Sitting in my rage came to me in the middle of the night.
I wanted to write about boundaries and therapy. But the ideas that were spinning in my mind became focused on one thing.
How angry I am.
It’s not the type of anger that happened because someone did or said something. It has been slowly simmering under my skin for the past month and a half.
I do not know what to do with it or how to let it out. It just builds.
I am not entirely sure where it came from.
Therapy is a lot of hard work. It is a lot of self-analyzing, crying, asking questions and unlearning everything that you thought you already knew.
Last year, I started therapy because life became too much. I learned about the areas of my life that needed work and set out to fix them.
A year later, I am frustrated, since it feels like I have accomplished almost nothing.
Therapy is not supposed to be a race. You are not supposed to attend a few sessions and BAM you are cured. It could take months and years.
So, I am not sure why I expected everything to be absolutely perfect by now because it’s certainly not.
In therapy I learned that:
- I am not responsible for other’s actions or feelings.
- I should have more compassion for myself.
- Boundaries are important. I really need to start having them.
- I can not control everything.
- Anxiety is normal, it is okay and I need to work with it (not against it).
But, then I heard something. I was listening to a podcast called “Advancing Women”, by Dr. Kimberly DeSimone. She’s a graduate professor at my school, St. Bonaventure University. Something she repeated in an episode was the phrase, “It’s not your fault but it is your problem.”
Now, she was referring to working women and the biases and inequalities they have to face. But I applied it to my personal life.
Certain things that people have done and said to me are not my fault. But they are my problem, and my responsibility to go to therapy and try to work through. And that makes me angrier than anything else. Why me? Why not them?
I do not get any apologies or changed behavior. People who negatively impacted me are living happily and carelessly while I have struggled. And it feels unfair.
Why can’t I get my revenge somehow? That is what the badass women do in books and movies.
Yet, I do not want to live that way. I do not want to live with a lot of anger in me. It bleeds into areas of my life. Sometimes, it affects my relationships. I get irritated, snappy, jealous and overall unpleasant. I lash out and afterward I wonder, was that even me?
Living with anger only makes people bitter. I want to be a calm, confident and overall happy woman. Not this version of me that I have trouble recognizing.
I am sure my therapist will be absolutely thrilled to hear all this.
It is time to bring out the emotion wheel and talk about my primary and secondary emotions (this was interesting to learn about because my feelings started to make sense more). My primary emotion is anger. I can feel it, and I can name it.
I am not sure what my secondary emotion is.
And… I’m a little too scared to find out.