at all.

I told myself it was worth fighting for because I had to believe that something mattered. I had to believe that there was something left worth fighting for.

I don't want it to have been a waste.

I can totally relate to the feeling of being helpless in having no control of how you feel or what you have done. I do not have nightmares, instead for the past 30 days I wake up, can't shut my mind off and lose sleep. Over and over I kept thin king I did something wrong, then I finally got it through to myself I did nothing wrong. To love unconditionally, a person has to return the same as you give. I am tired of beating myself up because in my heart I know I am a good person. But the truth is love hurts, rejection hurts and to feel blamed for something you did or didn't do it a battle in your mind. But you are never alone, God is always with you.

It sounds like your father may have been narcissistic and insisted everyone do things HIS way and his love was extremely conditional.

This can lead to what you describe as:
It's only natural that talking about things you experienced in your past with your father can trigger you to re-experience events that caused you to have these emotions and react with anger towards him, fighting him as a way to not experience these trapped and powerless feelings.

The anger is part of the reexperiencing, not my present day reaction. I always fought, and I felt trapped and powerless because fighting never made a difference, but I still always fought, because I was full of anger at the injustice of it all.

@LabRat27,
I admire so much your fight response, and I also do not underestimate all other ways of coping, as all of us were fighting for ourselves to survive, one way or another.
My first instinctive reaction to violence was also fight, before I was broken into freeze, that became my coping mechanism for longest time. As a result I literally could not express anger for decades. I would feel anger, as a heated band pressing all around my head, and I could feel the blood rushing to my face and neck, but I could not find way to express it, basically I would switch off in every such situation.

However, in my dreams, or rather nightmares, I managed in the last three years to express anger unrecognizable to me otherwise, to scream loudly in a distorted, howling voice that scared the hell out of my husband and probably all of our neighbors, and to twitch violently with my whole body, fighting the sense of powerlessness. So far this anger was turned towards my mother, for not seeing me, for not protecting me, and for emotionally abusing me my whole life. I haven't even scratched the anger towards my father, it is still off limits, as is most of my memory of the abuse.

So, to me it seems that dreams unlocked some of my conflicting emotions, and brought about some realizations that become elements of my healing. The most obvious being the changed pattern of my response from freeze back to fight, as I managed to actually express some of my anger towards my mother in reality, for the first time.

Have you considered the thought that perhaps this anger that you feel now in your nightmares is not the same old feeling, the one that fueled your fight response then, but the new feeling of anger, of an adult who feels protective of the child who had to fight so badly for dignity? I do not want to sound presumptuous, and of course I cannot know your experience, but it is just a thought - do you perhaps associate your anger back then with your feeling of powerlessness, as it was locked in that repeating circle of anger-fight-powerlessness? Because you are not powerless now, and you have every right to express that anger now for what has been done to you, as much as you had the right to express it then, by fighting.

I hope you will not think I was out of line with expressing these thoughts.
Take care,
A.

I'm glad you've been able to get in touch with some of your anger. Anger can be a very normal and healthy response when we are threatened or in danger.

I think my own anger in my dreams really is the anger of back then, but that that was the self-protective anger of a child who knew that what was happening to her was wrong.
Over the years there were a lot of external influences that tried to get me to repress that anger, to placate my father, to get along and play nice. I bottled it up and stopped letting myself feel it. I forgot about it for a very long time.
It wasn't until I started digging into this stuff in therapy and getting flashes of this intense powerless frustrated anger, like reliving an emotional memory, that I even remembered that I'd felt that way, so often and for so long.

I think I have to work on not judging that child for her anger, being proud of her for standing up for herself and telling her that she was absolutely allowed to defend herself rather than resenting her for not being more "mature" and "composed."
Current adult me has, I believe, lost touch with that very healthy response of self-protective anger.

In a way I think I'm the opposite of you, for it is my anger towards my mother that I have yet to allow myself to feel. She failed to protect me and at times was emotionally damaging in her own way, but I could not allow myself to be angry at her because I needed there to be one parent I could trust and look up to. My therapist has noted that any time a criticism of her comes up I am quick to make excuses, defend her, rationalize her behavior, and explain why the problem was really me.

Thanks for the support on the anger part.

That little girl was all alone, and children are not supposed to be mature anyway. She did the only thing she could in an unbearable situation. I am so sorry for that.

My experience with dreams tells me that you will be able to gradually feel those feelings in reality, too, and to make better sense of it all.


I absolutely understand your feelings towards your mother. Even after letting go of a big part of that idealized image I had of my mother, I still find myself feeling irrational guilt here and there. Of course, the rational me knows I have no guilt of my own to feel. But the mechanisms that keep us hostage are sometimes so strong...It seems that only repetition and re-affirming of new, healthy ways of dealing with difficult subjects makes them loose their grip on our behavior.


Take care and I wish you all the best,
A.

Is it possible that part of you excuses your mother because she was a codependent personality? Maybe your mother was afraid of your father too?

Just to clarify, I wasn't afraid of my father. I was angry, not fearful. He was at times intimidating and threatening and certainly caused a "fight or flight" reaction in those he terrorized, but my dial was very much set to "fight" and I was too busy being outraged at the injustice of it all.

My mother was afraid of my father. Well I'm not sure that's the right word. But yes she was terrorized by him and had her will and spirit broken down by him. She fought at times, but not in the way I did.

In the years since she has marveled at the way I stood up to him in a way that she never could, and even said "In the early days, I thought you would be the one to come out whole because of this." My response was "Yeah well it turns out you can't put any kid through that much for that long and have them come out whole."

She naively hoped that my relationship with my father would improve once she was out of the picture. She moved out when I was 11.
When we have talked about the years prior, how she could watch her husband treat her daughter like that and not intervene, she has said that intervening on my behalf to defend me only further enraged my father, made him more determined to prove his authority, and "only made things worse for me."

My therapist sees this as an excuse for not having protected me. I'm not sure. It's hard not to make excuses for my mother. I believe she thought she was trying to do the right thing.

Post-separation it was joint custody and joint visitation. My father's legal argument was "parental alienation syndrome," claiming that my mother was brainwashing me and turning me against him. Because the custody battle was being dragged out in court, anything my mother said or did to support me against my father was used as "evidence" of this "alienation" in court. She didn't know the damage she was doing at the time, but this really reinforced the gaslighting and the feeling of being all alone and not believed. Any time I tried to talk to her about my father she would tell me that he just wanted what was best for me, that he cared about me, and urge me to try not to get into conflicts with him. It was what the courts were telling her she had to tell me, but it was very isolating.

So your mother let you down. Yet, you did notice that your father was abusive towards her and her efforts to stand up to him made everything worse.

That is very challenging for a child to witness and not have the life skills to change/fix and understand better.

I can understand how you feel. I still fight with the remaining family that are still alive and I still have nightmare. Rarely do I fight back in my dreams. I run away in my dreams beginning for someone to help me. No one ever did.

Hey everyone...I posted earlier that I didn't have nightmares of the actual abuse done by my father... Please do not read further if you know you will be triggered!!!

Well, I woke up a bit before 4am, with a lot of pelvic and bladder pain. I often suffer from those. I have somatization, where I translate my feelings into painful bodily sensations.

I dreamt of my father, much taller, bigger and faster than he is, at least from the last encounters that I remember, and in my nightmare, he was coming from the entrance door that he broke through, right at me.

I do not remember that I ever saw him like this in real life. But I knew in my dream that I am not mistaken, and that what I was about to see really happened. You see, I also have dissociative amnesia, that prevents me from accessing some memories, or making sense of some others...this was the first time that I saw anything like this.

Anyway, he grabbed me, and held me...I do not need to be explicit here, I just want to describe that feeling that holds me stuck here in trauma time, and that feeling is bad enough as it is.

It is the feeling when you want to give resistance with all your might, but your every movement seems so feeble and insignificant, as if you are not moving at all. And I know that I am giving resistance, I am not passive, I am just too small and too frail to make any difference. Like my arms are spongy, and his arms that are holding me are made of stone. There is no comparison between the strength of a child and of a grown man. And yes, I become a three-year old child in my nightmare.

I can feel the heat from my anger that is climbing up my neck, and cheeks, to the top of my head. I feel as if my head is going to explode from mixed rage and inability to do anything to stop him. I know this rage so well. Whenever someone, later in life, tried to restrict me in any physical way - get in my way, or tease me and does not let me go from a certain situation, usually in a playful way - I would become wild...It didn't happen often, but these situations were the only occasions I would become physically uncontrollably defensive, even violent. As an animal who found herself cornered...I only now understand why...


Thank you if you read this, and I am sorry if it was awful...

Hey everyone, I just have an update to what I wrote previously...
I managed to pinpoint that feeling from my dream - that mixture of rage and helplessness - as the core affect of my traumatization.

I was not able to approach it for 40 years, and yesterday and today it started making sense, it felt so familiar. I understood that it is not the feeling that I have right now, but instead, that I carry this feeling of helplessness combined with rage for as long as I can remember. I carried it with me into every situation that I faced, and it influenced my life and my decisions. I always felt threatened, and therefore anxious, as I always just wanted to get away from that feeling. In my mind, I was still overpowered and immobile, and was trying to get away from that.
I feel as if I have unlocked something really important for me...
Thank you for reading

Wish you all the best!
A.