General Sad To Angry - Insight From Sufferers Gratefully Accepted

[Friday]

I wish I could help with this one :( ... But... Sadness is something I don't grok. I can't handle it, cannot allow it, deliberately pour on the rage and damn the consequences because anger and fury are the only things that kill sadness. The Beast I can handle, The Abyss I cannot.

The only time people actually need to worry about me is when I'm sad. It's not that I haven't tried to understand sadness over the past 15 some odd years. Grief? Grief and I are old friends, old enemies. Celebrate or Mourn, that's always the damn question. Grief, mourning, guilt.. I grok. Pain. Pure pain & loss. But not sadness. There is no line between sadness & despair. It simply is. And if I let it in? It consumes me. No. Better to rage up, to fight it out, to sink my goddamn teeth in than to ever let sadness get a toehold. That is, if I want to live.

Mmm. Laughter. Laughter can kill it, too, caught early. Very early. In the first few moments. But rage? Rage will burn it out. Always. It's the only safe thing.

***

If he's like me... Sounds to me like you give him a reason to fight the sadness. Boyo needs to rage up and burn that off before you get home & caught in the backblast, if he doesn't want to lose you. Not wait until the crunching of gravel under tires reminds him too late.

I hope he's not like me.

 

[City Slicker]

Just the other day he was looking for his boxing trophies. We couldn't find them. We think the ex-wife either kept them or threw them out.

Sounds like it might be time for him to earn some new boxing trophies - some grounding for his intense anger feelings before he can balance that with sadness. He knows boxing isn't about anger but is about channelling aggression. It might help.

 

[ZebraWestie]

Learning to understand emotions and realise that thoughts and feelings won't really kill you is something I learned through my own therapy for my major depression and previous MH problems. My husband has recently been having very similar rages and then collapsing into himself and seems to think if he starts to allow all the pain, grief and dispair to 'get him' then it will push him over the edge.... The fight, flight, freeze is where it's at. His T has given him muscle relaxing techniques to help regain control over his body as a self-soother to rage and he craves quiet which is sometimes very hard where we live but he has started to take the time for a calming stroll, away from civilization, every evening when our household gets noisy, sometimes running, sometimes with the dogs, sometimes just sitting and looking at the view... It seems to help. We have been taking note of the 5 stages of grief and using techniques and tips t hat seem to help. Relaxation techniques for calming the body when the mind cannot be soothed can work well too. The feelings of depression are like the rage turned inwards so I can understand how scary it is (especially for the menfolk, more especially for those men whose whole lives are about being men in the traditional sense of hiding emotions) I don't know if this may help anyone else but this thread gives me further hope for my husband to learn how to make himself feel better throughout this process of healing and learning how to cope with feelings WITHOUT fearing them. Such a scary place to be, big love to all x