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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.