Thank you, Justmehere for your post. I think your clarity on this is important. I agree with Karen12 that when people say "anger" they may be speaking of subtly different things and that for some, there is something very honest about the anger. And when a particular anger has been bottled up for decades, the way it reveals itself and manifests itself to the feeler is different than "fresh, new anger," a feeling in response to a new issue or to becoming angry at things that do not merit such a reaction.
Anger is something that I carried my whole life. I hid it from myself, but everyone else could see it. People said, "you are angry" and I was baffled. I was sure I had hidden it so well that I could not access it. My first T. said he could see it precisely in that I disavowed any anger. I am still a bit mystified at how I was in denial. This makes me aware I could still be in denial of things obvious to anyone but me.
First of all, for someone abused and betrayed so brutally by her own father and his friend and so left out in the cold by a mother incapable of love, I can see how I could not accept my own feelings or even feel them accurately. I still cannot, not really. It still "feels," often, almost like it all happened to "someone else." I have great difficulty still feeling like a whole person. I feel like I'm a "collection" and not "one." It is not always possible, especially when under stress, to avoid dissociation or depersonalization for me.
I disagree that one should never vent anger for fear it will increase based on one study, even a good long one. That study was conducted on anger as a monolith and does not look into the case of trauma. I am traumatized, but I am held to the same laws of nature. Therefore, now, in a general way, I do not vent my day to day anger because the study is correct about that. It only makes it increase. However, of the anger I have carried for so long, I had to vent it for over two years just to come to accept it. Therefore, the trauma is not "normal" and cannot be healed as if it were non-traumatic. I do not speak of "normal" anger, the day-to-day stuff. That stuff cannot cause anyone to have to self-harm, dissociate, or have flashbacks. I am talking about the kind of anger that is overwhelming and in response to overwhelming, disturbing events that individuals and society as a whole cannot handle. I'm talking about the kind of anger that haunted me for 30 years and that I didn't dare acknowledge. I don't know how it being labeled as "secondary" is helpful. So I won't get into that. I may have to find out what that is meant to mean or to recommend. So far, nothing has come to light down that path.
Every time I felt the anger come over me, unexpectedly, I also felt afraid of it. It felt foreign to me, and I distrusted it. These anger attacks led to all the other CPTSD symptoms. I usually asked my husband to take the children for a while. I suffered all kinds of symptomology, such as shaking uncontrollably, feeling very hot or cold, heart pounding, paralysis, sobbing, zoning out, feeling unreal, and having flashbacks. I had to resist a strong urge to destroy those responsible and myself, to end the misery. I would never do that, but I could think about it. And this caused me more suffering. It was, in short, a personal hell. And I never lost my nerve or self-control. I never hurt myself or anyone. I recalled poems and took my meds, and took a bath, and talked about this with my carer, journaled, and prayed. It felt obvious to me that I had put off dealing with this stuff and it had to be dealt with now.
Finally, after years of these "attacks," and my working on them, I was driving to work when I saw one of my abusers walking down the street, and my anger surfaced to my attention. My hand began to shake. I felt for myself, instead of judgement, pity. I turned my response to this around and instead "validated" my own anger. For a single moment I saw myself as I would see a stranger, and I felt sympathy for myself. I felt anyone in my position would be this angry. I stopped running away from it and turned toward it and saw a little girl's righteous anger. I saw that GOOD PEOPLE get angry when they are VIOLATED in evil ways and JUSTICE was never served in any fashion. I was RIGHT to be angry then and now. As soon as that hurdle was passed, the issue of forgiveness or letting go the irrational parts of my judgment against by abusers is now the new task. This frees up space inside me and lets me feel a lot better about myself and others. My PTSD feels better, too. But it's not gone.
As soon as I validated (not by choice, it just "happened." I was "ready.") the anger that I had left for another day to be validated, these attacks seemed to have melted. Sometimes, I still feel anger when reminded of my abusers, but when I feel the anger, I know that I was right to feel it, and that I have begun working on forgiving them. I am at home with it. It's integrated into my value system and mind, and it doesn't bother me so much. I don't react to things like I used to. I can feel anger and not feel bowled over or made sick about it. It doesn't trigger flashbacks anymore or panic.
This process took about 2.75 years of working on it, with some therapy, some work on my own, and my full attention. I am still fine tuning this process.
Therefore, in my experience, saying anger is a "secondary emotion" is a way of continuing to explain it away. It is probably correct in many cases of anger. It may technically be correct in all cases of unresolved anger. Whatever the case, I didn't find that concept healing in any way. Rather I feel that in general, it is correct and a good policy to not "give in to anger" or to feed it by giving it so much attention. But, whatever the feeling or emotion, the healing must follow the same path as the injury.
In my case, the repression of the emotion was the primary issue. For others, the over-focusing on the feeling is more the problem. It depends on the person; whatever happened in the reaction to the trauma is repeated. If repression/dissociation occurred, then one must go against the displacement and head right into the storm to connect with it. If the person accepted the feeling but cannot move out of it, then they need to walk away from the wreckage and learn to be able to see it in another way. Either way, the person must work on trusting herself or himself to the point of acceptance of their own responsibility and ability to control and work with their own feelings. Only parts of us that we have not accepted pester us until we do.
