Is anyone angry?

[neenonee]

Is anyone else with CPTSD angry, like all the time? Or out of the blue? I just found out I have this over the summer, when things got really bad and my reactions to situations were over the top. I began typing in online what I was feeling and CPTSD came up. I went to a therapist I had seen before and she seems to agree, even though I didn't have any major tragedies in my life but was bullied throughout childhood and never felt like I could escape. Now I get pissed at everybody for everything and I don't know how to stop it. I don't know what else I can process about my childhood; I think I've talked about it until I'm blue in the face. Am I brain damaged? Am I doomed to be this way forever? I can't get therapy for awhile because I don't have insurance until January, but I'm not sure what good it would do anyway. I'm one of those people who has believed for years that I'm borderline and this is my personality. I'm still not convinced that's not true.

[schrödinger's cat]

Hi neenonee, pleased to meet you. I'm often angry, too... hm, how about I'll describe mine and then you can see if our issues are similar?

I was bullied, too. At home, there was emotional abuse and emotional neglect. It got so much worse in my teenage years. At first, I defended myself and reacted with indignant anger, but it ALWAYS made things worse, and of course there never was anyone to validate my side of the story. My mother minimized and trivialized my being bullied: "just grow a thicker skin and stop blaming other people for your problems", which left me reeling, since it made me feel like I was to blame.

So I stopped feeling that I had any right to be angry. I stopped believing in my own opinions, and instead began to feel that everyone else was right and I was wrong. I felt like I deserved to be sidelined, I deserved to be teased. I stopped feeling any anger at all. I went numb.

In hindsight, I think this merely cut the connection between my anger and its cause. Bad feelings never really go away. They simply get shoved down into our subconscious. So the anger was still there. And later on (a lot later actually), suddenly it began to appear again. The way it functioned, I think it's a bit like thunderstorms - like anger is this electrical charge hovering about you, and then some things happen and WHAM, it earths itself in them. Something as little as a cyclist using the sidewalk left me absolutely furious.

This summer, I realized that my PTSD (which I was diagnosed with about ten years ago) is most probably CPTSD, and that made it easier to see my past clearly. And THAT has helped most of all. CEN (Childhood Emotional Neglect), the emotional abuse - I've come by my anger honestly. I get to be angry now. I deserve this. I'm catching up with things I should've been able to do decades ago. --- Paradoxically, this makes it easier to see the true cause of my anger. So if a cyclist swerves past me again, it's easier to tell myself: "wow, isn't he ever being an idiot", and to let myself be furious for a while in the privacy of my own head... but at the same time, I know EXACTLY where most of this anger comes from: it's a message from my past, informing me about what my past was like - it's not an accurate measure of the present. Because it's easy to confuse this - "I'm furious, therefore this cyclist has done something horrendous" - no, that's not what it's like: he's merely bumped against painful scars that someone else has given me long ago. In a way, it's almost a good thing if someone triggers my anger, because that lets me explore the present situation: "okay, now what exactly is making me so angry now?" - and that tells me more about my past, and it gives me an opportunity to work through things.

Which isn't to say that it's easy to do. But it's easier than it used to be.

One thing that might be interesting to you is what Pete Walker writes about the Fight Response: http://www.pete-walker.com/fourFs_TraumaTypologyComplexPTSD.htm.

I wish you all the best for your recovery, and I hope you'll find something on this forum that helps.

[Rain]

Being bullied is a nightmare and it leaves wounds that are easily triggered.   The past becomes the present because of this.

[lostinspace]

 Yes,  Rain, I can really relate to bullying. However, it was my own father who was the bully. He would lord it over me. That is to say he never let me breathe. He even said he could " turn my air off". I would get angry because I didn't have a response to that.   
My father could be very cruel ( and thoughtless ). I know I stuffed my anger. It was the only way to survive then.
Now I talk myself through the anger, realizing were some of it stems from.
I wish you the best neenonee.

[Rain]

Hi lostinspace (soon to be found....).   Your father was disgusting.   

[lostinspace]

Thank you Rain. I hope some of my story helps others. Just the sound of you defending me against my father creates anger for the love I never got.
Why couldn't they love me? Isn't that where most of our anger stems from that they wouldn't love us when we were lovable? I don't feel lovable now!

Thanks to this forum and my therapy I can learn that I am lovable, again.
My anger drives people away and that creates unloveability all over again.

[Rain]

He sure missed out on a great relationship with you!

You summarized The Hurt perfectly, Lost.   "Why couldn't they love me?"

You ARE very loveable, Lost!!!   You are a treasure.   You have love in your own heart.

[lostinspace]

Right right right. Today I have friends that support the fact that I am lovable! I want to always remember that I matter to others and myself. Hopefully others will find a voice on this forum. **There is nothing quite like finding the real you! And the truth is we have a voice and can give and receive love.

[neenonee]

Hey everyone, thanks for answering. I haven't been on this site for a few weeks. I've been too busy getting mad at everyone (ha-ha kidding mostly) It does help a small bit to know where the anger comes from and hopefully one day I will learn how to express it in the right situations.

[Brandy]

I'm angry a lot. I'd prefer to be not so easily driven into an internal rage over minor annoyances. It just happens, usually when I'm exhausted from tolerating an endless stream of constant irritation.

Babies die without love, even if they have everything else.

If that were really true, I wouldn't be here. Would any of us?

[wingnut]

Anger. Yes. I read the Book of Walker and relate to the Outer Critic. If I can find fault with everyone, then I have good reason to not let them get close.

You asked about change. I have been thinking a lot about this recently; the chasm between awareness and change and how to forge it. I think if I could build in something as simple as a two heartbeat pause between angering and reacting, I could make wiser choices on how I handle this. It's tough. But awareness IS the first step. I have been told that the more aware we become, then we start tracking. When we start tracking, we can recognize, pause, and change.

Best of luck to you. It's been a long road and I'm looking for that turn, too.

[smg]

Until fairly recently, I didn't have any idea that my anger could be resolved or how to resolve it. And I really mean RESOLVED, not just temporarily off my mind, until I'm reminded again and it comes back just as strong. My key to resolving anger is two connected ideas

1) Strong emotions are signals that I have an unmet emotional need, and I can resolve the feeling by taking action to meet the need (e.g., feel scared --> find safety, feel lonely --> find connection). Obviously, that is VERY simplified, but the idea that my dysphoric emotions are supposed to guide my behaviour into a better situation was a stunning new thought for me (i.e., it's not weak or shameful to give in to your emotions, it's what I'm supposed to do, it's what they're there for)!

2) Anger is a secondary emotion, with some form of fear or pain lurking underneath it as the primary emotion. If I look only at the suface of an angry feeling, I might decide that the best action to meet my needs is to punch the object of my anger in the nose, but that action has negative consequences, and may not resolve the feeling anyway. So for me, it's better to try to sit nonreactively with anger, until the thoughts that float through my brain give me a clue to the underlying primary emotion, and the unmet emotional need. Then I can think about actions to meet the need.

**I'm a fawn-type, so sitting non-reactively with anger for me is mostly about not directing it inward as shame. If you think there's any risk for you of acting out destructively, then please do whatever you know will work best in the moment to prevent that, and save these thoughts for a safer time.

I got the ideas about unmet emotional needs and primary vs secondary emotions from the eqi.org website, which is about emotional intelligence and has a lot of information and opinion about feelings that i didn't grow up with. However, the website's mostly the heartfelt and personal mission of one man, with the bias and hints of unresolved emotional pain that come along with such a mission. It may be triggering, and may be best viewed as a supplement to more authoritative sources of information.

smg

[flookadelic]

I hadn't realised until my diagnosis of PTSD - which I later realised was CPTSD that I had been so angry ALL my life. But up until that point all the anger had been driven inside, aimed at myself. I eas an angel to the world and a demon to myself. I hated myself for not being able to achieve the impossible...to be strong in the face of impossible odds. My anger was founded on guilt and shame which all fed into self hate.

When I got my diagnosis I was suddenly furious at my perpetrators. A fraction of all the anger and disgust I had given myself for decades finally made its way outwards and I fell apart with it. I didn't know what to do with it. Art therapy stepped in anf gave me a way of processing it healthfully before I did something stupid or gave myself another breakdown.

My anger now comes in flashes but I feel now that it is as much a cry for MY love towards those dreadful wounds.

My father actually found my distress amusing. He would laugh when I became upset. That was bad enough. To have grown around a control freak who could "turn off your air"... dear God. That we are all here today helping each other along is some kind of miracle we should all be proud of.