Anger Management

After many months of therapy and several recent weeks of introspection, I concluded that I have a problem with anger.  Specifically, I have misplaced mine.  I have no recollection of getting angry with anyone since I was a teenager.  No fights, no arguments, nothing.  I just don't get angry.  I don't know how.  This is not good.

It turns out that not getting angry has put me in a place I don't like being in.  However, thanks to countless hours with my therapist and many more spent probing my own head, I've come to realize that being angry and expressing it properly is an integral part of emotional health.  So, now, as an adult who has ignored anger for half her life, I need to learn a few new tricks: i) I need to learn how to recognize anger and ii) I need to learn how to express it.

So far, I'm still working on step one.  What I've learned is that there's a huge list of things that have happened in the last 20 years that I'm angry about.  Very angry in some cases.  Unfortunately, it's a bit late to go back and express my opinion about these events now.  Even if I did, I've lost the edge and the impact of my expression will be greatly blunted.  But I've managed to verbalize my list and recognize that these incidents affected me adversely.  That's something, at least.

I'm still very slow to recognize anger.  I still don't get it as it happens -- it usually takes me a day or two to realize what I'm feeling.  The new challenge is to muster up the courage to then do something about it.  My current theory is along the lines of "better late than never".  I figure I'll go with that until I manage to speed up the feeling to thought process.  For years I seem to have just skipped over the feeling part and went straight to thought. (Apparently, I've become very good at avoiding many of my feelings and tend to intellectualize them, but for right now I'm working on anger.)  The ultimate goal, of course, is to merge the feeling with the thought so that I can actually do something about it as it happens.  I've been told it's much more effective that way, and therefore, much healthier.

It's a scary thing, all this self-discovery.  Because once you realize how messed up you are, you really have to just buck up and start fixing things.  It's never easy to admit one's shortcomings and it's even tougher to look them head on and decide to improve upon them, especially if you haven't the foggiest idea how to go about doing it.  But it must be done if I'm ever going to be the happy, healthy person I want to be and need to be.  How can I ever hope to be a successful healer if I can't help myself first?

ps - I was reading this article today and came across this sentence: "Canadians are certainly good and worthy folks, but they suffer an excess of civil obedience, politeness and lack of civic rage that could be harnessed to combat political atrophy."  I wonder if perhaps I couldn't just change the context of this slightly and apply it directly to myself: "As a Canadian, I am good and worthy but suffer an excess of obedience, politeness and lack of rage that should be harnessed to combat emotional atrophy."