On Anger and Ancient History

People get angry. They get angry over many things, me or something I have done often being one of those things. Most times the anger confuses me. I have to stop and think and put myself in the other person's place long enough to understand where they are coming from. I can then usually comprehend the situation enough to form an action plan. But I rarely feel anger towards someone else on my own behalf. And it would appear that this is not a good thing. I don't understand the concept of wanting to be angry. Being angry is uncomfortable. I would even go so far as to say it hurts. But I am trying to see the value of the results that getting angry can yield.

The Komets played well on Wednesday night. They were up 4-1 when Kevin Hanson took a cross-check from behind and bounced head-first off the wall by the bench. He went down and never got back up again. They took him straight from the ice to the hospital and we had very little information on him. He remained conscious and had movement in his arms and feeling throughout his body. The rest was left to the imagination. At that point, there were just over 12 minutes left in the last period and the Komets could have gotten angry at the other team, channeled that anger and wiped the ice with them. They didn't. They held their lead but skated like their minds were at the hospital with Hanson. Anger would have served them well that night.

I got grilled by the in-laws last night. We had dinner and then an hour and a half of interrogation as to my plan to keep from doing anything so stupid again. It was 2 parts lecture, 7 parts guilt trip and 1 part concern. Frankly, I wanted NO part of it at all. But I screwed up and there are consequences to be paid. Lack of trust, being treated like a child, lengthy repetitive lectures, and demands to "never do that to us again" are all to be expected. That doesn't mean I have to like it. By the time we got home, I felt deflated. Tired, hurt and feeling guilty as hell, I wanted to curl up and hide. Apparently, I should have been annoyed and/or indignant.

The shrink caught me totally off-guard this morning. I expected yet another lecture, possibly veiled or at least a bit gentler in its delivery, but another lecture nonetheless. I expected him to be angry with me. Instead, my slightly out-of-sorts shrink informed me that he was angry at the biggest of the demons behind my Wall. In fact, he said he couldn't think of any polite names for Him. He blames Him for the OD. And he is angry at Him. And I said "HUH?!" (Well, no I didn't, but I thought it very loudly. *wink*) The shrink is ill today, recovering from a very nasty cold and in a strange mood. But I still didn't expect that. He... is angry at... Him, not me. I don't fully comprehend this as I despise myself for that situation.

It is his opinion, based on my description of what happened and how I was feeling at the time and based on my past behaviors, that when I pulled the covers over my head Saturday afternoon, I dissociated completely and gave over control to whomever happened to be willing to take it at any given moment. And at some point on Sunday, whoever took that control decided that death was the more favorable option. Even though most of me disagreed, no one put up a fight. I shut down and the results were disastrous, almost fatal. What he says makes sense, probably the most sense of any explanations I've heard to date, including my own. (I don't know why no one will own up to having done it though and even my regulars seem to have no knowledge of it...)

At any rate, the shrink says if not for Him, I never would have learned to dissociate like I do and therefore would not have been in the position I was in and therefore not have had the OD. And he's angry. He said if I had been coherent and cognitive ("like you are now" is how he phrased it) then he would be mad at *me* but as things stand, he is mad at Him. I asked him if I should be angry too and he said it would probably help. Not that I would want to stay angry but getting angry might help me work through it.

Getting angry, it seems, can be helpful. As with all emotions, it is what is done with it that determines its benefit or harm. One thing that I am quite capable of doing (though sometimes I stubbornly refuse to do so) is finding a way to interpret a negative as a positive. It's not really a half-empty/half-full thing, it's more of a "that glass is half-empty? This is good because I don't like to drink water and that's all the less I have to drink!" So I am more likely to identify how something *is* and then work with what is there to make things go a better way than to try to change how they are into something different. This leads me to wonder how I can make what I *have* work instead of trying to change who I am. I'm not mad at Him for what happened. I blame myself for it.

On the other hand, if anyone even THOUGHT about messing with my kids, I would truly, genuinely and easily become angry. So... maybe I can use that. Rather than try to squish all my different points of view into one lonely voice, maybe I can make better use of the segregation. I haven't managed to get mad for ME, but maybe I can get mad for Ginny, get mad for Mary, get mad for the Others who exist because no one got mad for them when they needed it. Maybe I can find a way to get mad at the right person, for the first time. This isn't going to be easy. I am fully aware that they are me and I am them and we are the same. But it may be easier to get mad for them then to try to generate the anger for myself.

I read a news snippet tonight that has added fuel to my fiery thoughts. The death penalty... wow. People get really angry about this. And I get angry at the thought of anyone hurting a child like that. So why is it so different when it comes to looking at my own situation? The shrink explained it to me this morning. Young children don't have the ability to reason through things. And they don't develop their own sense of "right" and "wrong" until after age 8. But I was only 6 when shit hit the fan. And He took the way that a 6 year old thinks and corrupted it to His purpose, twisting the natural thought patterns into a total distortion of reality. This was not just manipulation, it was premeditated and carefully thought out manipulation.

The thing is - and really this is what trips me up and truly messes with my head - WHY?!?! Why would someone do something so deliberate and cruel without a reason? He used everything I had been taught about life and rules and "good" and "bad" to teach me that I was the embodiment of everything that could be bad in a child. And He was a very effective teacher; I learned the lesson with all my heart. BUT... if it were one person in my life who had done an awful thing in an awful way, I could chalk it up to one evil person. I don't understand Evil but I know it exists. Except, it wasn't one incident or even one person. Everything He said meshed with the things I was regularly told by everyone, even those who didn't know each other. And once He was long gone, other people gave me the same message in similar ways, people who didn't know each other and didn't know my past. One person I can chalk up to a moral anomaly... but it wasn't one person. The only thing I can think of that would explain that is if..... He was right.

And it all comes back to that. How can I explain it any other way? How can I get mad at *Him* for what *I* did?

The shrink doesn't understand because he doesn't have all the pieces to the puzzle and I've never been able to make myself give them to him. There are words I can't say or write or type or even think of as words. When other people say them, I can't hold their eyes and I look away. I still tell myself over and over that most of the things never happened. I think they could not have really happened. I created the memories in my mind to manufacture reasons for my behaviors around the time. Right? Right?

Ah, but that is all ancient history, water under the bridge, as they say... No need to go there.