#42 | on anger
I've blogged before about how I don't feel angry, I just feel sad. For a while now, though, my therapist has gently suggested that she wants to hear more from the angry side of me. I mentioned this to my friend and she said that her therapist has nudged her towards anger in the past and it proved productive, so I tried to do some reading about the emotion.
Repressing anger has connections to depression, anxiety, and less satisfaction with one's life. There are some interesting cultural factors at play with why and how people repress anger, such as collectivist vs individualist values, but the research on that is still pretty preliminary. Regardless, in my personal experience, my parents always discouraged me from anger. They thought it was unproductive and should be extinguished. For example, I remember telling them my biology teacher was terrible, but they said that I needed to ignore her and focus on doing my best—to play the cards I'd been dealt. There is some wisdom to this: everyone in my class was dealing with the same teacher, and statistically some of us had to be awarded good grades. As long as I could work hard and be one of those people, did it really matter if the teacher was bad? They wanted me to shoulder personal responsibility and ignore my anger because it was a situation in which I had little control. But as an adult, I'm realizing that anger is recognition of one's needs and feelings. It's an emotional expression of dignity, not an act. Refusing to acknowledge anger won't make it go away; it will only turn inward on myself in the form of depression. By embracing it now, can I move on more easily?
Last weekend, I tried to consciously channel anger and speak the feelings outward. When I felt a sad emotion, I flipped it into anger.
- I am so worthless and incapable. -> I'm angry because I actually know I was a great, supportive partner. When my ex told me I wasn't trustworthy or capable of meeting her needs while grieving, all my efforts were completely invalidated. I was made to feel burdensome and insignificant. All summer, I had done so much to support her, and she told me I wasn't enough. I felt so invisible.
- I think she hates me. -> I'm angry because of her silence. She knows I need information and isn't giving it to me. It feels like total apathy. It makes me feel like she just wants me to disappear, like I'm nothing. It makes me feel punished for something I didn't do. I can't help but feel like my suffering is so unnecessary, that her choice has caused me immense pain when it could be even marginally easier if we went through this together, even as friends.
- I think she's swapping me out for people that are better than me. -> I'm angry because in a difficult time, she's decided that she would prefer to be with friends, some of which are men. I know that it doesn't inherently 'mean' anything, that they don't provide anything that I couldn't have. But it still makes me feel replaceable, for her to spend so much time with them instead of me, especially after telling me I wasn't enough. It makes me feel like our relationship was all for nothing.
My therapist and I discussed all of this anger together. I kept pausing to interject disclaimers: "I know she's just incapable of giving this to me..." or "I know it's just really difficult for her to...". She stopped me and said, "I know you have great empathy for her, but try to focus on how you feel instead." It was freeing to release everything without having to constantly prove myself as an understanding person. Because I do know that I understand her, even if she didn't think I did. In some ways maybe she didn't want to believe that I did.
Then, my therapist asked if I'm in a place where I can handle more change. I think the answer is yes.
But I cried all of yesterday evening after my session. It was a release, something deeper than other times I've cried. Thinking back on how I was taught to process anger, it's true that I have no control over the situation. Often it feels like everything is happening to me, like I'm strapped into a long emotional rollercoaster I never queued up for—one that could stretch out into years. I see myself being alone for a long time, bleeding out slowly, wishing I could just pretend none of this ever happened. But it did. The conditions of my life are the product of everything that's changed: my new apartment, how much free time I have, the fact that I have to lug my clothes to a laundromat now. I've been so stressed out that my menstrual cycle changed and I dropped weight, randomly losing appetite. Now that I've unlocked a capacity for anger, though, perhaps I can more easily channel this stress into something else. I played cello for a while the other day. Yesterday, I sent my information out to some part-time restaurant jobs.
It's not about "finding myself," though. It's about destruction. I've painfully wrung out all this anger from the recesses of my heart into my hands, and now, I'll take it and completely disappear so she'll never be able to find me again, or rather, the apparition of me she created in order to bury me without mercy. But I'll eradicate my real self too, the person I actually was to her, the version that was loving and kind and understanding, because that, too, is useless in the face of how much pain and anger I have. I'll create fucked up and beautiful things. I'll wipe my brain completely blank and embrace the absolute emptiness forced upon me.