An excerpt from my book, One Arm One Leg 100 Words.com, Overcoming Unbelievable Hardships”
Anger
The second stage is anger, which she took out on everyone who loved her. It was not pretty. She truly hurt those she loved. Like in that old Mills Brothers song, “You only hurt the one you love, the one you shouldn’t hurt at all.” I came very close to the end of my rope, mainly due to my experiencing more frustration than I could handle, and feeling zero appreciation. But God kept giving me a very special dose of Charlene grace to tolerate another day until it slowly and eventually got better.
During those days, I wrote her a lot of letters, many of them were never given to her. They were for my benefit only. She just couldn’t understand my point of view. God must have also given her some David grace, because many times I did not respond as lovingly as I should have to her anger. I was not accustomed to such treatment and I had to constantly remind myself not to take it personally.
I kept telling myself that she was sick and could not be held accountable for many of her actions. It was even harder for the other loved ones in her life who were not quite as understanding of her condition as I was. Communication of any kind about anything on any deep or shallow level was impossible. It had to involve expressing deep emotions of how she was feeling, and she simply was not capable of communicating at that level.
It just wasn’t a fair fight. I would always win the discussions (or arguments) because she couldn’t argue back with words the way I could. She just had a vocabulary of very frustrating screams. And scream she did. Emotional outbursts lasting anywhere between 15 minutes to one hour of bone-tingling shrieks that did not stop except to take the next breath to continue her screaming again.
As terrifying as it was, she was communicating the only way she knew how. By opening up her mouth and letting the words come out. (In this case, it was a vocabulary of one scream). Imagine, if you can, trying to calm someone down who would not stop screaming at the top of her lungs. I tried holding her, rubbing her back, talking calmly to her, but nothing helped her to calm down.
At times she didn’t even want to look at me or touch me. If she didn’t retreat into her room and slam the door, then I usually had to leave the room myself and leave her alone so she could let all of that pent-up frustration out of her system. I’m sure the neighbors thought I was beating her, it sounded that bad. It took a tremendous amount of energy for her to vent like that. It would take her days to recover fully from the outbursts that drained her body and her emotions. At times I felt that it was my fault for letting the conversation get to such a point of frustration that allowed her to just snap like that. She couldn’t just stop this outburst of screams once she got started. It had to run its course.