Thank you so much for replying. I really appreciate your time. Sigh, I guess it is progress. I am finding that I'm actually not very happy even when I control my temper, because then I'm stuck, for a much longer time, with all of the "high alert" anxious, stressed, angry, tumultuous feelings that go away faster if I just blow up. I am glad for the progress, but it's hard.
Is there any history of mess that connects to trauma or your family for you? Can you think of anything else that could connect to the past in that moment of fury?
Yeah, messes pretty much remind me of my mother, who can not tolerate them. I was explaining an example like this to my therapist the other day, when my daughter's room wasn't clean, and I was feeling pressure about it and got upset. She asked what my mother would have thought, to see my daughter's room, and right away, I burst out, that my mom would have wanted to burn it down. My mother is an unpredictable woman, emotionally unstable, with some other problems, and anger was something she got to express and I tried not to, because I would pay for it. My stepmother was not great with anger either. I've explained my perception of rage as something that is only for the strong, that when I was a child, rage was for the grownups, and we children had to control ourselves because the grownups couldn't. It's tough to talk about, sigh, but... it's part of where I am with anger- hating myself when I have outbursts, but knowing that some small part of me learned from my family that it was my right to be unreasonable, my right to be destructive in my anger, because that's what mothers get to do. It is horrible, I hate myself for that feeling- of course I absolutely don't actually believe I deserve to have these outbursts, but when I'm triggered, and stressed, and not rational, but just regressed back into those lessons I learned as a child... that's part of my reality as far as anger, though not all of it, but I'm working SO SO SO hard to fix it. I always know better before and after, but in the moment, I've lost control, so, sigh, that's it in a nutshell.
Does it make you feel protected or the opposite?
Let me differentiate between more typical anger and angry outbursts, here. Normal anger may make me feel a little scared, if someone else expresses it, but I'm fairly comfortable being angry to a certain point. Not completely, but... manageably. But the outbursts, where I feel full of rage and completely out of control, those are terrible for me. I wish I were dead when I lose control like that. I tell my therapist, that kind of anger is really fear, with teeth. It's me, feeling deeply threatened, and fighting back in the only way that I know instinctively, in that triggered moment- by using the same overwhelming, screaming, cruel anger to make the situation stop that I remember from my childhood. And that's only part of it really, it's complicated for me, something I'm very much still working through. It's very bad.
I also wondered how you are with being assertive in general and expressing when you are upset or offended
In many cases, I can manage to be mildly angry, and I'm pretty good at assertive, at least, good enough, at work, school, etc. I respect anger, understand it's necessary and useful, and in some cases I can express it much more normally. It's just defusing my triggers that's really the issue.
