Anger, Ira and the early history of my inflamed bowel/body consciousness
(I would like to state that this is my experience of the illness and while I believe it might apply to others, I do understand that some people in rare instances develop colitis in infancy and as such, this could be due to other factors that cannot be addressed in the following blog.)
Die Verdammnis (Damnation), c. 1730, Balthasar Permoser, MDBK, Leipzig
I continually find it frustrating that whenever I type in ‘anger’ and ‘colitis’ in a basic internet search, the results tend to bring up websites and articles discussing anger as a reaction to inflammatory bowel diseases as opposed to a pertinent and potential cause. One would hope, after years of research into such illnesses, especially those where inflammation is a factor, a more involved discussion would arise regarding the negative emotions involved before the onset of an illness. To put in other terms: how helpful is it to interview the reactions of a farmhand after a horse has run away when we could examine the busted gate that allowed the animal to flee in the first place?
From my perspective, my own experience, I endured years of frustration, anger and profound depression during my healing crises. So I understand the sullen and despondent lows of feeling physically and emotionally depleted. For sufferers of bowel diseases or any other serious illness, we feel as if our own body is insulting us, letting us down. I feel, therefore, that if we fail to examine the life, the emotional life before the arrival of an illness, we are not helping ourselves.
Anger/angr/angst
From an early age growing up in Canada, I was exposed not only to English but to French (through school) and also to Dutch (through my father’s family). Words, then as much as now, have filled me with wonder and that wonder contributed to my yearning to solve mysteries; namely, one of the sources of the ulcerative colitis.
When looking at illness, I find etymology extremely helpful if not insightful. And in our English language, we have a treasure trove of other lexicons buried within our words.
Let us begin with anger. Etymologically speaking, the word is sourced to the Nordic. English is a bastard language with its roots in Anglo-Saxon/Germanic with additional vocabulary storming in from the Vikings and the Normans (basically, the French Vikings). Anger, one will find, is linked to both the Old Norse word, angr, sorrow and German, angst, fear. (In my podcast, The Harrowing (Part III), I share a discussion with Barbara, a friend of the family, where she mentions C.S. Lewis’s book, A Grief Observed. The Christian author writes that no one told him that grief felt so much like fear.)
These etymological links bear examining. As a child I grew up dreading the anger of my parents, mainly my mother. Her temper would flare without warning and while most of it was directed at my father, her family or the occasional stranger (a shoe salesman that ignored her), I hated witnessing those moments. I myself never felt threatened by her but perhaps my tendency towards stoicism – repressing my own anger – was a reaction to a potential fear. In addition, school, from grade five onward was a source of angst for me. When I was bullied, it seemed the bullies could do their worst in secret while my reactions, my attempts at retribution, were eagerly noticed by teachers and rebuked. The teachers as much as the bullies were my enemies and assuming my stoic approach to both often proved less embarrassing.
Anger brought out fear in me and it is fitting that the word should be associated with the Germanic, angst, which is associated with eng, the German word for ‘narrow'. Usually a narrow place or space is where we find ourselves in a state of fight or flight when cornered.
“It is a passion that is in command at first, it is passion that speaks, it is not we ourselves.”
Meanwhile, angr, is the Old Norse for grief. As a kid, during various brawls where I eventually stood up for myself, shoving and fists flying, a few blows here and there, the adrenaline rushing through me amidst these fisticuffs eventually devolved into a fallout of sorrow once the fight was over. Alone, away from the mob and my opponent, I would give way into weeping. I often felt ashamed for what I had turned into during the heat of an immature moment. What had I done to myself and to my opponent by physically lashing out? Briefly, I had become rage, and like the rage of Achilles, it reduces humans to ugly beasthood. It often reminds me of the quote from William Shakespeare’s Othello when Cassio complains he has lost the immortal part of himself following a drunken quarrel and has become ‘bestial.’
Anger/Ira
English is also a language heavily populated with Latin words. Whether they entered via Norman French or from the 16th and 17th centuries when scholars submitted Latin words to the broadening English language to beef it up, these words from Ancient Rome and Medieval Europe have facilitated and diversified our language. We can either say ‘moonlike’ or ‘lunar’ (the former Germanic, the latter Latin), ‘hearty’ or ‘cordial’, and while ‘related to the eye’ is a mouthful, ‘ocular’ rolls off the tongue with ease.
This also applies to ‘angered’ or ‘irate’. Ira is Latin for anger and forms the basis for such words as ‘irate’ (enraged), ‘ire’ (wrath), ‘irritated’ (provoked, bothered) and ‘irritable’ (easily irritated, annoyed; easily excited to impatience or anger).
This brings me back to those above-mentioned websites where anger and depression are discussed as reactions to being ill or being incapacitated by illness. With further reading, I often find that authors discuss how irritable bowel diseases have mysterious origins or how such chronic diseases may be linked to genetics. Certainly blaming our genes provides for some degree of helplessness, a giving-up stance but how useful is bemoaning our fate due to the not-so-arbitrary influences of the family tree?
Yet to be ‘irritable’ means something or someone must be the cause of irritation. There must be a reason, right? When was the last time you irritated yourself? Most of us want peace. Self-irritation? I cannot think this would be some kind of daily habit or punitive hobby for many of us.
This aside, when regarding the online articles: yes, the irritable bowel disease can irritate the sufferer. But from where does the original irritation, ira, (anger) arise?
In my father’s house…
My father’s side is Dutch. In his language, anger is boosheid and when you are angry, you are boos. In German, the term etymologically related to the Dutch boos is böse which can be translated into a variety of words: ‘vicious’, ‘wicked’, ‘fierce’, ‘diabolical’ and ‘evil.’ Meanwhile böse sein is ‘to be angry’.
Portrait of Dostoevsky, 1872, Vasily Petrov, Tretyakov Gallery, Moscow - The famed Russian author would have a profound impact on me during my late teens and early twenties. While on the surface I tried to live a placid life, I often identified with his emotionally volatile and mystic-minded characters.
So, growing up, I unconsciously developed myself to be an imitation of my father’s approach to life. Whenever my mother’s Slavic temper burst forth with wrath and displeasure, he often sat back, normally at the dinner table, arms crossed, allowing her rage to fly at him. He rarely if ever replied with the same level of fury and furor. In fact, to this day, my father is hardly willing to give into emotions or even acknowledge them. A month ago, his friend of thirty years passed away. In our Skype chat, he mentioned nothing of the funeral when I asked how his week was. Another person might have mentioned the loss, the pain, the grief. My father remained mute, the personal topic mum, instead preferring our perennial arguments of politics to take place in our conversation.
As such, I grew up between two distinct stereotypes: one of a distant, Dutch father, the other of a fiery, Slavic mother. And because I feared my mother’s emotional reaction to life, I hoped to become more like my father. His detachment seemed honorable, cool, collected and emotions were messy. However, deep down, I found myself to be far more Russian in spirit, prone to moods and sometimes bewildering emotions, more in line with my mother than I had suspected.
This attempt to distance myself from my very core self, this hope that I could be one thing that I wasn’t, would create the troubled foundation for an illness to evolve in my life. This was very detrimental to my outlook and, later, to my health.
During my years of research into illness and healing, I learned about shamanism. In this ancient technique of healing, the philosophy of the shaman understands that the individual becomes sick because they have left or rather abandoned their core self. Whether the abandonment is intentional or not, due to trauma or other painful experiences, we as human beings tend to leave ourselves when dealing with the aftermath of a difficult situation. Yet, the idea is that you often betray yourself through turning against your true nature, resulting in the body weakening. Think of a house without an owner. Without an occupant to protect the integrity of the house, the interior and exterior is open to vandalism and disrepair. Our body needs a self, and that self should be grounded in integrity. (The word integrity evolved from the Latin adjective integer, meaning whole or complete. In this context, integrity is the inner sense of wholeness deriving from qualities such as honesty and consistency of character.)
In the early 2000s, before I became ill, I first turned against my own integrity by allowing fear to control my life. I had moved back into the family house to live with my brother and father, but rather than feeling safe and secure, I developed this irrational fear of being kicked out. Maybe not so irrational as my brother, Mark proved to be more in control of the household than my dad. He inherited my mother’s temper but whereas my mother learned to control herself in a new relationship with my step-father, a man who had no tolerance for illogical and fiery outbursts, my brother had no one to reign in his callous rage.
Living with my brother and father was a time of quiet and repressed ire for me. The American writer Thoreau once noted in his book, Walden, that men “lead lives of quiet desperation.” This is exactly how I felt living with a father who conceded his power to the younger, wilder, more irresponsible son, which left me, the older one, to constantly point out injustice while not seeing any constructive results. The old habit of my father not raising his voice continued with my brother. He kept his arms crossed, condoning everything. The paradigm had not changed for him.
This fear of being kicked out, this feeling of constant irritation, would inevitably lead to the irritable bowel disease. This would be part of my fate.
Families of greed and anger
“The greatest outcry surrounds money: this is what brings exhaustion to the courts, sets fathers against children, concocts poisons, hands out swords to assassins and the legions alike, this is what wears the stain of our blood...”
Many philosophers have connected the idea that anger, while being a reactionary emotion, is also related to either self-respect or a lowering of self-respect. In Aristotle’s Rhetoric, he discusses this concept of ‘downranking’, which is a state where the angered one feels denigrated or lowered by the one who caused their anger.
In Martha C. Nussbaum’s book, Anger and Forgiveness , there is a wonderful overview of philosophical anger. In her work, she briefly and additionally discusses the physical responses to anger. There is throbbing in the temples, pain in the neck. One might feel burning in the cheeks or a warm forehead as the rage rises to the top of the skull. Many can identify with this biological reaction.
While I lived an angered and irritable life before the ulcerative colitis, I had cause for anger regarding one specific outcome, one preceded by an unraveling web of deceitful circumstances.
You see, back in 2000, I started to attend university. I had saved money for school while living with my mother and step-father in British Columbia, Canada. However, when I returned to Ontario to live with my brother and father, I knew I could rely on my grandfather’s estate for financial support. My mother’s father died in 1989 and by the time I started to attend school, all the interest from the monies had created a sizeable sum to pay for my education.
Yet before I was able to touch the money, the executor advised me to wait until September 2001. What could I do in the meantime? Interesting enough, I had the chance to access another education fund, a separate account set up by my grandfather. What was strange about these additional monies is that they had gone untouched for years. They were there, an open fund for whoever amongst my cousins may need money for post-secondary school. By early 2000, most of my older cousins had already attended college or university and were out in the workday world. This money however, had remained hidden.
It was my step-father, Gil, who discovered the funds through asking the executor, Edgar, multiple questions. Caught off guard, the gatekeeper to these monies admitted to this previously undisclosed fund and its purpose. Yet in the months following this divulging, he behaved in a furtive manner. In fact, after I accessed the fund three times, helping to pay for three separate post-secondary classes, Edgar asked me again to hold on and wait. Seeing that my other cousins had not had a chance to access the funds, he believed it only fair that it be divided up. I felt angered because in many ways he had failed his role as executor. Truth be told, his intention of divvying up the monies was in violation of my grandfather’s express wishes for this account in that it was only to be used for post-secondary education.
In 2001, the estate was being closed. I received my separate inheritance, along with my brother and our cousin, Scottie. Upon receipt of our cheques, my brother inquired about the other education fund. Standing in the foyer beside my brother, the executor’s eyes widened, his body stiffened. My cousin, Scottie, then visiting, exchanged a furtive glance with him. Edgar then stuttered out that the account was empty. That education fund… nothing left. He pursed his lips, dopey-like. My brother, in typical form, tuned up his temper, the furor I despised though now entertaining to watch as he grilled the hapless, white-bushy-browed Edgar. The executor told him and me that we needed to discuss the matter with Scottie’s mother, our Aunt Katrina. Scottie darted his eyes back and forth, saying he had to get going. Edgar would do the same.
In the months that followed, I would go on to discover that my aunt had worked in concert with Edgar. They had kept the education fund purposely hidden following my maternal grandfather’s death. With all the years of interest, by the time Gil, a lawyer, learned about it and I accessed it, the amount was close to $20,000 Canadian. Following Edgar’s idea of divvying up the money, I let the conversation slide and somewhere between autumn 2000 and late summer 2001, my Aunt Katrina emptied the account.
Autumn 2001 - strumming to the calm before the perfect storm
There was a catch: Katrina herself could not directly access the money. In order to receive the education funds, you needed tuition receipts. When I paid for school, I paid out of my own pocket, later submitting the receipts to the bank, receiving my reimbursement via the fund a week later. Knowing the process, probably having planned for it, Katrina, being diabolical, a snake in the grass, took her step-daughter’s receipts from McMaster University to gain her ‘compensation’. The problem is, her action would have been deemed illegal in a court of law. The education fund was only open to biological grandchildren. My step-cousin was not in this category.
All of this I gleaned in the months following the executor’s visit in September 2001. During the autumn, Katrina was generously handing out money to her two older sisters, Irina and Vera, whereas my mother received nothing. When the executor provided an accounting in January, the remaining pieces fell into place.
This actually didn’t cause me the grave anger, my true ire. Rather, my father’s participation in the matter is what tore me apart.
A house divided
During my investigation of the funds, I turned to my father’s legal aid, provided through his company. I spoke with two lawyers, one useless, the other helpful. The latter, Keith, expressed compassion and support while sharing with me the realities of such matters. To go after family, namely Katrina, would incur horrendously expensive legal bills. The funds in question, the ones I would hope to attain, would be lost in litigation with court and lawyer fees making it all the more futile.
While Keith provided this kind but honest insight, both my father and brother rebuked my efforts to discover the truth. While my brother had expressed his ire with the executor early on, he withdrew his furor and disdain in a strange and mysterious acceptance days before we had our first legal appointment. I would discover why in January 2002.
The day of receiving the accounting, my father sat me down and explained all was not lost. In fact, he was against me going to a lawyer because he himself had received money from Katrina. The money was meant for school so in a way, Katrina had done, in his eyes, the right thing. And my brother knew this fact months ago.
This news hit me with such disappointment and anger. Instead of reacting, as my mother would have, with ferocity and rage, I bottled that potential wrath inside me. My father had kept this information, had only shared it with my brother. I shook my head. I felt insulted, belittled, betrayed. But I said nothing and from January to March 2002, I suffered a deep and debilitating depression (depression – anger directed inward). As the winter thawed and the spring flowers budded, it was then in April 2002 that I contracted the bacterial infection and was subsequently diagnosed with ulcerative colitis in June of that year.
Anger… becoming irritable… leading to an Irritable bowel
This is why I am frustrated when I do online research. Why is there no discussion about the emotional life leading up to the onset of illness? Why do doctors, supposedly knowledgeable about disease, hardly ever acknowledge a patient’s life in the years, months, weeks and days before a diagnosis? Wouldn’t this be pertinent?
Imagine being shot in your sleep. You awake in excruciating pain and are rushed to the hospital and learn there is a bullet lodged inside you. This diagnosis explains the current pain and doctors move heaven and earth to remove the irritant, this foreign, fiery object. Bloodied bullet as evidence in hand, it would next be a question of who fired the gun at you, wouldn’t it?
Take this a step further. You are shot, the pain remains excruciating, but instead of removing the bullet, doctors only give you medication and explain you will have the bullet lodged inside you for the rest of your life. If the pain gets worse, they won’t remove the bullet, rather the organ that houses the bullet. Meanwhile, the origin of the bullet, and the person who had previously fired the gun, is not even questioned.
I had to ask myself during my healing: who fired the gun? The uncomfortable answer: I did. I shot myself because I stifled myself. All my emotional reactions when it came to rage towards my father and brother were directed inwards because of my being passive, stoic. Because I associated anger with fear and sorrow and even weakness, because I chose to emulate my father, I helped create the perfect setting for an irritable bowel disease to fester in my life.
Bringing this to consciousness through understanding and through reflection would inevitably move me forward in my healing journey.
“For what will a man’s life be like if he is constantly swollen with anger?”
Purgatory, XXIV, 1867, Gustave Doré, Hatchet and Co. “And shadows, that appeared things doubly dead, from out of the sepulchers of their eyes betrayed wonder at me, aware that I was living.” - Dante Alighieri (1265-1321) - Trans. Henry W. Longfellow