I spent much of my adult life with a passive-aggressive cover of apathy
over a white-hot rage. Years of recovery
got that to cool down to anger. More
years of recovery and study helped me to let go of my anger. Now I think of anger as a secondary emotion
triggered by fear—fear of not getting what I want or losing something I already
had.
Feeling anger now leads me to try to consider what is the primary
stimulus/event and interpretation that is causing my angry thoughts. Then I usually conclude that whatever I am
thinking is a bunch of negative counter-productive crap and turn it over to my
higher power. I am not in flight-or-flight
survival situations so there is always time for me to process my anger before
responding (aka creating additional wreckage that has to be cleaned up later).
As always, there is plenty of room for improvement. Today my response to anger generating
thoughts is miraculously better than how it used to be.
Friends were taking about relatives that had died in April today. I talked about missing my sister Valerie very
much. I thought she died in April, but did
not remember exactly when. Valerie was
17 years old when committed suicide 41 years ago on March 31st,
1974. A huge part of my sense of loss
was from the life I expected to have as an upper-middle class white kid in
America to the one I do have now. I can
grieve that loss now much better than how I could back then. My father found Valerie dead on a Monday. Going back to school on Tuesday was a
terrible way to process my grief and loss.
I found out months later from another kid in Junior High that he read in
the local paper that Valerie was a suicide.
That sucked.
I am grateful to have much better skills in dealing with anger, grief
and loss than how it used to be. Turning
it over to my higher power turns any crisis (in my mind) into a situation that
can be processed over time and does not need to be immediately solved with an often
unnecessary and inevitably suboptimal solution.
A suicide affects the family a lot, I remember in high school the best looking fellow's Mother committed suicide, he was devastated, people whispered inuendos about the whole damn thing..I thought this fellow must have suffered terribly, my Mom died when I was young of cancer that was bad enough the best looking fellow suffered the same bullshit I suffered & it was out of his hands, totally....I feel for you, the times have changed a lot since 1974 40 full years ago, I got married that year..Lots of things called taboo are regularly talked about openly which they should have been then the death of one's Mom is a very touchy subject and suicide is more understood, your sibling SISTER deserved and you did too so much better, I am sorry you have suffered from the weight of her untimely passing all these years and rejoice that you can cope with it so much better..happy Passover to you and Easter too..
ReplyDelete