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Originally posted on Medium! Enjoy! As long as we stay around corrupt, abusive, and nasty people who overtly attack us, implicitly humiliate us through clever language tricks, or invalidate us subliminally through a sudden but brief look of contempt that immediately follows earnest proclamations that attempt to convince us they “understand where we’re coming from”, our entire emotional apparatus will remain compromised. So long as we remain in the presence of toxic people, our emotions will remain toxic through overstimulation; guilt becomes toxic shame, humiliation becomes chronic irritation, fear becomes hypervigilance and paranoia, while anger festers into murderous rage. Let’s have a more detailed look at anger as an example. Emotions are just another kind of information; information in the form of energy and the information that is being communicated through anger is that, not only has there been a violation or a transgression against you, but also that something needs to change, hence the energy which is designed to propel you into action. For instance, if you feel angry after being insulted by a bully, your anger is saying “get away from this person” or “remove yourself from the interaction”. But what happens when we cannot remove ourselves from the interaction? What happens if we are children, have no control over our environment and can’t escape because the bullies in our lives are our parents? Or, what happens even when we can control our environment and leave, but for whatever reason mistakenly believe that we can’t? Well, it is likely then that the anger will turn into rage. The difference between anger and rage is that while anger carries the message, “take control of your behavior and change things by leaving the dysfunctional environment”, rage says, “since we can’t remove ourselves from the environment let’s change things by controlling the other person” or, more simply put, by fighting back. This is why rage is often coupled with violent impulses to inflict physical or psychological damage on the other person. Again, it is designed to propel us into taking action that will change something. But what if we can neither fight nor flee from an abuser, as is almost always the case for children? What happens when we can’t run or when any attempt to fight results in greater harm for us? What happens when feeling these emotions become dangerous for us? The answer is that we end up feeling nothing. We become depressed. We enter the ‘freeze’ response similar to what we would enter into in the presence of a grizzly bear, a beast that we can neither fight nor run from; we play dead. Now, to be clear, it is terribly tragic for a child to ever have to enter into this response as a result of being raised by hostile parents, but at the same time it is totally healthy and necessary for preventing the child from further harm. It is unnecessary when this occurs for an adult who does indeed have the choice to get abusive people out of his life. Once we escape the corrupt and commit ourselves to healing, we slowly but surely can heal our emotional apparatus. And once we are safe to feel again, we gain access to our emotions like anger and grow confidence in our ability to process reality and self trust that our emotions accurately reflect reality. Eventually, people’s sneaky and crazy making attempts to undermine us and blame us for our feelings becomes extremely obvious and pathetic. We become our own proof.