Sad when you should be angry, angry when you should be sad

There are many clients whose ground is anger and cynical negativity. While they seem natural, their dark side is their only side, they are actually holding their breath ‘til they turned red. They won’t even allow themselves to feel bitter, because bitter is woundedness and hurt sitting beneath the anger. In this anger identity, nothing can change, nothing can get better.

 

There are many clients whose ground is sadness, hurt and weepiness. This may seem childish, but it is the deeper truth: Hurt is indeed what they were. And yet it can’t be enough if they intend to change, to get better. Some anger and indignation, conjured up from the Virtual or the Potential, will have to exist.

 

Don’t be deceived to think the angry person is an adult and the weepy one is a child. They are both children.

 

A man was terminated from his job by a boss out for revenge and, angry as hell, he believes his life is ruined. Many people get fired unfairly, it sets them back, but the wound eventually closes and they move on. Why did this injustice unman a forty-year-old’s life, where he feels all his future dominos must fall in the wrong direction? Because beneath his anger there is pain as deep as the boy who “had to raise myself,” whose parents divorced twice, who had no one to listen. That buried background, awakened unconsciously when he was fired, revived the fundamental wrongness of his life which, of course, was always there. We are what we were. Psychological time is a dimensionless point that looks like a line.

 

We can help an angry man to stop holding his breath. A batterer, a Vietnam vet in group therapy, wept as he recalled his father’s brutality. I never knew if he wept enough. But if he did, he would no longer be capable of hurting his wife.

 

Can we give someone who was always the family victim, and later its selfless helper, the anger to free herself? She always rushes forward to slide under their feet, and they – études in mass solipsism – accept this implicitly and forever. Maybe, at least, she can grow the idea of anger, the preferability of self-care and dignity. Though there are many self-medicative attitudes people find (people-pleasing, mild-mannered, macho, cynical, euthymic false-happy), productive anger seems impossible to form in a defeated child.