Addicted to Anger

Growing up with dysfunction taught me a lot; from coping skills, to survival instincts as well as emotional addictions to name a few. My anger is a major struggle, not really for me but for those around me. I personally don't mind my anger, I have a very workable love hate relationship with it in fact. The problem with my anger is it hurts other people's feelings, which truthfully I never really gave a fuck about until it was my own children's feelings I hurt. Anger has been a very useful tool for me. Only the closets in my life get to be the brunt of all my hate and rage. Pure true raw fuck you and fuck the world, I'll slit your throat with my words type of hate. The type of  hate that so quickly comes over me like a junkie who just got her next fix, with one less interventionist standing in my way, because this hateful rage is my tool to kick people out of my life. You see...I feel very passionate about my anger as I've always been able to use it in such a way to help me create words, to express emotion, to change, adapt, evolve, and even to protect myself. Of course with that I've also gotten to points in my life where I've felt completely and insanely out of control with my anger and I'll admit I didn't want to feel angry anymore. Yet like an addict I'll still reach for information to piss me off just enough that I can feel justified for my cruel and hatful words just to watch someone I feel hurt by breaking a little inside, to hurt just as they hurt me if not more. Why do I do this? Because I'm fucked up! Because I'm addicted to anger, addicted to pain, addicted to emotion in its purest forms. Yes my mother taught me not to say anything if I didn't have anything nice to say. At the same time my father taught me that daddies aren't always so nice to their children. When you're a child trying to survive you don’t always have choices. You have no control. You're stuck in limbo trying to plan your escape. Every person has a different method that works for them. For me I wrote my way right out of insanity... Or so I thought. Well kind of in some ways I suppose. I spent years and years writing my feelings, well mostly all about my anger and hate for everyone and the whole world. By the time I was able to regain my own independence and control I was actually controlled by this emotion that those people with those fancy college degrees like to call "just a secondary emotion" yeah uuuhh huh..”fuck you and your stupid degrees” is all I ever thought. They don't know me or how I feel! None the less I spent years stewing on ways to word things in such hurtful cruel ways I'd be sure to protect myself when I was able and needed to. So off into destruction of all man kind in the literal since that “men hurt women and I'll hurt them back’ mind set I stomped right into. But you see, right behind my cover of cold icy pent up rage was my loving, warm side. I realized quickly they were at war and I had a major conflict living inside my soul. 

Going into my teen years my anger was constantly labeled as psychological disorders, left and right medications were tossed at me. In counseling they would try and teach me to figure out where in my body I felt angry. To look for the signs on and on but these methods never worked. I went from calm to pissed within seconds, to quickly to catch any warning signs. My anger gets me high, a type of high I cannot explain. I tend to float away so to speak, or detach myself from feelings of a conscience to feel sad or bad for my rage or the nasty words I'm about to spew all over the place. “I have control now” I’d think, “I don't have to take this shit from anyone”. So I got with men who treated me bad because I thought it's what I deserved and I'd teach them! I'd destroy them with my hate. Of course that was never my first intentions, just my second one after they would hurt me. All of this in some type of subconscious coping mechanism I taught myself long ago. This all backfired of course, and I was left with nothing but failure after failure, guilt, and shame for all the damage I caused on the ones I loved. What was I teaching my children? Nothing good was really coming out of my anger when I used it in a way to attack those who hurt me.

I would be lying if I said I am cured from all anger, or even half of the anger I felt. I still am very much an angry person, and I still feel extremely passionate about my anger, with the love hate feelings going on all around it. I still get a rush so to speak when I’m angry. Sometimes I can use the emotional high in a creative constructive way, other times I still have no control and I take it out on those who don’t necessarily deserve it. While other times I can still use it as a protective tool to kick people out of my life and most of the time I am okay with that. I am still working out the wars inside my soul. I see an EMDR specialist counselor who has been helping me work through my anger. The first session that we addressed anger in I had to pick an image of some sort that wasn’t me or directly connected to me that represent anger. I picked the animated Tasmanian devil. I had a buzzer in each hand and my counselor timed the machine causing each buzzer to buzz opposite of each other like a clock; tick tock, tick tock, kind of deal. It helped me to close my eyes, and she said “okay just notice your image” and I could imagine Taz destroying things, yelling, spinning around like he does on the cartoon. After so long she stopped the buzzers and said okay now what do you notice, I told her. Okay good she said, now just notice that, and I realized after so many times of stopping the buzzers and taking a deep breath Taz would change in my imagination. He went from angry, to a little less angry, to sad, and confused, and even lonely, to angry again, to hurt, then confident, and peacefully walking down the trail whistling and hearing the birds sing. It was extremely bazaar to feel the emotions change and evolve. For the following weeks I noticed a difference in what was small triggers to set off my anger didn’t seem to matter anymore and it felt easier to just let it roll off my shoulders. All thought I have so much more work and improvements to make, I feel grateful for this opportunity to learn a better way to aim my anger so it isn’t hurtful to those around me.