I was
taught that anger is a bad thing. I’ve had an abusive childhood but
it is hard to feel any anger about it because I feel guilty and afraid about
offending God or blaming my parents. My therapist says I have to feel angry
feelings to get better. How can I show these feelings without freaking out
myself or the therapist so he will tell me to leave?
Anger is always a reaction to some sort of hurt or insult.
But when you look at this reaction more closely, you can see that anger does
not have to be the only reaction to hurt.
The most immediate
and primary response to hurt or insult is a physiological arousal of the
sympathetic nervous system. Your heart rate jumps. Your blood pressure surges.
These things, however, are just immediate self-defensive reactions that prepare
us to take some sort of action to respond to the threat.
Now, to be
technically precise here, anger does not refer to the feeling of
physiological arousal itself;
anger is a particular
response to that arousal that is grounded in hostility and hatred. In essence,
anger is a wish to hurt someone because someone has hurt you. Anger does not
even have to be experienced as the strong emotion of rage; it can just as well
be a thought or a wish to cause enough harm to someone to make that person stop
doing what has been hurting you. In this sense, then, anger is a “bad”
thing because it is an offense against love, for love is a matter of willing
the good of others, not a matter of wishing them harm.
When you are
told to acknowledge your anger in psychotherapy, however, you are not being
told to do something that is morally wrong. Nor are you being encouraged
to “get angry,” such as by yelling, cursing, throwing things, breaking
things, or hitting someone. Instead, you are being told to recognize
something that is already within you, so that you can stop deceiving
yourself about your own reality.
So let’s
see what that “something” might be.
Child
abuse always provokes feelings of hurt and insult in the child, and almost
inevitably that hurt leads to hate and a desire for revenge. In fact, even many
ordinary, non-abusive frustrations of childhood
will provoke feelings of hurt and anger. But because children are not usually
taught to express hostile feelings in any healthy way (and because they
aren’t taught the psychological meaning of
anger, and because
they aren’t taught the psychological meaning of
forgiveness and
reparation), children quickly learn, through
fear and
guilt, to hide
their true feelings from their parents.
The ultimate
psychological problem, however, is that these unexpressed feelings—the
“bad” anger—get pushed into the
unconscious where
they continue to grow in darkness, like mold on the walls. It may be hidden
from conscious sight, and it may be hidden from public view. But it can’t
be hidden from your unconscious.
That is, unconscious
anger, no matter how much you try to deny it, will continue to stain all
your interpersonal relationships. With this anger festering inside of you,
it becomes almost impossible to give
true love to
anyone. Right now, when difficult things happen to you, you fall kersplash!
right into the swamp of childhood anger.
The whole point
of psychotherapy is to learn that there are very specific environmental triggers
for your feelings. Recognize the triggers, first, and then recognize the
emotional “bridge” that goes back to childhood wounds. Learn to
look for the actual events (notice the plural) that have been bothering you
recently. Take each one separately. What are all the
feelings about
that event? Frustration? Helplessness? Abandonment? Betrayal? Fear? (Keep in
mind that anger is the final, hostile reaction to all the hurt
feelings.)
When you have
these emotions all separated out, then you have an idea of what is really
happening to you, apart from the anger. Then you can deal with each event
separately, according to the emotions specific to that event. And it’s
your choice. Do something constructive and creative about each problem
individually, or, well, get angry about everything and stew in it.
Up till now you
have been stewing in it, and that’s why everything seems so oppressive
and foul underneath the surface of a nice social demeanor. If I’m wrong,
then why are you in psychotherapy in the first place? Most likely, everything
in your life is all caught up in a big snarl of anger because of your childhood
hurt.
So, if you go
through this healing process, you will learn to free your hidden anger from
its dark, silent prison. Having thus set it free, and having thus cleansed
yourself of its stains, you will also be free of something else. You will
be free of victimization
and free
of secretly blaming
your parents, because as long as you keep your anger hidden, you remain
emotionally disabled, and as long as you remain emotionally disabled, you
are throwing your disability in your parents’ faces to accuse them of
their faults in the hope of making them say, “I’m sorry.”
Once you acknowledge
the core of your anger, and understand it, and stop unconsciously wishing
harm on your parents to make them say, “I’m sorry,” you can
forgive your parents.
That is, you can say, “Even if they never admit the hurt they caused to me, I
can succeed in life anyway.” Then you will be healed, and then you can turn to
the whole world with true love in your heart.
No
advertising—no sponsor—just the simple truth . . .
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