Anger, or Existential Terror?

Someone you trust forgets something important to you. Someone whose opinion matters dismisses your feelings. Someone you look up to acts in a way that feels careless or inconsistent. Someone you love does the exact thing that pushes your buttons. You send a text or email to someone important and they leave you hanging.

These are people you have come to place real trust in. People whose opinions shape your sense of self, whose decisions affect your future, whose presence you’ve come to rely on.
And suddenly you are not just irritated or disappointed. You’re furious.

Irrationally, disproportionately furious. You find yourself raging when from the outside they are just being human.

You may then blame yourself after for feeling such rage and think you are being irrational or “too much.” When in fact, there is a very human reason for it.

I think it is because somewhere deep down, we still have in us that baby who needed someone to be completely reliable or we would literally be dropped on the floor and get severely hurt. Back then, if the caregiver forgot to feed us or hold us, we could have literally died. That was a real existential threat.

We grow up, but that terror stays buried in our nervous system. So we unconsciously choose some people in our current reality to be our psychological caregivers. That is human and extremely understandable. The authority figures who guide us, the friends who validate our worth, the lover who keeps us feeling safe in an uncertain world. We hand them the job of being our existential security blanket without even realizing we’re doing it.

But when, occasionally, their human limitations fail us, our ancient alarm system screams that it is a life or death matter.

Sure, the rational, grown-up part of our brain knows that it is not always about us, that people have their own problems, that it is normal for people to forget things. Our adult side can be incredibly calm, empathic and understanding.

But then in all of us there is always this primitive part that screams “if they are unreliable, sloppy, if they are capable of dropping things, I will not survive.” That part is trembling in fear when things do not go according to plan.

Rage feels more powerful than terror. When we feel everything is collapsing, that we cannot hold onto anything, anger gives us the illusion that we can fight our way back to solid ground.

The illusion is that we can demand consistency from other humans, from the world. The fantasy is that if we make our rage big enough, clear enough, something will change. If we protest to God loud enough, something will change.

In psychoanalysis, this is called the illusion of omnipotence. As infants, we experienced a fantasy that our desires alone could make things happen — when we cried, we were fed; when we needed comfort, arms appeared. We couldn’t distinguish between self and other, so it seemed like our will alone controlled the world.

Except that is not how cold hard reality works, not how grown-up life functions. We are essentially unconsciously hoping for other humans to be more than human for our inner child.

That might be why a little lapse or saying the wrong thing often feels like such a betrayal, a personal attack almost.

But perhaps their forgetfulness, their inconsistency, their very human limitations are actually waking us up to gaps in our spiritual and personal growth?

Truth is, we suffer not because people are unreliable, but because we demand that they be reliable for us. We want our authorities to transcend their humanity so we can feel less vulnerable. We are hoping for something in the world that will give us the medicine for our existential terror, something that would make us feel we are in control again.

I hope one day I can relinquish my unconscious desire for other people to be perfect so I can feel safe. I want to be able to reach a point where I can just be at peace, graciously receive their love and care for me and relinquish my neurotic need for them to be anything but who they are.
I want to be in a grown up place where I can appreciate their love and attention for me without making them responsible for my ontological safety.

We find freedom not by finding perfect human around us, or magically turning them into what we want. We want to be internally unshakeable regardless of how scattered, imperfect, unintentionally hurtful everyone else is.

When our authority figures act inconsistently and carelessly, when our partners irritate us again by pushing the very button we need them to not push, when anyone we have put on a pedestal disappoints us with their humanity, I am learning to ask: where am I trying to make them responsible for something that should actually be pointing to gaps in my own spiritual growth?

It is a lifelong practice and most days it takes me hours to get to the point where I let them be nothing other than the beautifully imperfect humans they actually are. But I hope that time span gets shorter and shorter as I practice.

We can hold ourselves in the spaces where others inevitably fall short. We can become our own reliable caregiver. We can free both ourselves and them from an impossible burden neither of us signed up for.

Notice. Breathe, and gently, take that job back.
The ontological security you seek has always been yours to create.