The other day I put my Therapist’s Angel hat on again. I found myself explaining to a friend why his therapist is encouraging him to feel angry. This seemed counterintuitive, or at least undesirable to him. He goes to therapy in order to feel better, and anger is associated with feeling worse. First off, we are not encouraging you to be angry, we are encouraging you to feel your anger. The difference here is important. The first is a state of being, and the second is the flow of existing emotion. In fact, as therapists, we want to help you feel all of your emotions, not just anger. Anger often comes first, and serves as a gateway to sadness and loss, and then, luckily, more good feeling. We all have a fantasy that we can just feel good. The pharmaceutical industry feeds this fantasy with its sparkly ads for antidepressants. Anger appears in many different forms, and doesn’t always look like yelling or dramatics. Often it comes in the form of feeling nothing much, numbness, a turning in your stomach, or a tightness in your chest. If anger is stuck in the space of numbness or in your physical body, it usually means that you learned somewhere along the way that you had to stuff your anger. Many of us got the message that our anger was dangerous or unwelcome and we unconsciously learned to absorb it into our self-concept. In its extreme form, this absorbed anger can be the source of depression and severe self-criticism. Feeling anger does not mean we are bad, or mean. It usually just means we are feeling vulnerable or hurt. I should add that letting ourselves feel our anger doesn’t necessarily mean we have to express our anger. Sometimes just letting ourselves know we are angry is enough to let the experience flow. As the anger flows, we create space for the other emotions we would all prefer to feel.
10 Comments
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2/20/2017 09:04:46 pm
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3/12/2017 11:34:58 pm
Thanks for posting such good content
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3/27/2017 02:46:02 am
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3/28/2017 10:49:24 pm
You are working on a very sensitive project , am very impress to read the details . Hope you will continue it ,in the same way as you have done here in this case . Nice post thanks for sharing .
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5/7/2017 07:13:29 am
I didn't know that anger could be the gateway of all emotions to flow out. Thank you for this wonderful trivia. Therapists really know how to assess our different situations in life. They see that if we let anger comes out, sadness, frustrations, then happy thoughts would eventually follow. That makes the whole process more fulfilling. I love this article. It gave me so many fresh things I can use on an everyday basis!
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6/3/2017 05:12:26 am
Wow! this post is really amazing and I appreciate the work. i could not stop myself commenting here cause You’re doing a great job! Keep it up!
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AuthorI am a psychotherapist in private practice in Manhattan and Brooklyn Archives
December 2015
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