Awakening the Fire Within: Recovery, Rage, and the Power of Voice

Recently, someone pointed out that “rage” is hidden in “courage.” Finding my rage, I discovered courage—the courage to be. I had already navigated rugged terrain to align with my true self, my emotional intelligence had grown (at least I had some now), and I was largely emotionally sober.

For decades in recovery, I had no idea that anger was inaccessible to me. I had carried the early conditioning of the religious cult that shaped me into the rooms with me. The Twelve Steps—and the culture of the rooms—offered fertile ground for me to engage in spiritual bypass. Wherever I went, there I was. I interpreted the steps and the rooms through the lens of my early conditioning, projecting my inner conflicts and beliefs outward. Though I was abstinent and committed to healing, these unconscious patterns were still running the show, buried deep in my psyche.

Recovery became uncovery, peeling back layers of old beliefs and unconscious patterns. I learned that awakening isn’t a one-time event but an ongoing process of expanded awareness.

I hadn’t yet realized that beneath my recovery process lay repressed anger, hiding deep rage. Releasing it would ultimately open the portal to Eros.

What is Eros? In Uses of the Erotic: The Erotic as Power, Audre Lorde explains that the term “erotic” comes from the Greek word Eros, representing the personification of love in all its forms. As Lorde puts it, “When I speak of the erotic, then, I speak of it as an assertion of the lifeforce of women; of that creative energy empowered, the knowledge and use of which we are now reclaiming in our language, our history, our dancing, our loving, our work, our lives.”

Age played a role in the arrival of my rage, as did my growing consciousness and a spiritual awakening born out of necessity. At twenty-four years of recovery, I relapsed, drank for two years, and got sober through the Twelve Steps again. I’d worked the steps before—many times—but this time, maybe I was ready. Something took. A fire lit within me. Truthfully, I had no more fucks to give. I had failed at the most important task of my life—recovery—and reached the end of my efforts to stay afloat, conform, or achieve some imagined version of normal.

I think we all reach points in life—moments where we either get up or shut down. I stood up, and something happened. I began to burn. Somewhere along the line, I leaped; I said fuck it and started swimming—not to shore but toward an ocean. In my journey, I have reached points like this more than once.

The ocean I swam toward wasn’t safety; it was depth. It wasn’t answers; it was a willingness to question everything. Rage wasn’t just anger—it was fuel. It burned away illusions I had clung to and tore through old patterns, narratives, and fears, clearing a path I didn't even know I needed.

I was the scapegoat in my family of origin, but I’d never fully grasped how that affected me or how that conditioning kept me not just a victim but an unconscious one. I had bought into their story—hook, line, and sinker.

Like in the Taylor Swift song Anti-Hero, I believed, “It’s me; I’m the problem.” My role in the family, combined with the extreme fundamentalist indoctrination I endured in the high-control religion I was born and raised in, locked me into self-loathing and shame.

With my mentor’s encouragement, I returned to the calling I’d felt at six years old: writing my story—a memoir. But that life had always seemed impossible in the world I grew up in. My deeply religious, working-class family believed education only mattered if it led to a respectable, well-paying job—something to move you up a notch or two class-wise. Writing? The artist’s life? That wasn’t godly. It was too fancy-schmancy, too impractical. Who do you think you are?

I was a single teenage mother, a high school dropout, and they were right—or so it seemed. Though I had been writing since I was six, it never crossed my mind that it could become a career or a craft. My knack for writing did prove useful in my accidental foray into radio broadcasting. In my early twenties, as affirmative action opened doors for women, I was hired by a radio station, unintentionally starting a career—an ironic twist, given that the religion I was raised in had forbidden listening to the radio. I left my radio career for a more traditional teaching path when I got sober. An MFA would have made sense, but pursuing creative writing felt like an unattainable dream.

My mentor was convinced that writing was my path. He believed in passion and purpose—and recognized that mine was to write. Under his tutelage, one of my first pieces was a poem titled “Pass the Peas, Motherfucker.” Writing became the catalyst for the change I desperately needed. I began to understand the power of narrative—and that my family had one, too, a narrative that didn’t serve me. The layers ran deep. Suffice it to say, I had to find my own story and rewrite the one they had crafted for me. Writing became my outlet, a channel for what Audre Lorde called Eros—my life force.

And like The Hulk, whose strength grows exponentially toward infinity in proportion to his rage, I needed strength. I had to get angry.

As a female in a misogynist cult and society, I was unfamiliar with anger and rage—except as I experienced them from male abusers or, as a small child, in my mother. Like many women, her rage fell on her children—not often, but enough. My anger had been limited to unconscious, inappropriate expressions. When I got sober at thirty, and with abstinence, I learned to distinguish between aggression and assertion and began identifying and expressing my needs more appropriately.

Still, I realized that my practice of the Twelve Steps, shaped by the religious training I brought with me—primarily unconscious at the time—had contributed to pushing any anger or rage underground. It was a built-in default—when anger arose, it didn’t even register. But Eros is our birthright. I think of Joan of Arc and the unshakable conviction she showed before her accusers.

There are people—in recovery and out—who struggle with anger management. I was not one of them. Instead, I repressed and internalized anger, and it expressed itself as depression, self-sabotage, self-loathing, and neurosis. PTSD responses often manifest as fight, flight, or fawn. Mine were always of the flee or fawn variety.

Over the years, as my emotional intelligence grew, I became more skilled at communicating and asserting myself. But after my relapse, a new spiritual awakening shifted something within me. Rage awakened—not old, suppressed anger, but something new. It brought with it a psychic change, a new consciousness.

Another word for Eros is desire. That desire didn’t emerge as a gentle awakening for me—it arrived with rage.

Rage was an essential stage of my recovery. With that rage, I touched the profound truth of Self and began to uncover my passion and purpose. Only then could my desire and love for life truly bloom.

And bloom, I did. I found my voice and got published for the first time, with work soon appearing in numerous literary magazines. I began interviewing powerful women authors for various outlets and was offered an editorial position at the literary magazine of my dreams—all driven by the vision and purpose my transformation had ignited.

At the same time, I continued working on my memoir project, a cornerstone of my creative journey. After launching my Substack newsletter, my focus shifted. The platform freed my voice from traditional publishing, allowing me to write with immediacy, connect directly with readers, and share work in real time.

In the purifying fire of rage, I transformed self-loathing and doubt into the powerful realization that nothing had ever been wrong with me except what I believed was wrong with me.

“The light comes in the name of the voice,” Joan of Arc beautifully said.

My rage was inseparable from the light that comes in the name of the voice, and with it came couRAGE.

Imagine Joan in armor, on horseback, riding steadily into battle with her flag raised high. Her persistence during her inquisition and her calm in the face of relentless questions meant to condemn her endured. Imagine her lashed to wood, saying at last to them, “Light your fires.”

As a woman, I have been asked to justify my rage, explain it, and make a story of it all my life. But when I reached that holy place, the need to defend myself vanished—instead, a release. I did not have words, nor did I need them. I became them.

How about you?

We’d love for you to share in the comments:

• How has your relationship with anger shifted throughout your sobriety journey?

• How do you distinguish between helpful and unhelpful expressions of anger?

• In what ways have you found strength or healing by making space for anger, rather than suppressing it?

And if you found this article helpful, please tap the little heart. It lets others know there’s something useful here and will help us grow this community.

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Kelly Thompson

’s work has appeared in Memoir Land, BOMB, LARB, Guernica, Proximity, Fatal Flaw, Yoga Journal, and more. She is the founding editor of The Rumpus Original Column: Voices On Addiction and an LCSW. Subscribe or follow her on Substack at:

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