How I Tamed My Inner Rage Monster
How I Tamed My Inner Rage Monster
May 9, 2023
By Marta Kagan
I used to have a bit of an ‘anger’ problem. It was my dirty little secret: well hidden from casual acquaintances, coworkers, and retail employees, but real familiar to those who lived with me. So familiar, in fact, that my kids gave it a nickname: Momzilla. As in, “Look out—Momzilla is on the prowl!”
‘Mom’ was kind, loving, affectionate, playful, adventurous, optimistic—and a whole lot of fun.
Momzilla, on the other hand, was a giant reptilian monster spawned from nuclear radiation. She slammed doors, hurled accusations, and on one occasion, shattered a glass cooktop stove by assaulting it with a tea kettle.
Momzilla could do some real damage.
Eventually, my husband (who is also a psychiatrist) said, “Enough. You need to work through whatever is causing all this rage with a therapist—instead of terrorizing the family with it.”
He was right, of course. Momzilla had to go.
Two (very important) things I learned about anger
At my first session with Jill (my therapist), she asked me what I hoped to get out of our work together.
“I want to learn how to control all the ugly feelings that make Momzilla appear,” I told her.
Jill smiled and nodded, then asked me to expand on the ‘ugly feelings’—how and where I felt them in my body; what thoughts preceded them; what behaviors followed them.
In a way, she invited Momzilla to join us for the therapy session, and to my great surprise, Momzilla obliged. Except she wasn’t monstrous and destructive. She was scared and sad and small.
I learned pretty quickly that anger is often a secondary emotion—one that masks a more vulnerable emotion like fear or shame or sadness. Anger protects these raw, painful feelings with its vigilant, aggressive facade.
From an evolutionary perspective, anger can be useful. It’s an internal alarm that can protect us from danger, making our hearts beat faster and our ‘energy hormones’ (such as adrenaline) spike.
“Anger is just the tip of the iceberg,“ Jill told me. “The part that you and your family see is the surface emotion. It protects you from the painful stuff that lurks underneath.”
With Jill’s help, I gradually uncovered the fears and childhood wounds that lived beneath Momzilla’s fury. There were a lot of feelings there—raw, tender feelings. Feelings that made me (and Momzilla) shed a lot of tears.
And here’s the other truth I discovered about anger (and feelings in general): You can’t control them. Nor should you. Feelings, it turns out, are meant to be felt.
“This goal isn’t to control, deny, or suppress your feelings,” Jill explained in one session. “It’s to increase your tolerance for the discomfort they cause.”
Because there is nothing wrong with having angry, hateful or ugly feelings. It’s what you do about them that counts.
How to tame your inner rage monster
Taming Momzilla was not ‘quick,’ and it was not easy.
But on the bright side, IT WORKED.
My family hasn’t seen or heard a peep out of Momzilla in ages. She has been, for all intents and purposes, neutralized. Or as Jill would say, “Integrated”—meaning she’s still there inside me somewhere (and at times she’s pretty fucking vocal), but she’s no longer breaking the furniture or scaring the children.
If you’re struggling with your own inner rage monster, I strongly suggest finding a good therapist or support group to help you. For me, working with Jill and Internal Family Systems was life-changing, in the best possible way.
And while I can’t possibly distill my treatment experience down to a single paragraph (nor am I qualified to do so), I will share the framework that helped me lose the ‘Zilla’ while embracing the ‘Mom.’
I hope this helps you do [your version of] the same.
Step 1: WATCH
The first step, for me, was the most eye-opening. You see, I considered myself to be fairly self-aware. But it turns out that Momzilla not only destroyed the sense of peace in my household, she also took an axe to my self-awareness—and parts of my short-term my memory.
Simply put, Momzilla was always lurking beneath my conscious awareness. At the first sign of trouble (in my case, any time I felt neglected, rejected, unappreciated, or unloved), she’d barge in and take over. In those moments, the kind, loving, playful, self-aware person I thought of myself as was rendered unconscious. Hijacked. Completely taken out of the game.
Later, I would struggle to remember what happened: What triggered me? What exactly did I say or do in the heat of my rage?
I don’t mean that I experienced full-on amnesia—it’s just that the details were pretty fuzzy and the actual feelings beneath Momzilla’s anger were unclear.
She was doing her job—which was to protect me from pain—and she was doing it REALLY well, often at the expense of the very people I loved most in the world.
It took a LOT of work and daily practice to expand my ability to stay present with Momzilla; to not be completely hijacked. But it helped. Tremendously. In time, I got better at detecting the ‘early warning signs’ and increasing my tolerance to the triggers that summoned her. I learned how to stay present to her rising emotional intensity—rather than dissociating from it.
And when I managed to ‘stick around’ for one of her tirades, I found Momzilla was a lot less lethal. She was becoming more ‘Mom’ and less ‘Zilla.’
How to apply STEP 1 to your life:
Become the Watcher of your own emotional landscape. Take a few moments several times a day to do an ‘Internal Weather Check.’ Before long, you, too, will become better at predicting and preparing for emotional storms.
Step 2: PAUSE
My grandfather used to say, “You don’t have to show up for every fight you’re invited to.” I learned to hear his voice in my head saying these words every time Momzilla appeared on the scene. And then, I’d walk away.
Sometimes I’d retreat to my bedroom, but more often than not, I’d have to physically leave the house. The emotions I felt once Momzilla was triggered were so overwhelming that I had to truly isolate myself and/or change the scenery in order to jolt her out of her mission-to-destroy.
At first, this was a crude and sloppy work-in-process—meaning that Momzilla might tear through the kitchen before I became aware that she’d taken over and could lure her out of the house. With practice, I learned to stay present to her sensations in my body, the expressions on my family’s faces—or the way our dogs would slink out of the room when they caught a whiff of her.
That would be my cue to hit the pause button on whatever was happening and GO GET SOME AIR.
How to apply STEP 2 to your life:
Find your ‘emergency break’—before you get triggered. Try leaving the room, going for a walk, taking some deep breaths, or distracting yourself with another (less destructive) activity for a brief period. The key is to create a small gap between the emotion and how you REACT to it. Hitting the pause button (or pulling the emergency break), even briefly, allows you to separate the emotion you’re experiencing from the behavior it tends to produce.
Step 3: HEAL
Getting a grip on my reaction to ugly, intense feelings was no small victory. But after a while, this felt like ‘managing the symptoms.’ And I wanted to cure the disease.
So the third phase of taming Momzilla meant I had to examine, express and/or tend to the underlying raw, super-vulnerable feelings in a way that felt safe, productive, and healing. Jill called this the “Reparenting” phase: a process of giving myself the love and support that I needed but didn't receive as a child.
“Childhood is where you build the framework for dealing with life: how to process emotions, how to hold boundaries, what relationships look like, and many other habits and behaviors that live in your subconscious mind,” Jill explained.
The problem—not just for me, but for the vast majority of humans—is that we are not taught to do this consciously. Meaning that we unconsciously adapt (and repeat) the same patterns, habits, and belief systems that our parents learned from their parents (also unconsciously).
This is how generational trauma continues to wound all of us. It’s like a raging fire that keeps burning and consuming everything it touches.
Until someone finally decides to turn and face the flames.
Jill encouraged me to bring compassion and curiosity to the wounds we uncovered in my therapy sessions.
“Your parents can only parent you from their own level of awareness,” she pointed out. “They can’t give you what they don’t have or what they themselves have never even seen.”
So it was up to me to face the proverbial flames—and to consciously create new, more adaptive ways of dealing with the emotional content of life. This was the REAL work that we all should be doing. This is the step in which the real miracles can take shape.
How to apply STEP 3 to your life:
Once the storm has passed, take some time alone to reflect on the raw, tender emotions that live beneath the big surface ones. Ask yourself: What is my anger protecting? What unmet needs live beneath all the rage? Use these questions as journal prompts and allow your thoughts and emotions to pour onto the pages without judgment. Then take a moment to read what you’ve written and ask: How can I help my inner child feel safe and loved? What might healing look like? What will I do differently with my own children to ensure that this fire no longer burns? Whatever answers emerge for you—listen to them. Be the parent/healing presence that your inner child needs and deserves.
