Life & Therapy

The other day when I wrote the post about name calling, I’d been sitting on a half-written version of it for a week or two. I have many posts like this, ones I’ve started and then gotten stuck on, so there is a massive pile of drafts waiting for me to write. A conversation on Facebook between a total stranger and my husband triggered me into finishing that draft. In that conversation, the stranger called a politician a “bitch.” My husband expressed disappointment in this person’s behavior, and was treated with the response, “a bitch is a bitch.” This made me angry. I started writing a response to this random stranger, when suddenly I realized where that response would take me: into a conversation with someone who has made it very clear that he has no intention of changing. I could picture myself feeling more angry. I could picture myself wasting energy and time on it. I stopped myself from writing to him. I felt the anger until it transformed into an inspiration to take action: I wanted to write a blog post for the first time in over a year. Not only that, I still want to keep writing. All because I harnessed my anger and asked it what it wanted from me.

The first time I can remember consciously harnessing my anger to take action in my life was the moment that essentially led me to choose to become a therapist. I was working as a cashier at a retail store, and I really hated this job. Another employee at the same store had been promoted to manager, which was a position that I felt I was more qualified for. I hated working under her. Honestly, I hated her. One day, she said something to me that offended me so much I could barely contain my feelings of rage. I went home for lunch shortly afterward, and all I could think about was how much I hated her. I was just so angry.

At the time, I was reading a book called “How to Get What You Want and Want What You Have” by John Gray, and in it was an exercise about feeling one emotion and then feeling the emotions that come next.  The theory was that emotions, if felt, move, and that under each emotion is buried more deeply another.  I came home and sat there with my anger, and I wrote about it, how angry I was with this woman at work. I wrote until the next feeling came; sadness. I felt sad that she got the position at work that I wanted. After the sadness came fear: I was afraid that I would be stuck at this unsatisfying job forever and never get to do something that gave me satisfaction. Once I felt the dissatisfaction with my job, the hatred and anger transformed into something else: motivation. I knew that I needed to take action and change my life. This woman was not keeping me from being happy. I was. I had taken this job because it was a no-brainer for me. It was safe. It did not require any responsibility from me and I could do it with my eyes closed. It was also mind-numbing and soul-destroying. And it was not this woman’s fault. I needed to change my life.

I resolved that moment that, even if I didn’t know what it was I wanted, I would spend the next year ruthlessly trying to figure it out. It took less than a couple of months after making that resolution to discover that I wanted to be a therapist, and that is what I did. All the energy that had been stuck in my hatred and anger was now freed up, and I focused it on all the work that it took to go from being a cashier stuck in a job, to applying to graduate school, attending graduate school and doing the post-graduate work to become licensed and to build a practice. That was more than 16 years ago, and to this day, I have never been stuck in the way I was before I learned to feel and listen to my anger.

When we throw our anger and other difficult feelings at people, especially to trolls, without experiencing it for ourselves, we hand over a great treasure to someone who does not recognize its value and definitely who does not deserve it.  When we instead spend time with these emotions, the world becomes bigger, freer and better than we could have imagined.