Our clients who can't get angry

 

One of the most frustrating experiences I have as a therapist is to try to help a client who needs anger to save herself, but who has none. In my naïve early forties, a new counselor, I ignorantly assumed that everyone could invoke the rage that should be generated in abusive and unjust situations. A completely self-enclosed mother who trashes her brilliant 18-year-old daughter’s soul – “You’ll never amount to anything!” – because she didn’t clean her room at her mother’s whimsical decree. A 16-year-old gay boy, a 17-year-old lesbian whose parents faux-warmly inform them that they will be going to hell if they maintain these immoral choices. They feel only sadness, hurt and abandonment.

How is it possible to have no anger in the moment, or as a part of the human makeup? Where does a mentally healthy person’s anger come from? There are probably many ways to deflate or submerge or kill what might have been early rage-making pain. But I can’t specify them, and who knows why one toddler’s frustration melts to tears and another’s bursts into flame? I con­front a client with her need to stand up for herself in the face of her mother’s or father’s infantile entitlement, and she has nothing. She dissociates or states the reason that has no reason – I’m just not angry.

It's clear that this lack of feeling is a factor of regression and dependency. We are look­ing at the injured inner child which – as I’ve maintained at all times – is our essence, not a “part” of a predom­inately grown-up psyche. And here is the law which is the uni­ver­sal flaw behind all the myriad diagnoses and existential “problems that have no name”: We are what we were and no rational thinking or toxic psychotropic will change that.

Is this Freud’s “death instinct”? Why do some people rage against the dying of the light and others “guess we had best let it be,” resign themselves to an inner prison like Jimmy Driftwood’s enchained wanderer?*

I believe that what’s left is for these clients to see if, upon inner searching, they mirror my mixed-up psycho-topography. I know for a fact that at the absolute beginning, in the chemistry of my birth, there are both the essence of rage and the essence of inertness. These could be encapsulated in Caesarian and incubator traumas. They did not manifest in any way that I could remember in my infancy. But during the latency years (around six to twelve), they manifested in corresponding diametrical ways. I was a complete and utter coward before bullies: terror, full emotional dissociation and its inability to move a muscle to defend myself against their insults, threats or the rare physical aggression. I felt no anger whatsoever in these moments. But at home, in the quiet of my room, I would silently and in recondite feeling burn ants one at a time on a bright lightbulb. I felt no anger then, either, but there must have been rage. At the level of birth pain, at infancy frustration with a depressed mother and an emotionally absent father.

I know that both qualities of my nature live without remission or change. And now, recognizing that inertia, terror and rage, I can call forth the vital one in times of need. I can look at the years of my parents’ ignorant and uncaring blindness and feel a cold, quiet judgment. There’s anger in that, too, that gives me an existential kind of strength. I hope my clients can do this. Find the early molecules of pain – your parents were like this when you were born, too – burn ants, raise your voice to a level far above theirs that knocks them on their back, be primitive and powerful, righteous and strong when you need to be. There is something immanent there. No child was born to accept chains.

- - - - - - - - - - -

* “Long Chain On” – Peter, Paul & Mary’s rendition: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xhM0hAzrl8A. Jimmy Driftwood himself singin’ it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BU1gFka4w-I.