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Anger
(lemmy.world)
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this post was submitted on 29 Jul 2026
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Okay, but, my fellow tumblrite, therapy isn't going to help with that. When you went to your therapist, they assumed you want to stop feeling a certain way and feel different. If you don't want the help they can offer to achieve that (which is valid), why are you there?
A mental health therapist can and should be able to help a client manage their righteous anger as they work their way through it together. Anger underlies a great many things, and grief is one of them. You don't just say, "I don't want to feel angry," or just decide, "I'm not going to be angry about this anymore," when the rage is this broad and deep and well-established: in time, that kind of denial and repression is just going to explode in your face, if it works at all.
Instead, because anger is very well understood, there are known ways to deal with it. Anger doesn't just disappear on its own, nor even very quickly, and a person suffering this kind of grief could use some assistance diving into the anger and the very exact specifics that are causing it. The therapist should be able to navigate this presenting anger with relative ease and guide the client through it, not just with skillful therapeutic inquiries to get to the very specific root of this writer's unique grief which is where they'd start, but also with coping skills to give the client to be able to self-manage their righteous rage for as long as it takes them to work through it and clear it so that their overwhelming grief can resolve.
This therapist is doing none of that. Instead, they are just offering commentary on the presence and length of the anger as though they're watching a movie, when they could and should be helping the writer sort it out and work through it. That's not on the writer, that's on the therapist.
Yes but to what end? It doesn't sound to me like they want to manage it and work through it and clear it. They want to hold on to their anger.
No, they really don't. What they want is to feel better, and for their therapist to stop playing "no shit Sherlock" with their pain by pointing out obvious irrelevancies in regard to it.
What they want to hold onto is the very specific, unique truth to their grief that is invariably found behind the anger. When they find it, that very specific point or points fueling the rage, they no longer need the anger: it has served its purpose.
That's not in the post though. It might be true but the post is saying they want to stay angry (until society properly deals with the fallout from the pandemic). Anything else is your interpretation based on what might seem logical but without even knowing them.
Lol, no. Why would this writer by choice be paying a therapist his time and cash to painfully bare his soul so that the therapist can say idiotic things to him and not just assist him in remaining exactly where he is, but actively make it worse?
Dude, he could get that for free (and probably already is from friends and family telling him he needs to "move forward" like that's just a decision he can make).
Look again. That person is simply telling the therapist they will not release their anger just because society has said it's been long enough. That's just not how it works, and this writer knows it. The writer will release the anger when the anger has served its purpose. That is not accomplished with facile lies, much less casual grief-shaming.
Frankly, a therapist should know what purpose anger serves off the top of their head: that alone would guide them forward. Not everyone does, and that's okay, just not so much in a therapist.
But when you can't recognize a overt cry of anguish and grief, and you mistake someone correcting their therapist from that place of inner agony for someone that "wants to stay angry," all you're really telling me is that you've never had a situation like the writer's, nor a therapist that could take you through your darkest hour and help you see what you needed to see to get back out of the cave of your grief again.
Truly amazing how you can diagnose people from a distance, solely from what they write.
I know this comes as news to you, but this has all been studied literally since the beginning of time. Anger was discussed by the earliest philosophers. The writer openly describes it himself.
So what's the diagnosis I've provided? Do you even know what an diagnosis is, or is that just a word you threw at me because it sounded smart and -- wait for it -- you're angry?
It's not saying that they want to stay angry, it's that being angry about it is righteous and justified, and everyone should be angry enough about it to prevent something like it from ever happening again. But half of people still don't even acknowledge covid was real, nevermind the social issues it exposed. Being angry is a reasonable response.
And I agree that it's reasonable. Which, in my mind, translates directly to "I don't want to stop being angry, stop trying to make me calm down."
I think it's more "stop telling me that being angry isn't an appropriate response to current social issues." The therapist could be working on coping strategies or mindfulness techniques to deal with the anger in constructive ways.
I don't know if that's what the therapist is saying. But even if so, the patient needs to be (or at least try to be) clear with what they're hoping to achieve in therapy. If the therapist is ignoring what OOP has told them, that would be the problem but we don't know if that's what's happening.
i think a therapist should be able to help their patient with feels that are the correct reactions to a situation, without resulting to a "why aren't you over this already?"
i bet this specific form of anger also makes the patient feel incredibly hopeless, so their mind has a choice - to feel anger, or despair, they chose anger, and it needs to be worked through in a healthy way, not just gotten over with
What is a healthy reaction to the realization that you live in a society that does not care for you? That rewards sociopaths who will lie for their own wealth and power in ways that kill millions?
i've got no idea man. maybe trying to do activism?
my imperfect solution was to limit media intake, i'm fully aware i'm just holding hands in front of my eyes pretending i don't see - but you know what, i'm no longer depressed, i'm no longer riddled with anxiety... so i guess plugging your ears and going lalalalala works. (i have to add that i do my best to stay kind of informed, but not too much. basically whatever memes give me, i'll know)
I can't say you are wrong.
One where you channel the anger into positive change. For some that's volunteering and doing something to help the cause they're so angry about, for others it may be working hard to emigrate to a different country that doesn't embrace disease as a virtue. That's where the therapist can help, not by invalidating the patient's feeling, which everyone should learn in psychology 101.
Probably looks a lot like this:
https://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1917/staterev/
That's basically what the op is about. Anger is an appropriate reaction and the therapist is treating it like it isn't.
Yes. Maybe the anger is justified, but is it helpful?
Being furious all the time is really hard on your body. It's hard on your relationships with other people.
Anger is useful in a fight where it can be used to overcome fear and ignore pain. But, it's hard to go to bed and get a good night's rest if you're still seething with anger.
Maybe, sometimes, anger can be a good thing in the long term if you want to maintain the energy needed to get a law changed or something. That's not something that happens overnight, and it's easy to get discouraged. But, you need to be able to balance that with being able to sleep properly, to socialize, to perform well enough at your job so you don't get fired and don't end up homeless.
If you just want to be angry, then stop wasting the therapist's time, and wasting your own money.
Exactly. Whether or not you feel justified in your anger and grief, it is maladaptive to hold onto them if it is preventing you from living your life. You can move past awful things, but you have to actually recognize the issue and want to change.
It is no measure of health to be well adapted to profoundly sick society.
At what point do we acknowledge that YOUR response is maladaptive for the human race as a whole because it has led us here? It has led us to this point. You people who decide that feeling calm and at ease is more important than dealing with dangerous people or situations.
I am angry because these things are still present. I am angry because they are not being dealt with in any way. If you want me to "adapt" to my environment and learn to live with the evils that take place daily, to not be angry when I see mothers liquified by our bombs, to be calm when I see police drag a man out of a council meeting for clapping 3 times, you can get fucked.
You can get absolutely fucked. I will remain BLOODTHRISTY AND CONSUMED BY RAGE until I can QUENCH MY FUCKING THIRST.
It isn't about the external world though. You could live in an utopia, experience grief and loss, and be unable to feel happy or do the things you want to do for your whole life because of it.
Regardless of the condition of the world, you would suffer. Suffering is an internal, mental state.
I think it is best to try to reduce that suffering as an end in itself. But you could also think about it in terms of helping the suffering person achieve whatever it is that they want. No matter what it is they want to do, letting go of their attachment to their suffering will be beneficial. That includes changing the material conditions that caused the event in the first place. It is easier to do that if you aren't suffering.
Also, that is not to say they just "forget" and move on. It is simply that their relationship to the event that caused the suffering has changed. You can accept that the event occurred and that you suffered, but not allow it to cause you further suffering. That's easier said than done, but it is possible if someone wants to attempt it.
What happens when people let go of their suffering is that they let go of any real drive to do anything about it. I have known people that have suffered and through counseling have bettered their life. But the thing that caused their suffering? Unaffected. Unchanged. And if not forgotten, ignored or some small pittance of virtue signaling that they care about it. Our society is so unbelievably shit at solving problems. We only ever sweep them under the rug.
Economic crash? Bailout
People hit by cars while walking on the road because there is not sidewalk? They shouldn't walk on the road, idiots. Forgotten
Wealth disparity? Ooh look! Another subscription to an app I use once a month.
People don't even attribute the suffering to its actual cause most of the time.
If we want to change things, you need the impetus of extreme emotion to really get shit done. If you have relieved yourself of the suffering, of the anger or grief or fear of something, how could you care about it? How could you possibly claim to care about it to the same degree?
People only want to be comfortable. They don't want to make the world better, as long as they are comfortable in their own little heads.
Yes. Maybe the anger is justified, but is it helpful?
Being furious all the time is really hard on your body. It's hard on your relationships with other people.
Anger is useful in a fight where it can be used to overcome fear and ignore pain. But, it's hard to go to bed and get a good night's rest if you're still seething with anger.
Maybe, sometimes, anger can be a good thing in the long term if you want to maintain the energy needed to get a law changed or something. That's not something that happens overnight, and it's easy to get discouraged. But, you need to be able to balance that with being able to sleep properly, to socialize, to perform well enough at your job so you don't get fired and don't end up homeless.
If you just want to be angry, then stop wasting the therapist's time, and wasting your own money.
clippy pfps are stupid, btw. microsoft was already evil by the time clippy was introduced
That's not the point. Its a reminder that in the late 90s/early 00s, MS was slapped with multiple antitrust lawsuits for their evil actions. Its not
its
Member when the government cared about monopolies and forced companies to split completely when they got too much market share?
Or that time a deadly flu swept through the world and while it did kill a bunch of people (and change the course of history in interesting ways), people and the government followed best practices known by science at the time and social distanced/masked up as best they understood it? Yeah, it got a racial nickname of Spanish flu despite it not originating there but still.
what???
...what does this mean???
Just in case you're missing the reference