Despite my advanced years and therapy experience with negative and bitter people (“I have disdain for the average person,” a client said), I have never been without the feeling that adults should know it is wrong and immature to have a misanthropic personality. I think they should know it is actually stupid to be, as character, nasty, hateful, sarcastic, contemptuous. This is your one life – I think – and you feel right, self-satisfied to be soaked in pessimism and cynicism? Don’t dignity and decency seem called for during this precious time we have on Earth?
Yet there are individuals, some personality-disordered, some not, who are wounded, angry about it, and want to stay that way. Anger, certainly, is not the only ego-syntonic baggage people may drag all the way to their deathbed. A teenager recently endorsed the Depressive Personality Disorder* syndrome: content in his slop of misery. The young man said: “When the meds make me feel a little better, I miss feeling depressed.” But it is easier to justify a self-pitying character than an angry one. This is because self-pity is a direct manifestation of the hurt the child suffered, while anger is an escape from that hurt. The angry personality is a projectionist, a blamer of others. How effing immature, it could be said.
My disdainful client said: “I don’t know any other way to be.” That is touching, and a possible hand to hold to lead him from his rage back to the hurt child. He had no parents worthy of the name. His mother said to him: “You can call CPS, see if they protect you.” When he was four, she stopped the car, set him outside, and drove off. One can see how anger kept him alive, while tears would have drowned him.
But the present has the advantage of offering help. Anger started with and perpetuates hopelessness and broken bonds. Hurt, and you can be cared for. Your tears are held by someone else.
Angry characters are too afraid to feel their truth, too alone and weak to reach out. How paradoxical that they so often seem frightening and strong.
“Scared children do scary things.” – Dr. Bryan Post, https://postinstitute.com/.
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* https://courses.lumenlearning.com/abnormalpsychology/chapter/depressive-personality-disorder/.
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Comments are welcome, but I'd suggest you first read "Feeling-centered therapy" and "Ocean and boat" for a basic introduction to my kind of theory and therapy.