By Toni Bergins
Growing up in my household was a mixed bag. I deeply love and genuinely adore my father. He is exuberant, buzzing about life, highly intelligent and wanting to share his world with us. He also had uncontrollable and unconscious outbursts of anger that were deeply terrifying, confusing, and alarming.
It would be indiscriminate, screaming about a bill arriving in the mail, or something in the living room that fell over. We literally didn’t know what was going to cause a complete and total eruption, and when it came, we were terrified. My sisters and I would run to our separate rooms and hide until it was over.
My response to my father’s anger created a systemic pattern in my body, which I’ve been working on for 30 years. It’s so deeply ingrained because I was born into a family where this behavior was already operational. After many years of my own deep work, I’m certain his behavior came from his own childhood that was filled with intense pressure and emotional neglect.
It’s interesting that the word scared and scarred are so similar. My sisters’ and my nervous systems were scarred by this indiscriminate and abusive anger, leaving us scared and wired for fear, then anger, then shame.
In my family, I only got attention for the emotions that my parents could handle. I learned to compose myself as positive, happy, and controlled. I shut down my other emotions. I’ve learned that my sadness and anger wires were crossed. When I was sad, I acted angry. I didn’t cry very easily, because crying wasn’t the emotion that got attention in my family. It was definitely anger. If we were yelling, we got yelling back. If we were crying, we got the infamous headshake of disappointment from my father who just didn’t know what to do with us. Our mother would comfort us in an attempt to get us back to happy as quickly as possible.
My response to my father’s anger created a systemic pattern in my body. I became an emotional observer, repressing all of my emotions until I couldn’t hold them in any longer, and because an expresser on the dance floor. Nothing has helped me more than processing and releasing my anger both in theater and on the dance floor.
I learned that my sadness and anger wires were crossed. When I was sad, I acted angry. By releasing the energetic charge of my anger through movement, I not only can observe my sensations as they arise, but can make a new choice in that moment to respond rather than react. I discovered that by telling my story on the dance floor through movement I could let myself express my anger through my body using all of me: my pulsations, my elbows, my fists, my face, my knees — everything.
Since then, I’ve been able to sit with and feel all of my emotions, and freely move with an release my teams and my anger. This practice has completely changed me.
Combining a dramatization influenced by music with your movement shapes, you can access all of your emotions and let them move through you. You may find places in your body where you have stored physical or mental reactions. As humans, we’ve all acquired certain activators or triggers, which is just another way of saying strongly conditioned responses to feeling unsafe or traumatized. Please remember that you can always titrate your experience by going slowly, choosing your music, and using your breath for grounding and self-regulation.
In my work of 27 years, one of the most powerful experiences for people is inviting them to tell their story to the dance floor. They express their “story” — whatever is charged with the most bandwidth in their mind-body-emotions — with their body in shapes, pulses, and movement. In this way they release the energetic charge and can be “heard” in a sacred sense. After this expression they can self-regulate with some slow deep breathing and return to their center refreshed, expressed, and relaxed.
The dance floor is waiting and available for your story. You can tell it as many times as you like and in many different ways. Asking yourself, Is this the last time I need to tell this story? will give you the freedom to tell your story until you’re done.
When telling your story to the dance floor, try moving to one of these three emotional pieces of music:
“Don’t Give Up,” by Zoe Wees
“Recovery,” by Rose Betts
“The Arena,” by Lindsey Stirling
Whatever is happening, let it be okay just to have agency to choose and have your own experience. You deserve to feel.
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