Collateral Damage
May 17, 2026
As I was dinging out my file cabinet the other day, I came across a copy of an old email I received from someone that didn't really know me, yet spewed all kinds of sardonic criticisms and accusations. The details aren't important, but I remember years ago, upon first reading that email, I had that reaction where your adrenaline starts pumping super fast and it feels like you can’t catch your breath. Even though they were mere words on my computer screen, I felt ambushed. After the shock wore off, I reread the email and recognized a pattern. This quote immediately came to mind.
Sometimes we are just the collateral damage in someone else's war with themselves.~Lauren Eden
Collateral damage is defined as an injury inflicted on something other than the intended target. The metaphor in the quote above, reframes personal conflict as an internal war. Meaning that, when someone is battling their own ghosts (insecurity, shame, fear, unresolved trauma), the people around them can get wounded as a side effect.
When someone irrationally lashes out, withdraws, sabotages relations or treats us poorly, it often has very little to do with us. We just happened to be there while they were wrestling with something inside themselves. We end up experiencing the explosion without knowing there was even a conflict. This is why it feels so confusing and personal, because from our vantage point, it came out of nowhere.
Why It Happens
- Projection - Inner conflicts get cast outward. The things people attack or criticize others for, are the very things they detest about themselves.
- Displaced anger - Directing internal pain at an external target, rather than facing it.
- Unresolved trauma - Someone who hasn't dealt with their wounds will often spread them, unconsciously recreating familiar dynamics.
- Emotional dysregulation - When someone doesn't know how to manage their emotions, they spill over onto the people around them. This skill deficit is the result of a nervous system that never learned to self-regulate.
All of these share a core function - keeping unbearable, internal pain from being felt or consciously acknowledged. It's a way to protect the psyche from what it can't yet handle. Whether it's projection, anger, trauma or dysregulation, the underlying task is the same:
Don't let me feel what I can't endure feeling.
Why Anger Gets Displaced
Displaced anger is the most common, psychological, defense mechanism, where emotions that feel too detrimental to direct at their true source, get redirected toward a safer, or more available, target. The true source of anger is often off-limits for one of the following reasons:
- Too powerful - a parent, a spouse, a boss, a system that can't be confronted.
- Too painful - admitting the real cause means admitting vulnerability.
- Too gone - the true source has died, left or is no longer reachable.
- Too socially risky - confronting it means losing something that one depends on.
- Too close to identity - when the source is deeply entangled in one's foundational story about who they are, it gets externalized.
Breaking The Pattern
Recognition
Before anything can change, we must acknowledge that we play a part in the quality of our relationships. This sounds simple, but it's not. Because every defense mechanism that caused the pattern will also fight to protect the pattern. The same projection that blames others, will also say, this doesn't apply to me; the same displaced anger that hurt people, will insist they deserved it. This is why so many people never change. Not because they're incapable, but because the system that needs changing, is the same system doing the evaluating. Thus, recognition often comes through the loss of something significant enough to force self-reflection.
The 3 Layers of Change
Most people only focus on the first layer, but real change requires all three, ideally worked from the bottom up.
- Behavior - stopping the outbursts, the coldness, the sarcasm, the control. Without deeper work this is just white-knuckling. The pressure eventually builds and finds another outlet.
- Emotional processing - learning to feel feelings without immediately routing them elsewhere. This is the core work.
- The original wound - understanding where the pattern came from. Not as an excuse, but as a map. Because until it's known what war is being fought, recruiting innocent bystanders into it will continue.
The Inner Work
Most collateral damage happens in the one-second gap between feeling something and doing something about it. Learning to pause in that gap can be difficult at first, but with practice the brain is able to rewire itself, sparking impulse control and reasoning, rather than emotional eruptions.
Name That Feeling
Since many people have a very limited emotional vocabulary, feelings often get compressed into broad terms like anger or frustration. This practice requires getting to the heart of the matter. Not just
I'm angry,but
I'm angry because I feel humiliated.This precision allows the emotion to move toward its real source, instead of sideways onto someone else.
Mourning The Loss
Defense mechanisms like anger are just pain's bodyguards. When pain is not properly grieved, it continues to burn. Going back and mourning the desired childhood that never was; the words never heard; the relationship that fell apart; the lost dreams that will never be, allows these old wounds to fully close.
Taking Responsibility
There is a delicate balance between accountability and shame. Too little accountability, and nothing changes. Too much shame, and it becomes a trigger for more defensive tactics. The goal is to take responsibility for poor choices without thinking,
I'm fundamentally broken and beyond repair.
What I noticed when I read that email again the other day, was that all I felt was peace. The kind of peace that comes from walking hard roads and overcoming the inner-battles along the way. On those roads, I learned what to fight, and what to abandon; what is mine to own, and what is not; what truly matters, and what never will. Peace comes when we can remove the armor we sheathed ourselves in to survive, and free the pain hiding beneath, rather than passing it on.