[dalila]

<font color="green">I am not really sure how to begin this but here goes. I think my therapist may be trying to get me angry with her. I have problems being angry – I turn it on myself or I become frightened by the feeling. I have recently begun to feel anger at the right persons for the right reasons, but I have never been angry with my therapist. Sometimes when she is pushing hard she will say, “It is ok to be angry with your therapist or does that make you angry? Lots of people have been angry with me and I can handle it.” My reaction was to get upset with ‘those people’ who had been angry with her. I wanted to protect her.

I have felt Scared to death of her or terrified that she is going to abandon me once she really gets to know me, but not mad at her or her words. Even when I have felt misunderstood or pressured there has been no anger. I see her in 5 days and I have not really been able to work much on the ‘homework’ she gave last time. I am so afraid she is going to get tired of my inability to live what I have learned and internalized. I am tired of my body and brain digging up the past – we have worked on it and worked on it. I feel like she is trying to push me out the door and I just keep scrabbling backwards away from it.

Sometimes I wonder if there is something that I haven’t found that needs to be pulled out and worked on, or why would I cling so tightly to her? Why else would the ideal of being angry with her make me feel sick and scared? Do I need to get angry at my therapist to heal? Is it part of the healing process?
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[InACorner]

anger is a very stong emotion to deal with. Sometimes when a person gives you even a remote possibiltiy of security your afraid to push it away...anger in anyones minds is the number one way to push someone away...with anger your courage is built up your activity level...when people are angry sometimes they dont remember or dont mean what they say..its the anger that fuels alot of stuff...so you block it away feeling like you can never get angry at the person who gave you security..you feel it would be unworthy to them if you showed any ungratefulness when in fact the person doesnt care if you ever get mad at them...they do you a favor of security because they care about you..it doesnt make them perfect..it doesnt mean that you are forever in debt to them...you are still human and so are they...both of you know that...and I think maybe your therapist is trying to get you to realize you can show anger to her..that its ok ..its still SAFE to show her anger...if you can trust her for security you can trust her with anger...she wants to see how you deal with your anger..she wants to see those emotions because she knows you have them. It is crucial for a therapist to see every emotion in order to help their patient...and anger is in everyone...im glad you learned how to redirect your anger..it seems you are doing wonderfully..but i too also felt no anger to those who showed love me im going through that right now..my abusive parents showed me a tiny bit of love and i feel i have to be the perfect child otherwise i feel guilty..even though i have the right to be angry at them...i have the right to say im angry with them...just like you..you have the right to be angry for an understandable reason...im sorry i wrote an essay and im sorry if i made no sense whatsoever and im sorry if i didnt get your post and wrote about something completely different..but if i helped im glad!! Good luck keep us posted! love, Inny

I think I've always thought Anger must be an action. Unless I physically attack someone or verbally assualt them then I haven't reached my anger. Maybe you are doing exactly what you supposed to be doing right now and talking your anger!. Anger hasn't always got to be some big act. Next time T asks yoiu if your feeling angry, maybe just reply "yes I feel angry" and see where that takes you. Sometimes naming it, brings it up!

[Smilie]

Perhaps more than anything your therapists wants you to release some anger in a safe place where you will not be judged.Not all anger is bad. Anger can also become an action for change that was very much needed to move onto the next level in our healing.Having our anger accepted and shared and understood buy someone important to us helps us not to be so afraid of our angry feelings. These feelings need to be discharged out of the body as do all emotions for us to remain as a healthier person.A lot of times when we find out what triggered the anger we find the root of our pain.

Smilie

[lauren_helene]

I'm not sure if she "wants" to make you angry but if she does then it's for a good reason?

The more I read on here about other T's the more I think I should change mine. He doesn't explain stuff like this to me which creates more uncertainty and needy reactions.

[sunrise]

dalilah, I really related to what you wrote and have thought a lot of that myself (although my T does not try to make me angry with him). I have brought up anger before in session and my inability to have it. My T told me that anger is a secondary emotion, and often masks the primary emotion, such as hurt or sadness. I am a person who just feels the hurt or sadness and doesn't react to those emotions with anger. I still have a lot of work to do with anger. I think maybe somewhere inside me I am carrying some anger, but it is a very alien feeling to me and I shy away from it in myself and others. Like if someone gets angry at me, I just don't understand why they react that way (I feel embarrassed for them), and I tend to just remove myself from the situation. I would like to be able to handle other people's anger better. My T doesn't seem too worried that I don't get angry but instead experience the hurt, sadness, etc. I think with "angry" people he has to work to get them to understand their anger as an expression of a primary emotion such as hurt. We don't have to do that. We have lots of other problems to deal with, so this has not been a pressing issue. Should it be? Sometimes I just feel so clueless. I read on this board sometimes that people get angry at their T's for being late, or taking a phone call during session, or cutting session short by a few minutes. I just would never react that way. I feel like, hey, give the guy a break, so he's a few minutes late, I've certainly had that happen to me in life before. It just seems no big deal to me. I'm not trying to minimize other people's reactions of anger to these incidents, but just puzzling at my own lack of what seems to be a common reaction...

dalilah, maybe you can ask your T outright if she is trying to get you to be angry. Sometimes knowing what they are up to can really help.

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The more I read on here about other T's the more I think I should change mine. He doesn't explain stuff like this to me which creates more uncertainty and needy reactions.

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almedafan, maybe if you ask your T, he will explain things more?

[lauren_helene]

That is a good point, I ask but then let him give me indirect or unclear answers...I should push more.

[Perna]

I think anger is the "action" behind the hurt or fear. If you just dissolve in a puddle when you're hurt, you can't recover? Same thing if you are chased by a bully. Turning around in your dreams and "confronting" the monster is an act of anger. You are in effect saying, "Hey, you should not be chasing me and I'm not going to put up with it anymore. Stop it!"

A therapist that often falls asleep or is late needs confronting in the same way. One isn't paying for them to not have their own act together :-) I saw my T a total of 18 years and in year 17-18 she lost my check (I paid out-of-pocket) not once, not twice, but 4-5 times in about a six month period. It got very complicated because I didn't "want" to be angry either but. . .

Anger just "is." It's not something some people have and some do not, it's an emotion and the secondaryness just helps explain it a bit, doesn't make it somehow less important. Dalila, I would say that "Yes," your therapist would like you to experience your anger. There is no "at" it's a self-respecting sort of action that protects you from being either a puddle or a doormat; your therapist doesn't get anything out of it one way or the other (other than knowing you can "take care" of yourself). Anger is a tool. Whether someone hits you or crosses your boundary; you have to let them know that is not acceptable. That's anger. How you "express" it is different. When someone hits you you don't have to hit them back but you do have to stop them from hitting you again. People who are mugged or hurt by others often create special programs (MADD, Mothers Against Drunk Driving, for example) and that creation is a creative expression of anger.

I think most people though get the emotion mixed up with its expression. When someone cries it doesn't upset or startle anyone to hear that person is sad. But when somone says they're angry, because they were raised with shouting or violence they might be anxious and worried about violence. It's a Pavlov's connection though and the person feeling the anger doesn't have anything to do with how they "have to" express it. That's training/background/education/personality.

I was/am afraid of anger, especially other people's until my boss was wrong one day and was yelling at me, thinking he was right :-) I stood my ground because a liar I am not and my sense of righteousness :-) was enough greater than my fear so I kept repeating the truth as I knew it and eventually he got it and collapsed in a puddle of abject apologies :-) It was a wonderful feeling. I didn't die and everything turned out well.

[Talulah]

wow dalila I've asked myself these same questions. T only made me angry once in her presence yet I can go away from therapy and become angry, but when I see her am unable to tell her.....

You've made some very valid points in your original post and you've asked some interesting and key questions:

............."My reaction was to get upset with ‘those people’ who had been angry with her. I wanted to protect her."............

Have you thought, or could you admit this to her? Her answer may surprise you.

..........................."I have felt Scared to death of her or terrified that she is going to abandon me once she really gets to know me, but not mad at her or her words. Even when I have felt misunderstood or pressured there has been no anger. I see her in 5 days and I have not really been able to work much on the ‘homework’ she gave last time. I am so afraid she is going to get tired of my inability to live what I have learned and internalized. I am tired of my body and brain digging up the past – we have worked on it and worked on it. I feel like she is trying to push me out the door and I just keep scrabbling backwards away from it."...................

I felt this same way.....I was "stuck" and so was my t. She nevered wanted me to leave and I bet your doesn't either. She probably doesn't know "how" to get to you and you may be leaving very little room for her to move around. These sentiments clearly show to me that you still need eachother. Can you write this or tell her what you've just said here? Maybe print off your post....I think it's a necessity for you if she needs to know where your head is at. Then, she can help you incorporate what you're unable to utilize. I've been going two years and have just hit this wall and have just said, what you said above. Try talking and explaining this. It will help immensly.

(((((((((((((((((good luck)))))))))))))))))

[Crystal88]

I don't know about your therapist but my counselor has admitted that she sometimes trys to make me mad on purpose. She says thats what a councelors job is - making people face their problems and feelings and when she notices that I am avoiding something thats what she targets and sometimes her target is agner especially if she sees I am not expressing anger even though I say Im mad. She does that because I have what she calls lack of affect - cant express my emotions and her making me mad in therapy is supposed to break down that lack of affect wall by showing me that its ok to get angry in appropiate ways.

All of the primary emotions can be either primary or secondary emotional responses.

A primary emotional response (roughly) is modular. To explain modularity I'll start with an analogy to another process that is modular: Visual perception.

Take a look at the Muller Lyer illusion:http://figuresfictives.free.fr/Diver...er-illusia.gif
The lines appear to be of different lengths.
Measure the lines. They are of the same length.
But despite rationally knowing that the lines are the same length, the lines continue to appear to be of different lengths. Visual perception is a modular process in the sense that the way things appear to be is fairly impervious to our rational knowledge of what is actually the case.

Primary emotions are similarly modular. We can have a fear response to a spider or a snake. We can know that the spider or snake is harmless and poses no threat to us. We continue to feel afraid, however, because the emotional response is modular in the sense of being fairly impervious to our rational knowledge of what is actually the case.

Secondary emotional responses are thought to be responses to cognitive appraisals. The notion is that we appraise things to be a certain way e.g., 'therapist is trying to hurt me' and it is IN VIRTUE of our cognitive appraisal that we have the emotional response. Cognitive restructuring (when it works) is thought to work by altering the appraisals which thereby alters the emotional response. Cognitive restructuring only works with secondary emotional responses that are the result of cognitive appraisal. Primary emotional responses are impervious to our rational knowledge (or our counter-appraisals).

It is a bit more complicated than that but that is the general gist.

So all of the primary emotions can be top down driven (by cognitive appraisal) as well as bottom up driven (by external stimuli). The secondary emotions are thought to be top down driven (by cognitive appraisal). That is why the secondary emotions exhibit more cross cultural variability (depending on the appraisals that are common to a culture) and that is why cognitive restructuring works to alter them.

I would say... That with respect to anger... Anger is typically thought to be one of the 'primary' or 'basic' emotions. In the sense that it is fairly hard-wired such that it is common to all 'normal' (whatever that means) individuals of all cultures. It is also modular sometimes (an automatic response to some stimuli and not mediated by appraisal). Top down (rational) considerations can sometimes INHIBIT primary emotions, however.

I guess the notion is that someone who says they don't feel anger... Would be inhibiting the emotion because of fears of retaliation / abandonment...

[dalila]

<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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