The Fake Bug Test: How a Mother Began to Let Go of Anger

In brief

A mother of three from eastern Kentucky lived by one rule: if anyone wronged her, she wronged them worse. After a family fight left her in a Texas homeless shelter, a library video led her to Falun Gong — and a prank at a gas station showed her how to begin to let go of anger.

Getting even

Some of us learned early that the only way to stop being hurt is to hurt back harder. If that’s how you’ve had to live, you’ll understand her.

“If anyone wronged me, I would surely wrong them much worse to get back at them,” she writes. “I had many enemies.”

She grew up in eastern Kentucky. Her family split apart, and her parents divorced. She left school after ninth grade, she says, “due to a rebellious and angry temperament.” For years she blamed her parents for everything that went wrong, and lost herself in self-pity.

By her late twenties she had three children and a strained family life. She was often in hospital with bronchitis and pneumonia. “I was depressed and lost,” she remembers.

“I was not an ideal mother,” she writes. “I always lost my temper and always thought of myself first before anyone else.” Even in her marriage, she answered hurt with hurt, and the marriage never fully recovered.

All her life she had been searching — the Bible as a child, a mystical society for many years, a book on Zen she put down in frustration. None of it, she felt, taught her how to be a better person.

In 2000 the family moved to Texas to live with her mother, a relationship that had always been rocky. They found good jobs, moved out — and then everyone was laid off, and they moved back in. Terrible fights followed.

One day she climbed the highest hill near Canyon Lake and sat there. It was, she writes, “a silent prayer to the universe for a way to cultivate back.” She wanted to be moral. She didn’t know where to start.

A few days later, a big argument ended with her mother throwing them all out. With nowhere else to go, the family went to a homeless shelter.

If you’ve ever hit the point where there’s nowhere left to fall, you know how that can feel like the end — and sometimes, strangely, like a beginning.

A video at the library

“It was the best thing that ever happened to me,” she writes about the shelter.

While her husband went to his new job, she and the children walked to the local public library. They borrowed videos, books and CDs. On her second visit, she found a video called The True Story of Falun Gong. She had never heard of it, but she felt an urgency to watch it.

“I can remember putting it into the recorder and pressing ‘Play’ and seeing the Falun symbol and hearing the music,” she writes. “In that single instant [I] knew I had found what I had been searching for all of my life.”

The next day she went back to the library to use the computer. She downloaded each of the exercises onto a disk, took it back to the shelter, and practiced the movements there. She found a group practice site nearby, met several practitioners, bought a copy of Zhuan Falun, and read it all in one day.

“I must forbear”

But reading about forbearance and living it were two different things. She found that out at a gas station.

The family was on its way to look at a house, a chance to leave the shelter. They stopped for gas and drinks. As she walked back to the car, a girl she’d never met came up and asked her to open her hand.

She did. The girl dropped a huge bug into it. She screamed, and the girl laughed and went into the store. On the sidewalk, she looked at the bug: a fake, a trick toy.

She was furious.

Sitting in the car, waiting for her husband and the children, she tried to hold on to what she had just read. “I must forbear,” she told herself. “Isn’t this the kind of thing [Mr. Li] talks about in the book?”

But she was still so angry. How dare that girl do that to her? As they drove away, she yelled at her.

“I failed my first big test,” she writes. “I felt very bad afterward.”

If you’ve ever reacted the old way and felt sick about it afterward, maybe that bad feeling isn’t failure. Maybe it’s the first sign that something in you has already started to change.

For a woman who once made sure anyone who wronged her paid for it twice over, feeling bad afterward was something new.

A week later, the family moved into that house. She kept going to group practice and kept studying the teachings of Falun Dafa, founded by Mr. Li Hongzhi. Her lungs, she says, got better too.

She is still practicing, she wrote when she told this story. “Falun Dafa totally changed my life, and I am a different person now,” she writes.

The angry teenager who left school, the woman with many enemies, the mother on a hill asking the universe for a way back — when she looks back now, she says it simply:

“I can hardly believe the person I used to be.”

What this story may hold for you

• Her anger had a history: a family that split apart, years of blame, a sense that getting even was the only protection. Perhaps yours has a history too, and deserves understanding before judgment.
• The bottom — a homeless shelter — turned out to be where things turned. You might hold open the possibility that your hardest place isn’t the end of your story.
• She yelled at the girl anyway. The change wasn’t that she never reacted; it was that she felt bad afterward and kept going.
• Letting go of anger, in her story, began with one test failed and noticed. You don’t have to pass the first one.
• A miracle might be the body healing, or the heart letting go, or finding meaning again — or any mix of these.

A free guide for letting go of what still burns

If this story touched something in you, there are two more like it.

Our free guide, Letting Go of What Still Burns, gathers three true stories of people who were caught in anger and resentment — and what slowly changed for them — with a gentle page on how to begin.

It’s free. One email with the guide, then a few short letters. Unsubscribe any time.

Questions readers ask

Q: How do I let go of anger when I always want to get even?

She lived by revenge — “if anyone wronged me, I would surely wrong them much worse.” Her change didn’t start with getting it right. It started with yelling at a stranger anyway, feeling bad about it, and deciding to keep practicing forbearance.

Q: How can I stop holding grudges against my family?

She had blamed her parents for years and fought hard with her mother and husband. Her story doesn’t tell us every step, but she says Falun Dafa “totally changed my life,” and that she can “hardly believe the person I used to be.”

Q: Where does this story come from?

From “I Can Hardly Believe the Person I Used To Be,” chapter 23 of the eBook Hearts and Minds Uplifted, first published on Clearwisdom.net (now en.minghui.org). The author, a Western practitioner in the U.S., is not named in the book. The quotes are her own words.

A note on health

These stories share personal experiences and inner journeys. They cannot replace professional psychological or medical help, and please don’t stop or change any treatment because of a story. If you are in serious distress or crisis, please reach out to a qualified local counselor, doctor or crisis line.