You're probably right, turquoisesea. I don't get angry very often. I'm not entirely sure why, but I'm generally a soft-spoken person. I'm not argumentative (usually) or remotely aggressive. I prefer to let everyone else walk all over me than put up a fight or (heaven forbid!) offend someone, and I think that's usually because I either don't have the energy, or I feel too insignificant to bother. I think I'm impatient on the inside, but on the outside I prefer to just grin and bear it. It has a lot to do with my family and some of my friendships over the years, I think. My counsellor is helping me see that anger is as valid an emotion as any of the others, and sometimes it takes getting angry to provoke real change in your life. To that end, I think she's right, because the last few times I've really snapped because I couldn't handle the abuse/neglect/being taken for granted/stress/about a billion other things anymore, it did provoke some change in that I empowered myself to stand up to someone I never thought I could. Anger has made me feel guilty almost my whole life, so I've suppressed it as a "bad" feeling, but she's helping me to feel less guilty and to be more rational about what caused the anger in the first place. I have another appointment with her on Tuesday, so I'm hoping we can look at this a little more, now that I've started acknowledging the feelings I preferred to suppress before.

The one thing I do know is that I need to take care of this, now. Because if I let the anger attack me like it has been instead of acknowledging my feelings/situation and doing something about them, it's eventually going to wear me down completely. I used to feel like I was always wearing a mask around the rest of the world, hiding from them and myself all the feelings I thought were "inappropriate" or "wrong" or inherently "bad" somehow. But the depression has taken away that mask for the most part now, so that I don't have the strength to hide my feelings anymore and I have to meet them -- and their triggers -- head on. Hopefully I'll be able to sort everything out so I don't have too many really angry days in the future.

Thanks for your support.