In the Shadow of the Rage Monster
A memoir by Wynter Snow, survivor of a toxic childhood.
© 2025 Wynter Snow. All rights reserved.
Excerpt (Introduction)
Throughout my life, whenever I met people who knew my father, they always told me what a wonderful man Bill was. When I was a child, I immediately thought: You don’t live with him. You don’t know what he’s like behind closed doors.
Of course I never said that. There was no point. And with them, with people outside the family, he was a wonderful man. He was kind, generous, compassionate, an understanding listener with wide ranging curiosities and knowledge. He was often those things inside the family as well. But behind closed doors, he was also a Rage Monster.
Roughly twice a week, something would set him off. He would stomp and yell. I can hear him in my mind’s ear to this day. God Damn Son-of-a Bitch!
Often, it was something going wrong on a household carpentry or repair project he was engaged in. But sometimes it would be something I’d done, and the burst of rage was directed at me.
His face went red and blotchy. His fists clenched. His shoulders rose and widened. His eyes got wide and glaring. He trembled with the intensity of his anger. His words blasted at me with the ferocity of a tornado.
In those moments, I froze. My eyes stayed glued on him, unable to look away. My body shrank into itself, as if I could somehow disappear inside my skin. I was afraid he would lose control and hit me. I was afraid the damage might be bad—so bad that he might kill me.
The worst part was that I never knew when he might erupt in rage. Those moments were completely unpredictable. Whenever Bill was home, living with him was like tiptoeing through a mine field. Even today, sixty years after leaving home and twelve years after his death, in writing these words I start to tremble.
It’s not like I haven’t done therapy. I have. Lots of it at different times. Starting in my late twenties, whole bunches in my thirties, sporadically during my forties, fifties and sixties—and most recently during my seventies. I’ve gained a lot. “Made progress” as the saying goes. Significant, big, even huge progress. Yet a few deep-seated wounds persisted throughout most of my adult life.
There’s a great video on the web of folks coming to the edge of a ten meter (30 feet) high diving platform. They look down, then debate with themselves about whether to jump into the water. Look up “Ten Meter Tower” if you want to see roughly ten minutes of what it looks like when your limbic brain is screaming Danger Danger Danger! and you’re trying to persuade yourself to jump anyway.
Many of these people do jump after much hesitation. But some go back down the ladder to the ground.
Going back down the ladder has been the story of my life. My body and brain and self go into shut-down mode—called freezing in the fight-flight-freeze-fawn response to danger. My limbic brain takes over my muscles and refuses to do something that other aspects of my Self want to do.
Back in the fifties when I was growing up, child abuse meant either sexual abuse or physical violence, getting hit. Yelling didn’t count. I never understood back then that what I experienced—and endured—was actually abuse.
Ironically, I thought I was lucky that my father did stop himself from hitting me. I thought he had succeeded in cutting the chain. His own father had beaten him with a belt until his arm was so tired he couldn’t lift it anymore. He’d also belittled my dad and been abusive in other ways.
This book is about my journey. It’s about surviving the Rage Monster during my childhood, the price I paid during my adulthood, and my ventures in healing my inner child. It seeks to answer the question: How can we heal from the wounds of a toxic childhood?
- Part One (Seeds) focuses on my childhood and the specific traumas that I endured. It shows my strategies for coping with them and the impact these had on me, both at the time and later in my life.
- Part Two (Struggles) covers my adulthood from the time I left for college until my mom’s death fifty-three years later. In particular, I struggled to create the kind of life I wanted in both romance and career, yet kept falling short.
- Part Three (Solutions) describes my healing journey, starting with a mini-fiasco in high school. Soon after my mom’s death, I learned why my problems were so persistent, despite a lot of therapy along the way. Details include recent deep changes I’ve made to my limbic brain’s reactions, and how these transformations were possible.
Trauma changes the brain. In both adults and children. Neuroscience is beginning to show exactly how trauma impacts the brain. These changes show why it can be so difficult to heal and why trauma survivors often overreact to events that others find quite ordinary.
My situation was not the worst instance of abuse. I’ve read harrowing examples of other people’s experiences. Mine was more of a middle-range. But whenever a child is so scared that they constantly feel like they are walking on eggshells in a parent’s presence, that experience constitutes abuse. A child’s strategies for surviving this abuse, while useful in the short term, often wreaks havoc on their adult life.
If my experience had been worse, I probably would have left the minute I was old enough and never looked back. Instead, I returned at several key moments. This book explains why I did so—and the impact that had on my adult life.
Bottom line: We can recover from the constraints we placed on our lives, constraints born in the survival strategies we adopted all those years ago.
I’m writing this book for people who have endured similar traumas as children and suffered similar obstacles as adults. My hope is that you will gain useful insights from my experiences—and put them to use in your own healing journey.

A memoir by Wynter Snow, survivor of a toxic childhood.
© 2025 Wynter Snow. All rights reserved.

Excerpt (Introduction)
Throughout my life, whenever I met people who knew my father, they always told me what a wonderful man Bill was. When I was a child, I immediately thought: You don’t live with him. You don’t know what he’s like behind closed doors.
Of course I never said that. There was no point. And with them, with people outside the family, he was a wonderful man. He was kind, generous, compassionate, an understanding listener with wide ranging curiosities and knowledge. He was often those things inside the family as well. But behind closed doors, he was also a Rage Monster.
Roughly twice a week, something would set him off. He would stomp and yell. I can hear him in my mind’s ear to this day. God Damn Son-of-a Bitch!
Often, it was something going wrong on a household carpentry or repair project he was engaged in. But sometimes it would be something I’d done, and the burst of rage was directed at me.
His face went red and blotchy. His fists clenched. His shoulders rose and widened. His eyes got wide and glaring. He trembled with the intensity of his anger. His words blasted at me with the ferocity of a tornado.
In those moments, I froze. My eyes stayed glued on him, unable to look away. My body shrank into itself, as if I could somehow disappear inside my skin. I was afraid he would lose control and hit me. I was afraid the damage might be bad—so bad that he might kill me.
The worst part was that I never knew when he might erupt in rage. Those moments were completely unpredictable. Whenever Bill was home, living with him was like tiptoeing through a mine field. Even today, sixty years after leaving home and twelve years after his death, in writing these words I start to tremble.
It’s not like I haven’t done therapy. I have. Lots of it at different times. Starting in my late twenties, whole bunches in my thirties, sporadically during my forties, fifties and sixties—and most recently during my seventies. I’ve gained a lot. “Made progress” as the saying goes. Significant, big, even huge progress. Yet a few deep-seated wounds persisted throughout most of my adult life.
There’s a great video on the web of folks coming to the edge of a ten meter (30 feet) high diving platform. They look down, then debate with themselves about whether to jump into the water. Look up “Ten Meter Tower” if you want to see roughly ten minutes of what it looks like when your limbic brain is screaming Danger Danger Danger! and you’re trying to persuade yourself to jump anyway.
Many of these people do jump after much hesitation. But some go back down the ladder to the ground.
Going back down the ladder has been the story of my life. My body and brain and self go into shut-down mode—called freezing in the fight-flight-freeze-fawn response to danger. My limbic brain takes over my muscles and refuses to do something that other aspects of my Self want to do.
Back in the fifties when I was growing up, child abuse meant either sexual abuse or physical violence, getting hit. Yelling didn’t count. I never understood back then that what I experienced—and endured—was actually abuse.
Ironically, I thought I was lucky that my father did stop himself from hitting me. I thought he had succeeded in cutting the chain. His own father had beaten him with a belt until his arm was so tired he couldn’t lift it anymore. He’d also belittled my dad and been abusive in other ways.
This book is about my journey. It’s about surviving the Rage Monster during my childhood, the price I paid during my adulthood, and my ventures in healing my inner child. It seeks to answer the question: How can we heal from the wounds of a toxic childhood?
- Part One (Seeds) focuses on my childhood and the specific traumas that I endured. It shows my strategies for coping with them and the impact these had on me, both at the time and later in my life.
- Part Two (Struggles) covers my adulthood from the time I left for college until my mom’s death fifty-three years later. In particular, I struggled to create the kind of life I wanted in both romance and career, yet kept falling short.
- Part Three (Solutions) describes my healing journey, starting with a mini-fiasco in high school. Soon after my mom’s death, I learned why my problems were so persistent, despite a lot of therapy along the way. Details include recent deep changes I’ve made to my limbic brain’s reactions, and how these transformations were possible.
Trauma changes the brain. In both adults and children. Neuroscience is beginning to show exactly how trauma impacts the brain. These changes show why it can be so difficult to heal and why trauma survivors often overreact to events that others find quite ordinary.
My situation was not the worst instance of abuse. I’ve read harrowing examples of other people’s experiences. Mine was more of a middle-range. But whenever a child is so scared that they constantly feel like they are walking on eggshells in a parent’s presence, that experience constitutes abuse. A child’s strategies for surviving this abuse, while useful in the short term, often wreaks havoc on their adult life.
If my experience had been worse, I probably would have left the minute I was old enough and never looked back. Instead, I returned at several key moments. This book explains why I did so—and the impact that had on my adult life.
Bottom line: We can recover from the constraints we placed on our lives, constraints born in the survival strategies we adopted all those years ago.
I’m writing this book for people who have endured similar traumas as children and suffered similar obstacles as adults. My hope is that you will gain useful insights from my experiences—and put them to use in your own healing journey.