Track-1 FIGHT: When Anger is the Return of Agency

Track 1 – Fight: When Anger Is the Return of Agency

For a long time, I thought healing would look like softness.

What I didn’t expect was that, as my system thawed, what arrived first was Fight.

Not rage for destruction. Something cleaner. A firm internal resistance. Heat. Clarity. A refusal to keep accommodating at the cost of myself.

Fight, for me, is the moment my body says: enough.

Enough adjusting.

Enough explaining.

Enough smoothing things over while something essential gets crossed.

From a nervous system perspective, this makes sense. When a system has been in freeze or collapse for a long time, healing doesn’t move directly into calm connection. As the system begins to come back online, energy returns first. Mobilisation precedes ease. Before ventral safety is available, there is often Fight.

Anger, in this sense, isn’t pathology. It’s movement. It’s the nervous system regaining charge after numbness. It’s the sign that life force is returning — not yet settled, but no longer shut down.

This anger isn’t performative. It’s precise. It’s what returns after too much compliance. It’s what rises when consent has been quietly overridden for too long.

In Fight, my boundaries become audible. What I once tolerated stops feeling tolerable. What I used to endure politely registers as intrusion. Sometimes disgust appears too — not as judgment, but as information. A boundary emotion. A signal that contact has gone too far.

I notice how Fight sharpens my perception. My attention narrows. My body knows exactly where it stands. There’s less willingness to blur myself in order to keep the peace. What matters becomes clearer — not because I’ve reasoned it out, but because my system has already decided.

I’m also learning this: when I’m dysregulated, even caring questions can feel invasive. Questions ask for narration before regulation. They pull for coherence when my body needs containment first. In those moments, I don’t need to explain. I need to stabilise. I need space for my nervous system to reorganise before meaning-making begins.

There is also, at times, a simultaneous urge to retreat. Flight weaves in and out, not as avoidance, but as support. Stepping back allows mobilisation to stay clean rather than turn corrosive. Space gives anger somewhere to move without being acted out.

Seen this way, Fight isn’t a failure of healing. It’s a phase of thawing. A necessary passage as the system moves toward greater regulation and, eventually, toward connection.

This isn’t regression. It’s correction.

Fight isn’t here to burn bridges.

It’s here to stop me from crossing myself.

I’m learning to let this energy move without acting it out, and without pushing it back down. To listen to what it’s protecting. To trust that mobilisation can be part of healing — and that calm, when it comes, will be earned rather than forced.

For now, Fight is doing necessary work.

And I’m letting it.

This is only one way anger has shown up for me as reclamation.

Others will recognise it differently — in different bodies, histories, moments, and lives. The work, each time, is not to match a description, but to notice when anger is no longer about harm or defence, and is instead pointing toward a return of self.

This piece forms part of an ongoing exploration held within the Homecoming Audio Series.