Reply to I cannot stop feeling so deeply angry at someone

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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]This person is not worth the energy you are putting into your anger.[/quote]

And that anger is giving this person a prime spot, THE prime spot, in your mental real estate, OP. In essence this person is, to put it crudely, "winning" against you, even after the abuse is long over, by taking up so much of your emotional and mental time and energy.

For those reasons, this stranger is begging you to get back into therapy, or, if you're still in therapy, to tell your therapist more fully exactly what you told us here. Maybe change therapists if you have one but for some reason aren't being this frank with the therapist as you are anonymously here. We can advise all day, and you'll get posts asking you for more and more details here "so we can help you better" etc. (often these come from people who just get kicks out of all the gory details--don't feed those beasts). But you need to see a professional to evict this person from your mind. Your life is being impaired and that gives this person power over you. I won't say, "Just stop giving this person power over you" becuase it is so hard to do that on one's own. See a new therapist, or tell your current one your whole, raw, angry truth, or restart therapy if you've stopped it, but you need help to take back your life and thoughts. You deserve to have your true self back and that cannot happen with just venting to strangers online. Please, please get help.[/quote]

You don't get it. My therapist knows I feel this way. Have you ever been through this? If not, you don't get it.

And yes, I'm aware that this person is winning, that they have won. That's the whole point. No matter what I do I can never get back what they took.

Also, I'm not sharing any details here, I'm not stupid.[/quote]

I am not in the same boat [b]but my therapy has only amplified my bitter feelings.[/b] I think we could both be helped by seeking healing in another outlet. [/quote]

DP.  You said upthread that you have learned that you must express feelings to be able to move past them but many people have the experience that expressing negative feelings increases them and is not the solution.

The way to let negative feelings go is to let them go, not to focus on them and give them more power through expression.  [/quote]

You are not responding to a post by the OP but I am tending to lean into what you are saying. The problem is too much baggage. It's like how hard it is to cut family off when you still have tons of ties that bind in other ways. Can you let go of bad feelings for an abusive teacher if you still see them in the hallway every school day? People often side against a victim because the victim is so upset, never mind they didn't ask for any of it in the first place. The guy that rocks the boat is annoying but the person who rocks the boat back is looked down on even more.[/quote]

The issue is that when you have strong negative feelings and share them, and the response is "you need to let them go," if the person cannot let them go (which is common if you're talking about trauma), then instead what you are really saying is "bottle those feelings up and don't take about them anymore." Which is toxic AF.

There are very limited spaces in the world where you can say stuff like this. In therapy, maaaaaaybe with very close friends and family (but even that is dicy because most peopel are just not able to hold emotions like this and it will freak them out to see someone they love express this stuff, it's just really rare to have a support network that can handle this unless you are paying them), and then on an anonymous site like this. Maybe a support group IF you can find one, they are actually hard to find.

Which is why "you need to let it go" is just such useless advice. How? When you have been harmed like this, you can try to think about other things, you can exercise, meditate, whatever. At some point you are going to wind up thinking about what happened and you're going to feel how you feel.

Just where exactly is it that you folks think all these negative feelings go?[/quote]

It is totally useless advice. Next comes the lecture about why do you see yourself as a victim? Well, because you were victimized. The only productive approach is to stop inviting people to take advantage of you. You were genuinely victimized. Victim has become a dirty shameful word and it’s all about not enforcing accountability for perpetrators.[/quote]

+1, the comments about "you need to get out of this victim mentality" make me mad because is anyone telling the abuser, condescendingly, "you need to get out of this abuser mentality."

It's not a mentality. If someone harms you, you're a victim. I'm a believer in the power of language and embrace using the term "survivor" over victim and I totally agree we need to find ways to facilitate survivors feeling empowered to make changes and take control. But the truth is that if someone hurts you and gets away with it, you feel powerless because you have been stripped of power. Expecting someone in that situation to believe they actually are powerful when their abuser and the people who facilitated, ignored, or covered up the abuse have provided copious evidence to the contrary is not a realistic expectation. When people succeed at this, you should be wowed by them. When people fail at it, you should be understanding.

If you want to yell at someone, yell at abusers.[/quote]

DP.  These comments are not yelling at OP or PPs.  It's a variation of the wisdom of Carolyn Hax (who, like her or not, is occasionally right).  You can't change other people, you can only change yourself.  And no one else can change you, not your therapist, not anyone else.  Only you can change yourself.  So if you want to, you will.  [/quote]

I think peopel who do this don't understand how trauma works. Whether they are "yelling" or not is debatable -- the truth is that is not kind to tell someone to do something that they are trying and failing to do as a form of advice. Like this is what it sounds like:

A: I was hurt very bad, I'm struggling, I want to feel better but don't
B: Do this, this and this and then you will feel better
A: I did all those things, I still don't feel better
B: Stop being a victim, you just have to change how you feel

It's just a weird brick wall of advice. It doesn't help. Maybe this works for other things, like if someone who is unhappy in their job and complains about it all the time, maybe telling them "the only person who can change this is you" will help because in that situation, they can in fact change it. But telling people with PTSD to just let go, stop being a victim, etc... it just doesn't make sense within the context of the problem. It's like telling some whose bored to go visit the moon because that would be an exciting thing to do. I mean, I guess, but that's obviously not a feasible solution to that problem.

This is what the phrase "trauma-informed" means when it comes to therapy or other forms of services designed to help people. A lot of the "common sense" advice on improving your life just doesn't make sense in the context of trauma, and can even be harmful.[/quote]

Look, to an extent, we define our realities.  If you believe everything you just wrote, that is how your life will play out.  For others who choose to do whatever they can to move on and find a new identify for themselves, that is how their life will play out.  No one is denying OP's feelings or suffering but only offering advice on how to mold a new identity for herself so that her life is not defined by this one event.  [b]If you look at human history, it always strikes me how much people in past centuries suffered.  The women who lose child after child, the hardships, the wars, etc.  But yet they persevered.  All the focus on being hurt and being a victim is really quite a modern phenomenon[/b] and while useful in to some degree, can backfire and make us less resilient.  Stop looking inward and focus on someone else.

OP is very mature for not wishing real harm to the perp but is angry at him "getting away."  My advice would be to focus on you having done right, regardless of outcome or how others perceived the situation.  You didn't do anything wrong, followed your conscience to confronted him.  Can you take comfort in that?  None of us are judged by the misfortunes that befall us, but by how we acted.  And again, do whatever you need to distance yourself and start afresh.  Move to a new location/neighborhood if possible, cut off all shared acquaintances, get a new job if job related.  [/quote]

I don't really agree with your point but I just wanted to highlight that the bolded is not true. For historical research projects, I've read a large volume of personal letters written by people in the early 19th century, and let me tell you -- those folks focused plenty on being hurt and "being a victim." People have ALWAYS struggled with these kinds of interpersonal hurts and harms, with power struggles and humiliation. We tend to put this rosy, dignified patina on portrayals of previous eras in our media, but this is not accurate. Lifelong grudges between neighbors, parents disinheriting their children, siblings who don't speak to each other for decades over childhood hurts. This is not a new thing, it's not some new weakness or vulnerability developed by modern people. It's very old and probably just part of the human condition. Since people started forming societal groups for safety and comfort, the betrayal of social bonds has been among the hardest things for people to recover from.[/quote]

Have you actually talked to people in previous generations?  And compared it with talking to people now with all the trauma mentality?  Of course everyone is going to have petty angry thoughts and literature is going to be full of them because that makes for drama.  But people have lived through REAL hardship and not only survived but managed to achieve more happiness than people today who live during the best of times. [/quote]

Historian here. You may think that you are contradicting the PP but you’re actually illustrating a known problem relying on living narrators who have had the benefit of time to modulate their experiences of what happened in the past. The contemporaneous accounts—not “literature—the PP was rightly pointing to are a far more reliable source.[/quote]

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