A sense of safety with a therapist may take a lot of time for some of us to build if we have intense abandonment or attachment wounds.. I was thinking a lot about how our reactions can be difficult to make sense of when we never got to feel safe in their emotional expression, or mature with their expression.
As a baby we can forget that we lived inside an inner storm of sensation that was dependent upon our mother to regulate.. Even as a young child if we had to hold in a lot due to our parent not being available or able to cope or if they reacted a lot and made us feel unsafe then self expression of all feeling becomes problematic, especially hurt and anger..
This all came to me reading a response my first therapist sent to me by mail back in 2004 after I had returned home for the second time and was asking her about anger and rage. At that time I was struggling with having been told by an older sober AA member that anger was one of the seven deadly sins, but having seen sober persons come to grief and die due to illnesses I was not so sure, surely held in rage and anger, could, over time become even more deadly or destructive to us? And this is something Canadian doctor Gabor Mate shares about in depth in his seminal book When the Body Says No.
In her reply Wendy made a differentiation absolute rage and anger she explained that she believed that the comment about not having anger was more about having an intense rage which in her words “leaves you so open.” She then went on to describe healthy anger as like a muscle used to say No and protect ourselves. “Anger is necessary, how can we know when something feels wrong or transgresses boundaries and how else can we have the courage to stand up for ethical issues? I see it like a fire. If the flames burn too strongly and out of control it can be dangerous – drawing everything into itself destructively. However, when dampened down, it gives us warmth and light and can be cleansing.” This sense of something feeling cleansed or clear to me relates to how we can feel free once we express our anger and make our true feelings known.
Anger is something I struggled with and I have got angry with therapists in the past but Kat reminded me on Monday in our session that my gut often let me know when I was not with a therapist able to help me, when they struggled to contain my anger then the container of our therapy broke.. There have been two times with Katina where I felt so angry I was tempted to break our therapy but I am grateful now I held on and in time she owned her part as I owned mine and we worked through to resolution if she had ‘dropped’ me energetically in some way..
In retrospect as I see it anyone who wants to shame you for anger is not showing empathy or compassion, come to think of it there was a lot of anger I expressed in that poem on Saturday that someone else tried to shut down.. Kat reminded me on Monday when I read it all through with her that I had dealt with the situation well voicing how I was angry to the person who commented so that immediately the inner heat I had felt over the situation died down.. In the end in the post I wrote explaining it all, the person in question sent me a love heart. That was so good as I was very fearful of confronting them, questioning if they were in some way right but now I see they were not.. I was working through a process of anger.
When looking for a therapist its important to make sure that they are well versed in handling abandonment attachment trauma.. We should never be abandoned by them, while at the same time they encourage us to build our own inner container.. An earlier therapist of mine, Bryan Hunt once told me that with the level of attachment wounding I had I needed to have a therapist available 24/7. That may sound like a lot to some of you and ideally we would not be calling on them at 3 am in the morning all of the time, the important point being that we need reliable support. The young feelings we had to deny due to our parents not being able to cope still remain there lodge deep inside of us seeking a way out.. Our most common default when the parent shames and blame us is to turn against our True Self and its valid emotional expression.. When this happens we get so lost and may end up getting ill.
Lately I am feeling safe enough to understand that my anger will not destroy me or rupture all of my healthy relationships, expressing it is so important, for to be abandoned in a rage that needs to come out is to be left all alone all over again.. as much as we have to hold and contain our powerful historical feelings as adults we still need to find ways to understand and express them if we really are to recover from very early stage abandonment or neglect trauma.
Emerging From The Dark Night 