I was raised as a young girl to be a good Methodist. Anger was not an acceptable emotion in my religion or in my family. Neither my father nor my mother expressed healthy anger. Instead, my mother grew resentful from over-giving and her resentment turned sour as passive aggressive pouting and stomping without clear communication. My father would suck it up, suck it up, suck it up, and then, unexpectedly and without warning, he would explode with harsh, terrifying rage. Neither of them were ever violent with us, but nobody ever modeled or tolerated healthy anger. When I expressed appropriate anger as a child, anger that should have protected me, it got shut down. I vividly remember having access to deep rage when I was tiny, but anger did not work to keep me emotionally or physically safe as a toddler, so by the time I was 4 years old, my anger mechanisms had been effectively disabled. I had been successfully domesticated, silenced into submission and ready to be conditioned into a docile, people-pleasing, compliant good Christian girl who would be ripe for tolerating dehumanizing behavior later in life.