Posted by Racer on March 7, 2006, at 13:20:37
Dinah's thread above made me think of this. It seemed to me, on reading what she's going through, that she's got a lot of people and events to be angry at -- but then, it's not their fault, either, so it's hard to know how it's OK to be angry with any of them. Does that make sense?
If not, my own is generally about my mother, or my teachers in jr/sr high school. With my mother, I know I'm angry with things she did, but as soon as I admit that, I start into the whole "but she was so young/she didn't know any better/she had too much to deal with/the same sort of thing was done to her/etc." And then, I have all this emotion built up -- but it feels as though it's blocked, it can't come out in an "I'm angry with my mother for failing me." It turns back on myself, as a sort of "I must be a really terrible person, to want to be angry with my poor mother, since she did the best she could with the resources available to her."
That's really not much clearer, is it? lol Guess no one would mistake me for Ronald Reagan, The Great Communicator, today, huh?
Or when I think of the teachers, I think, "Instead of just saying I was some sort of 'bad seed' child, and sympathizing with my mother, why didn't ANY of them look at my point of view? Maybe think if something was happening TO me? They'd recognize the signs now." (Always followed, of course, by "it's not fair," which just starts a whole different sort of self-reproach going...) But then, of course, I put myself into their places, and I see that they didn't have the sort of training for that sort of thing that teachers get now. I see that they were actually quite young, and no doubt doing the best they could, without the tools to recognize problems in middle class homes. I see that it's really not the teachers' responsibility to recognize signs of abuse. And the end result, again, is that I get into berating myself for being so unfair to them as {horrors} to feel something akin to ANGER.
It's something that we do talk about, a little, in therapy, but I still don't know how it works. What do you do, when you're angry, but you have this pathological need to put yourself into the others' place, and explain/excuse the behavior which makes you angry?
If anyone has any comments or thoughts, I'm eager for them.
poster:Racer
thread:617049
URL: http://www.dr-bob.org/babble/psycho/20060225/msgs/617049.html