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How do you process anger?

Posted by garnet71 on March 21, 2009, at 11:55:28

So a couple of years ago I read a great book written by a psychoanalyst-"The Angry Book". It explains how anger, when not processed correctly or ignored, gets perverted into anxiety, abuse, hate, depression, obsessions/compulsions and everything else. It was the most informative self-help book I ever read. This author does inject some stories as to how he cured some patients of life-long mental illnesses by releasing and working with the unprocessed anger. In a nutshell, he explains how many mental disorders are a result of anger, or are linked to the emotion.

But the book doesn't really go into that much about how to process anger that's been held within (for me-decades).

I was talking a walk in the middle of the night and was feeling angry and upset about some things....and I kept looking up at the stars since it was a clear night and the stars were so bright and I felt tears and couldn't hold them back. So I realized it triggered me, and then I remembered that during my childhood, I was always trapped in the house and had chronic insomnia so after my Dad went to bed I would take off the screen to my window, put a folded blanket on the windowsill, and sit there and watch the sky and look at the moon, looking for shooting stars for hours. I've seen a few over the years, and would use them to cope-to make wishes that everything would be ok, and I had sensed by this action, wishing on shooting stars, that I would have the ability to achieve my life dreams and would turn out ok. I know, silly, but it allowed me to hang on to faith and hope while I was growing up.

After I had that thought during my walk, I then realized that some things going on after childhood, the things for which I was currently angry about, led me to feel angry because they reminded me of being abandoned by my parents, in a sense, and how my mother let my dad abuse us, so lack of support by my mother, always left to fend for myself-powerless. I realized that is why I was angry about the things I was thinking of, things that had nothing to do with childhood.

So once you acknowledge the anger, link it, and understand it, how do you process it correctly? What do you do next?

 

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