In the series on recovering from traumatic relationships, this is the third article on grieving and letting go. It is an extension of the last one, which discussed exploring the past to understand our patterns of belief and behavior. This is about how we do it and what we find. Or rather about how I did it, and what I found
Unpacking frozen memories
This week I reached out to someone whose name is part of my history. She was once the lover of a man I regarded as the great love of my life. He was an alcoholic poet who died when I was 23. She is a poet too. I found her web site, read a poem about the first time they made love, and wrote her an e-mail to introduce myself.
She wrote back, asking about his life and how he died. I tried to answer her factually, but found myself drifting over and over into how I felt about it all.
She asked if I ever wrote about him. I told her that, when he died, it was as thought my memory was wiped. I couldn’t remember his voice or the joking banter that was part of our everyday conversations. Except for photos, I couldn’t remember what he looked like. I was so angry, it took me four years to finally grieve him and let him go. At that time, I dreamed about him, and those memories are more vivid than our life together. If I could write anything, it would be only my story. I couldn’t reproduce him in prose. I wish I could.
I wrote a second letter, apologizing for going on and on about my feelings. I tried to tell her more about our life together, getting lost again in telling her about how it was for me as more and more memories returned. Then, within the same day, I wrote her a third letter. Apologizing once again for dumping all this me, me, me on her, a stranger. Telling her it wasn’t my conscious intention when I wrote her, but I was using her to unpack those frozen memories. That’s what she was seeing in these letters.
It wasn’t the first time I’ve done this. Through the years of recovery, I’ve reached out several times to lost people in my history. Always thinking I was just writing to say hi, and then finding memories flooding me. The one the sticks in my mind was an e-mail exchange with my high-school boyfriend, who broke up with me after we begin attending different colleges. It happened at the same time that my mother threw me out, because I’d tried to tell her what my father had done to me and was about to do to my younger sister. My mother accepted my father’s lies about a 13-year-old seducing him. Before this boy broke up with me, I finally told him the truth about me. Then he told me he wanted to date someone else at his new school.
He remembers only the sensible break-up of two teenagers going to schools in different states. But talking to him reopened what I was living through. I was at the edge of adulthood, abandoned by everyone who cared about me. Until then, I survived on an illusion that I could have a “regular life” by pretending it never happened. Now I saw that I was going to pay over and over. I felt how my personality tightened around fear, determination to ward off new monsters, and a hunger for something I called love, but now think was simply safety.
This was one of the foundations of behavior and belief I described in the last article. These events shaped much of what happened later. I didn’t have to think about it intellectually. I felt it. The insight shined like a light on the future of that young adult.
I had to stop talking to him. I was starting to say cruel and provocative things to him, sniping he didn’t deserve. Because in insight, I also saw him as he was, as well as my mother as she was, from the vantage point of the distant future. He too was entering his adulthood, actively shaping his future. How much of his potential could I expect him to sacrifice for a girl who was truly messed up? Would he fight my father? Was there anything fair about expecting him to take care of me, when he never would have gotten involved with me if he’d known the truth? Likewise, my mother, what did I expect from her? She was beaten down, trying to survive with her three younger children, and she was afraid of my father and afraid to leave him. She chose their survival.
I could see how my father’s behavior had damaged me and how my damage burdened other people. It wasn’t my fault or theirs. Whether they took on my burden was a decision about their lives, their resources, what they could handle. I had no choice, but they did. And they had more than me to consider.
I could see how it all came together. Without thinking about the word, I forgave my boyfriend and my mother. Instead of being angry, I mourned for myself, that young girl with no one but herself to depend on. It could have been different. But it was what it was. She had to move on, wounded but with no time or place to heal. She would create a life that reflected the reality of those unhealed wounds. And in understanding this, I forgave myself too. I stopped thinking I was stupid or selfish or incompetent or lazy or anything else. I was someone who lacked the resources that a lot of people took for granted, and I did the best I could.
Inside the myths
The more I crack open the “truths” of my life to discover what is really inside them, the more I come to realize that luck is a big factor. Perhaps that is too light a word for what I mean — the random way that events coalesce at a moment in time.
The great learning of the angry phase is that we are not responsible for what we cannot control. Our traumatic encounters begin with location and timing. If things had been a little different, we would not have been there. Beyond that, we did not want to be hurt or ask for it. Other people have their own histories and structures of behavior and belief. We did not create them and we cannot control them. If they had been different, it would have come out differently.
In the angry phase, we spend time dissecting what happened, finding what to blame on the circumstances and on the people who hurt us. We look outside ourselves for the reasons our good intentions attracted such bad results.
Twenty-five years after this husband died, another man drove me into healing myself. I believe he is a sociopath. In getting over him, one of the things that moved me from anger into grieving and letting go was a jarring realization that there was nothing I could blame on the sociopath that didn’t seem to be equally true of me. He was using me and he didn’t care about my feelings. True, but I also wanted him to be what I wanted him to be. And though my methods of coercion were more socially acceptable as “expressions of love,” their intention was to persuade him or guilt-trip him into giving me what I wanted.
The same was true for lying or obfuscation. Whatever he hid from me, I hid as much from him. I didn’t share what I really felt or wanted. I kept posing as an adult when I had a wounded child’s needs for unconditional love and complete safety. The same was true for being selfishly uncaring about what I wanted. I claimed to be committed to making him happy, but what I really meant by “happy” was him loving me and making a forever commitment. .
If I had accepted what his words and behavior were telling me about his capacity to give me what I wanted, that would have been the time to decide whether I liked or loved him. No blame. No fault. He fit or he didn’t. The truth was he didn’t. I wasn’t lucky that way with him. His life might have been improved by me, but the opposite wasn’t true. This was a frog, not a prince. It was that simple.
Luck turned on its head
As I get older, and keep cracking open the bits of mythology that make up my beliefs about my own life. I sometimes find surprises.
Writing the former lover of my dead husband, my memories opened up. Because I read her poetry and remember a few things he told me, I knew that she wasn’t certain about him and ultimately sent him away. She knew he was an ex-con. She knew he always had a bottle of beer in his hand. She knew he was seductive and smooth. I understand why she passed on him. She had professional stature, life equity, something to lose.
It was different for me. I was barely 20, desperate for a new life. Equally desperate for acceptance, because I felt like a freak. I had a soul-killing clerical job, no money, no clue of what to do next. I had heard things about him.That he had stocked the library shelves in a brand-new prison and was literate, had read everything. He was already a published poet, and people spoke of him with awe and affection.
When I met him, I saw a big handsome man with a background as bad as mine who had made something extraordinary of himself. The booze and drugs, the terminal liver disease, our shared ability to ignore the fact that he was engaged to another woman somehow just added to the mystique. I looked at him and saw a future that was better than anything I could create alone. That night I stayed with him and never left.
I told her how it began. And then I told her about the end. Watching his character and intellect deteriorate as his liver failed, the blessing of his death in a car accident, my angry refusal to grieve him until I had a psychotic break four years later. But, by the time he died, I had a profession. I was a writer. He fed me books, taught me to edit, gave me rules of writing and thinking which serve me to this day. He left this girl, 13 years younger than him, a new future.
That’s the mythology. In the first letter, I wrote “I was lucky.” I meant lucky to find him, but the words stayed with me after I sent the letter. As I told her more in the second letter, I found myself looking at me through her eyes. My myth of a great romance began to shrivel to the story of a vulnerable child-woman and the out-of-control addict she had chosen as a replacement daddy. I would do anything, accept any treatment or circumstance, as long as he would stay alive and keep convincing me that he loved me. Yes, he was charismatic and funny, brilliant and talented, and probably more tolerant of my childish neediness than almost anyone else might have been. But it was a dead-end ride and I wouldn’t get out of it without more damage.
By the time I was writing the third letter, I was not telling her about the times he had hit me. The ways he made me carry his grass, because he was already a three-time loser. How, when we were broke, he wanted me to start whoring. How our open marriage was a license for him, not me. How when he became too bored writing the trash novels that supported us, I did it alone. Or how, at the end, he kept getting into serious accidents with other women, until he eventually died in a car with a woman who barely survived it.
In the myth, these were blips in a mostly charmed life with someone who understood me and who my horrible life into something interesting and glamorous. But now I remembered that the last time he went to prison, it was because of a tip by a woman he was living with, who was supposedly working her way through college as a prostitute. I thought about how people with my background make up the majority of prostitutes. The woman who tipped the police about the suitcase of grass in his trunk had gotten rid of him, like the woman poet, like the wife before her, another beautiful and gifted woman who fell in love with him, corresponding while he was still in prison, but gave up on him after his drinking created grief, chaos and endless expense. Like me, they probably all loved him after he was gone, but they got rid of him, because he was dangerous to them and himself.
Looking back at him, another damaged child with a terrible background, and me, who was hungry and bright but with no boundaries or any idea of what a good relationship looked like, I realized that I was luckier than I knew. Lucky that he wasn’t well and needed someone to take care of him. Lucky that, except for a brief scary period, we made enough money writing that he didn’t go back to dealing or trying to turn me out. Lucky that he was probably more kind than he would have been under other circumstances, and that I had the opportunity to see the best more than the worst of him. Lucky that I came out of it with a way to support myself so I didn’t have to submit to the next “rescuer” that came along.
Like the situation with the man who couldn’t be what I wanted him to be, this was a confluence of circumstances. If I hadn’t been so hungry, I wouldn’t have seen him as I did. Nor loved him and mourned him as the soul mate whose good influence stays with me to this day. If he hadn’t been too broke to escape from Albany, I never would have met him. If either of us had more resources, it never would have happened. But I was lucky. He was what I needed him to be, and I was that for him.
Who is under those sacks of cement?
Writers treasure people’s peculiarities. Stories would be boring without them. But, to write well, it is also necessary to dig under the stereotypes of good and evil. My husband’s story didn’t begin with prison, or the dope-dealing or pimping. I knew a few things about his early life, but in retrospect I know more from just seeing how he responded to trauma. He refused to be broken. It was something I loved about him, but it also spoke of entrenched habits of trying to ignore or bury pain. We had this in common.
We thought we were brave, but I’ve come to think it’s braver to face the truth. Which, in our case, was a dance of the walking wounded. Facing truth can take romance out of a story, but facts may be more nourishing. Truth may lead to spontaneous forgiveness, as I forgave my old boyfriend and my mother. It also can show us that we did the best we could. We see the burdens we are carrying and the innocent and good soul who is trying to bear them.
Blaming ourselves is a function of anger. Realizing that we are not perfect, that we live with handicaps, is part of grieving and letting go. Facing it doesn’t mean we give up trying to heal. And forgiveness has nothing to do, ultimately, with the people we are forgiving. It is a choice of what we want to care about, what burdens we decide not to carry. Being mad at a sociopath for being a sociopath and exploiting or hurting us is like hating the sun for shining and giving us sunburn. Facing reality empowers us to deal with it. Wear sunscreen. Trust conditionally.
The best reason to invest in healing from unresolved trauma is because it is crippling. It blocks our ability to mature through experience. It constricts personality structure with fear-based blinders and self-limiting rules that should only be interim strategies, rough protections until we see through what happened. The more we understand the confluence of events, most of which had nothing to do with us, the more trauma tends to lose its glamour and terror. It becomes simply a variety of human experience that we integrate into our knowledge of the world. When we stop mistaking a snake for a goose, because we now know that snakes exist, life becomes that much easier, safer and richer.
In the next piece, we will talk more about the relationship of fear and forgiveness. Until then
Namaste, the unchangeably innocent spirit in me salutes the unchangeably innocent spirit in you.
Kathy
Thank you, Rune. I did not bring up abuse, but he did and lied in his attempts to sound parental instead of sick. However, People approached me in the elevator stating that it sounded to them like he might be molesting the child. Shrugged shoulders allowed them to think what they want. The truth will come out when and how it is meant to. I will pray for my daughter by heart not birth and be here if ever she needs me. But I can no longer cling to false hope or endanger my future and the lives of my 2 other children getting caught in the drama web spun my her psycho dad.
Congratulations, Joy! I’ve been picking up bits and pieces, but what a great sense of empowerment you must have. I do believe a lot of these creeps hang themselves if you give them enough rope.
Regarding the old boyfriend, it’s nothing to be too romantic about. He is married with two teenage children and living in California. I dumped him on his birthday all those years ago by cheating with someone else. I’m not extremely proud of my behaviors. I don’t even know why he still wants to see me. Although he did not abandon me like Kathleen’s former love, I abandoned him, which is the other side of the same issue. I’m sure I will be digging up the “why’s” when I see him tomorrow, and how I could have been so flippant with men who loved me back then.
Kathleen,
The part of your article that affected me is about realizing how how you couldn’t expect others to take on that burden of your abuse from your father. For me, this touched on the abandonment I always feel with men. The abandonment issue has played out in different ways with different men and even my women friends. Can I ask how you release the anger? Do you just feel the feelings or do you have to do something physical. Mine feels like a pressure that has no release. I’m used to acting it out with a man, but I have deliberately avoided relationships so I don’t take it out on anyone. I don’t even feel comfortable getting angry at my therapist. It’s like a catch 22. I know I deserve to get better. But I feel helpless about how to express the feelings.
star – I went too this ‘workshop’ years ago for expressing emotions etc. expressing anger is difficult for me -= two people would get up in front of the class and scream at each other – release anything and everything.. I looked and felt like a fool – it so foriegn for me to express anger or stand up for myself – I did get very angry with the X many times – it was so unlike me – but I am tired of handing people toilet paper when they get through chittin on me..still it take ALOT to evoke anger from me – I think it was fear that made me express anger at my X – fear and the total obvious lack of respect he showed me. I dont like to feel angry or be angry it takes too much effort and strength – but now I have boundaries and I am not anybodys door mat….
Stargazer,
There are a lot of ways and reasons we forgive. In this particular instance, it was just spontaneous. I saw that neither of them was really capable of helping me. You can’t get blood from a stone.
And this forgiveness comes more than 40 years later. At the time, I was just shell-shocked. I couldn’t even be mad at them. I was floating around in outer space, desperately trying to figure out what I had inside of me that would let me go on. Now, after I’ve gone through all this work to become emotionally self-sufficient, I can look at their situations with some understanding. I loved both these people, and from my perspective today, I’m able to be concerned about them. It’s just a different place.
As far as your anger goes, the one thing I could say is that it’s important to do the work of the angry phase. This is getting perfectly clear that we had losses and that there was an “outside” cause of that loss. So we get good at precisely targeting our angry feelings at the right target. And the “size” of the anger is appropriate to the loss (or in current situations the risk of the loss).
For us people carrying around old damage, we have backlogged anger, and that creates two problems. One of them is that we have a kind of “angry hum” in our heads all the time and it affects how we react to other things. The other is that we still haven’t gotten over the reasons we couldn’t express our appropriate anger at the time. This increases our tendency to censor ourselves, because we know instinctively that our current reactions aren’t totally trustworthy (because of all this additional feeling we carry around) and that makes it even harder to feel safe about communicating our feelings.
So the the big challenge here to is to link loss to cause, and finally acknowledge and release those angry feelings. It sounds logical. But in practice, especially if you have a lot of backlogged emotion, it can be pretty volcanic for you and intimidating for the people around. Some people call this the obnoxious phase, because once we start releasing that old anger, we get into being angry in general. We become prickly, quick to react to any threat or slight, ready to search out and identify the wrongs around us, and generally a warrior for our own sake and others too.
People who have trouble feeling and expressing anger — I was one of them — often have a fear that if they finally let it out they will burn down the world. That won’t happen, but they will probably singe the people around them. To the extent that we can stay conscious enough to warn people that we’re working through some old anger and we’re a little prickly right now, it can help. Other things that will help is having a good therapist who knows what’s going on, and a private outlet, like a journal. Because the task here is to work through a lot of stuff that we haven’t been looking at.
I had a couple of places in my processing that helped to trigger my anger. One was some thinking I did, early on, about whether my ex-S was a “bad guy.” If he was a bad guy, then I could stop worrying about my behavior and worrying about the reasonable causes of his, and just react to all the things he did that caused me pain. I finally realized that it didn’t matter if he was a bad guy or if made mistakes, he caused me pain. And more than that, he stole things from me that were important, really personal things like my self-confidence. And I finally started to get mad at him.
Another trigger for me was in therapy, when my therapist asked me if I was starting to get angry yet. I’d just been through unpacking all the incest memories and getting back in touch with the frightened and disoriented girl I was then. When I looked blankly at her, she said, well, you might think about your losses. Like the fact that you lost your teenage years, and didn’t get to either have the normal experiences or the normal development you were supposed to have. And you might think about the fact that he stole those years when you were the most beautiful that you would ever been, and you would never be that beautiful again. How’s that for a start?
Even then, it wasn’t a sudden flash. I was so well-trained to bury these feelings that it took “side triggers,” people who said thoughtless things to me or situations that I felt were unfair, to finally unleash the rage that was just coming to the surface. But then I was hell on wheels. Rewriting my memories, straightening out anyone who dared to be insensitive to my feelings, planning social revolution to protect other defenseless children (I’m still working on that thread), and generally being a warrior in my past and present. It was great, as anyone who is fully in the angry phase will tell you. I felt in touch with my power and in touch with a powerfully analytic part of my mind for the first time in my life.
All my life, I was really afraid of being an angry or bitter person. I saw the risk in my history, and I didn’t want it “change me.” To allow myself to get in touch with this anger took an incredible leap of faith for me. I had to trust that it was necessary to get well. I had to be willing to go through, to be obnoxious for a while, if that’s what it took, and to have faith that I would come out the other side healthier and stronger, and able to manage and use that anger as a more whole person.
I think that anyone who is struggling with accessing and expressing anger, especially old anger, is dealing with the same issue. Can we give in to it, and not be permanently consumed by it? Will it make us bitter, critical, unpleasant people forever?
I’ve facilitated a number of people through this healing process, and I’ve been through it myself. And I can say that the answer is no, we will not get stuck in it forever. Though it takes a little time to get through it, especially if we have a lot of backlogged anger and we don’t have established skills in processing it. The most important skill that we have to acquire is the realization that we have the right to be angry and the obligation to ourselves to target that anger on the real cause of the loss.
We learn how to use the right words — especially in remembered situations. “I hate what you did to me.” “You had no right.” “You used me selfishly for your own purposes and didn’t care what it did to me.” “I am a separate human being and I deserve respect.” “I did not want this, did not volunteer, and you stole something important from me.” “This is unforgivable and you do not deserve my love or caring about you.”
In current situations — which are different because we still have the ability to change them — we learn how to say that most important word, “no.” As in “I’m not comfortable with this.” “No, I don’t want to do it.” “What you’re doing makes me feel angry.” “I’m not interested.” “I’m not participating in this.” “I need more respect from you if I’m going to continue.” “I’m leaving.” “This is not what I want.” “This isn’t working for me.”
Anger is a negative, defensive, rejecting emotion. Most of our thoughts and communications are about what we don’t want. Later, as we start to emerge from the other side of the angry phase, we start being interested in switching all this to the positive. What we do want. But anger is all about getting clear about what we don’t want and what’s creating the problem. (Or did in the past.)
Back to the question about getting stuck in anger. No we don’t, because the chronic hum of anger, that thing that makes us afraid of our own feelings and that tends to cause us to displace old anger on new things that might not actually warrant that much reaction, goes away as we do the work of assigning righteous anger to those events in our past. That hum of anger is just the noise of our minds reminding us to get around to it.
When we’re not living with that old, waiting anger, our responses are a lot more appropriate to the current situation. And we’re a lot more capable of using the analytical strength and physical energy that anger brings us more effectively.
I used to be one of those people who carried around a lot of resentment, and tended to burst out with whining things that started with “you always” and “I’m tired of.” These days, I feel those little shark bites and decide what’s required to clear up the situation so the biter knows I’m not food. I’m still not the fastest reactor in the world, but but I’m a lot faster than I used to be, and a lot smarter, more measured and more creative handling these moments.
That’s the benefit of using the angry phase to clear old anger. You’re more competent about caring for yourself in life now. And you can get to trusting yourself in new ways because of it, so you can go on to the more fun stuff, like planning and creating a life.
Namaste.
Kathy
And for anyone who wonders if we ever stop being angry, or if we should stop being angry, the answer is no. Of course not.
A few things might change in meaning. Like I’ve come to regard my relationship with the sociopath as an important catalyst to positive life changes. But it doesn’t change the fact that his behavior hurt me. And that I reject that behavior and I reject his thinking, assumptions and ethics as destructive and repulsive. And so I reject him and anyone like him as something I want in my life.
The difference, after we clearly assign anger, is that we resolve the important matter of whether or not we are victims. We might once have been victimized. But experiencing anger does two things. One is establishes clear knowledge about the cause of that victimization, which gives us resources for recognizing that kind of problem again. No guarantees that some other problem won’t slip by us, but we’re smarter about this particular issue than we were before.
The other is that we’re clear that we’re not the bad guy and that we have a right to defend ourselves. Just the process of suppressing anger puts us in the position of being responsible for something about our victimization, and that muddies the water in a lot of ways. The mental construct of “you did this to me and it was bad for me” clears that up.
We continue to feel righteous anger when we think about these things, and in fact, our anger may develop over time. We become more clear about real causes. Like I am very angry about what my father did to me. But I am also clear that he was a victim of his father. And they were both victims of poverty and a background culture of the disempowered, where hatred and violence were expressions of displaced anger. And my righteous anger extends to all of that, and the parts of it than are still within my power to change continue to interest me as positive outlets for my creative energy.
But when we get down to assigning anger where it belongs, particularly in the old situations that have been affecting our emotional systems for a long time, we remove the reason why they are creating so much current noise in our minds. We stop spending so much energy dealing with them and their impact on our lives. And it frees us to look forward, instead of backward. We stop living so defensively — and this old stuff really shapes our lives in that sense. Our relationships, our choices of career and living circumstances can all be subtly affected by fear of being unable to care for ourselves that comes from unprocessed anger.
Processing this anger, looking squarely at the causes of our pain, is like a message to ourselves that we are ready to take care of ourselves. The big anxiety engines in our systems can take a break. And we can move on to thinking about what we really do want. What’s important to us. Beautiful to us. Meaningful to us. And start looking toward furnishing our lives with that stuff.
Knowing that we can and will take care of ourselves, our actions in attracting the good into our lives are more competent and effective. Everyone runs into obstacles and threats on a regular basis. But it all becomes less dramatic for us. We just start to deal with things. We boot things out of the way. Or stop paying attention to what’s not useful. Or get smart about neutralizing or sabotaging anything that resistant to our efforts to get it out of our lives. Because we’ve got better things to do. Our lives are about what we want. What we don’t want is something we want to minimize and exclude as soon as possible.
All of this is on the other side of the angry phase. That time when we need to take care of unfinished emotional business. And it’s something we can look forward to, something that motivates us to do the work.
Later in pursuing the positive outcomes we want, we get to a lot more interesting stuff. Like developing true compassion, the capacity to love without need, peace of mind. But that’s down the road. First we have to let ourselves get mad about what we should be mad about.
Thanks, Henry and Kathleen. Your posts are very helpful. I have done quite a bit of anger work in past years, but find there is still a lot left. I wish I could afford to go to a workshop, but then I don’t even know if I would feel comfortable going off in a workshop. Someone would really have to piss me off. I was talking on the phone to a girlfriend last night and we were sharing stories of our past. When I started telling mine, I could feel myself shaking with anger. I don’t often talk about it to many people, and have been able to talk about it for years without actually connecting to the emotions.
The thing that triggers me recently is the inconsiderateness and rudeness I’ve seen around my complex. Someone at the pool was having a loud personal cell phone conversation which I was forced to listen to, as if I wasn’t even there. This is very common. If several people are doing it at once, the noise blends and becomes background noise. But with one person, it’s obnoxious. I didn’t say anything because I knew with that person, she would not have changed her behavior. Then kids were playing in front of my patio, which is a common area, but which disturbs my privacy. When I went to go in my condo, their mom was having a loud cell phone conversation on the steps which is still audible in my kitchen. I usually confront people when they do these things, but they are so common now with all the renters infiltrating the complex and so commonly accepted in our society that I am regarded as the bitch of the neighborhood. No one else complains about kids playing or cell phones or loud conversations in the hallways or loud pool parties at night. I am pretty much the only one. When I say something, I sometimes get the finger or the entitlement response of “so what”. This seems to be the attitude of a lot of young people–very entitled. I cannot tell you how it pisses me off.
I hope once I am less angry, I can be more accepting of this self-centered trend in our society. I don’t think I’ll ever get used to it though. I don’t own a cell phone (I think they’re obnoxious) and when I’m talking to someone, I give them my undivided attention.
Anyway, I am walking around shaking with all this volcanic anger coming up and not really knowing how to let it out. I’ve downgraded therapy to every other week for financial reasons. The best I can do is to breathe and try to feel it. I soak in the bathtub with epsom salts and just feel anger and pain pouring out of me, but it doesn’t seem to make much of a dent. I know this is a necessary stage of getting through depression. But are you sure it will go away? I have alienated so many people already. I absolutely cannot go off on people at work, so I usually just stuff the anger down when I’m there and go into depression.
Tomorrow I’m meeting with that old bf from the past. I hope I can at least hold it together and have a pleasant visit without finding some reason to go off on him too. I’m considering canceling the visit, but I’m tired of locking myself away due to depression.
And the thing that really pisses me off is that it all came up just as I was thinking about going back to massage school, which would be such a great benefit to my career. Once again, I feel I have to put my life on hold to deal with all this bullshit from my childhood. I cannot tell you how angry I am about this.
Thanks for letting me vent.
Stargazer:
Was thinking of you when I saw you post. Your successful evening the score with your S motivated me into taking action beyond my using the tax code to settle scores with mine. I recently sent a judgment creditor of S’s after him. I can’t tell you how “appreciative” this lawyer was. As for me, I feel “satisfied.” And I am sure my satisfaction will only increase as I sent the othe 15 judgment creditors after S.
But, I realize all this is a result of the volcanic anger I feel — at S, at my abusive parents, etc. I am trying to find some way to diffuse the anger. Last week I started suffering a whopping case of heart burn. I don’t see the gastroentologist until next week. Meanwhile, I am swiggning Maalox like a drunk with a bottle of Jim Beam. I know all the stress of the last year — S, losing my job, my mother’s illness have probably given me acid-reflux disease. And I know the anger I feel has fed into it. I thought I was past my anger at the S. But, I now see that I am apparently not past it. I know I’d feel even worse if I shoved the anger down deep. So, at the moment I am feeling it, but hoping I can find a way past it.
Matt,
That’s fantastic that you are taking action against your S. As an attorney, you are in a unique position to nail him. Good for you!!!! I also I wondered when I read about you taking care of your sick sick mom, if that would trigger any resentment about your past too. I understand about anger being shoved down so deeply. I know exactly how this feels. My physical symptoms are a tightening in my neck area and in my butt (where all the brutal beatings occurred). I get burning pain in my butt at times. I have released some of it while doing an intensive meditation retreat many years ago. It is upsetting that there is still so much more. Doesn’t it even make you angry that you have all these physical symptoms? I’m angry about ever part of it!
I pray we will all get through this together. I will keep you in mind while I’m doing my anger work with hopes that you are getting through it too.