In therapy, I am finally getting to a place where my anger is surfacing. For me, anger is the least "safe" emotion. I was punished for expressing it in any form, so I repressed it. On top of that, my father was a rage-a-holic. His anger was so scary, and his behavior so unpredictable, I lived in constant fear. Anger on our part wasn't allowed because his took up all the air in the room. I spent many years trying to "let go," aka repress my feelings. I am finally getting to a place where I feel safe enough to acknowledge my own anger, and man, I am pissed.
My therapist suggested I find some way to let out my anger, such as taking a kickboxing class or going to a thrift store and buying some dishes to break. That's when I thought of hate couch. Growing up, we had the world's ugliest couch in our family room. It was a brown tweed abomination that had to be the most hideous thing in the store in its day. I hated it with a passion. Naturally, my parents owned the scratchiest, barfiest, most visually repulsive piece of furniture ever designed in the history of man. In my mind it's the perfect visual metaphor of their soul. It's the abuse. It's them. So aesthetically out of touch with everything that represents goodness, beauty, and truth in the world.
That couch lived with my dad long after the rest of us escaped, even after three moves and a divorce, well into the next century. It's possible it still sits in there, smoldering with 40 years worth of bad juju embedded into its fibers.
I decided to search for my own hate couch, so that I can destroy it.
Turns out, perfectly hideous couches that represent my childhood are hard to find. Most of them are long gone. Free couches I'm finding on Craigslist are too demure. The one above is close. It has a vibe. I could hate that couch.
Comments
Post a Comment