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dalila · Mar 16, 2007, 04:17 AM

<font color="green">Thank you all for the thought you put into this. It seems that anger is complicated for me. I am not sure how to answer everyone so I will give a bit of history and explanation and hope it is clearer.

It is possible that my mother has bipolar – she was loving and connected one day and the next abusive and dismissive, distant. During my teen years, she ‘trained’ me to not be angry. Even a facial expression that was off would bring her ire down on me. More than once I had to get up off the floor cos she had ‘wiped’ that smirk or scowl off my face with a blow that would knock me down. After a while, I stopped feeling anger, I felt fear and shame and anxiety but not anger. When I got away from her I had already been warped – the only person I could be angry with was me. Even that became warped as time passed so that all I felt anxious or pressured and used SI to handle it.

I have started trying to release the huge stockpile of anger I have buried inside but it scares me and I feel ashamed of that emotion. Feeling anger at some of the people who abused me is new and exciting. So far, I have been able to feel real anger at three of them, leaving my mother to work with, she has been the hardest. She taught me to fear her when I was a baby and I learned my lesson quite well. I can sit there and talk about her kicking me across the kitchen with sympathy for how ill she was at that time. I could talk about my godparents’ perversity with only shame that it had happened to me. I used to say my stepfather tried to seduce me no anger, only shame that I ‘allowed’ it to happen.

I have worked so hard to release the anger so deeply buried inside that each time it happened I rejoiced. I once wrote a long letter to my mother saying – I am angry with you because… I sat in therapy, read it to therapist, and felt nothing. My head knows I have a right to be angry about those things but my soul [?] won’t accept it. I have finally stopped turning most of my anger against myself and have ‘felt’ angry at the abusers and the abuse.

My father was everything my mother was not, stable loving consistent and very attached to me in healthy ways. It is largely due to him that I am as stable as I was before therapy and now therapy has helped with much of the other issues. Sadly, he was in the navy and would be gone half of most years. I cannot remember ever being angry with or at him. In some ways, I seem to feel the same about my therapist. How can I be angry when she is doing her best to help me? How can I feel mad when I love her so much?

I don’t think she is out to deliberately invoke anger in me but sometimes I will be working hard on an issue and she will ask if I am angry with her for saying that. Or I become confused, and again she asks if I am angry. She has said that I get a flat effect and she cannot interpret what it means at times. One day she was pushing hard against the shame issue and she got off to an area that didn’t apply. I know I became frustrated. She then talked about it being ok to be angry with her. She has brought that up a few times but I just don’t feel anger with/at her. I dunno I feel confused. Thinking about becoming angry with my therapist is scary, thinking about showing I was mad at her invokes panic. I have told her this and the time I became upset with the ‘other people’ who were angry with her, I told her and we worked some on it. I want to get well and be done with therapy so I work as hard [sometimes she has said too hard] as I can.
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