07/07/2019
To this day, when a male raises his voice at me, I break down.
Before I go into this topic, I first want to make it very clear that this isn’t meant to be an attack on my dad, but rather just an honest depiction of my own experiences. I am not angry at him, and anyone that is close to him and reading this should not be either. Understand that this was in the past and there is much more to our relationship than this. My purpose for this is to share my experience in hopes someone can relate and begin their own healing process.
When I was brainstorming my answers to this question, I wrote a few things down, like bees, heights and some other pretty basic fears a child might have. But if I am being truly honest with myself, my true terror as a child came at the thought of my dad being angry. Now, to be clear, he was never violent. When he was angry for whatever reason, he would yell, scream, curse, throw things, break things, and every once in a while, would punch a hole in the wall. For the most part, my childhood was happy and safe, although these temper tantrums would loom over my family as a consent anxiety as we wondered when the next one would come. Every time the wind would take the door and slam it or we heard a raised voice, my sister and I would get that tight feeling of anxiety in our stomachs and wonder if we would spent the day locked in our bedrooms while we listened to yelling, screaming, and the sound of house phones being thrown at a wall.
To this day, these memories are my first experience with anxiety, of course, back then I didn’t understand why male teachers made me want to cry every time they spoke to me and why I generally avoided men for most of my young life. But over time I learned to understand where these anxieties steamed from. I’ve grown to forgive my dad and talk with him about those times and him acknowledging and apologizing played a big part in the process of moving past my anxieties about men. I now have wonderful men in my life that I love and trust whole heartily. That doesn’t mean that when a man raises his voice at me, I won’t run to a bathroom and cry my eyes out…because I will, I did recently.
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