Accepting Anger and other emotions

The first words out of my mouth today were:

“I don’t want to be here today.”

I was not in the mood for talking, or dealing with *why* I didn’t want to be there talking. K was very subtle, and asked me about my stress levels.

Initially I gave her one-word answers and I guess she is used to dealing with resistant/irritable, grouchy clients, and I said “It’s… work. My training starts next week. Our entire department is changing, it’s incredibly stressful, and I hate change. It might be like this two weeks from now. I wouldn’t be surprised if I come into therapy all grouchy and irritable.”

She took it in stride: listening to what I had to say, asked me about my Window of Tolerance, and gave me 1–2 minute “breaks” to just cuddle Buddy, inhale him, calm myself. Eventually she was able to get me to laugh a couple of times, but it was probably obvious I wasn’t in a great mood.

She also thanked me for coming into therapy and saying that I felt stressed and irritable and didn’t feel like talking. Because she could understand that generally, when you are meeting with a professional — a teacher, a coworker, a supervisor, etc — you want to be on your best behaviour.

“It has been very, very difficult to shrug off the mentality that I need to be on good behaviour. That sitting here and being angry, irritable, cranky is acceptable.”

She emphasized that anger is a very acceptable, normal emotion, and that it seems that because my mom didn’t know how to process her own emotions in a healthy way, I didn’t exactly have the best modelling for these negative emotions. That I always felt “guilty” for being frustrated or tired after a long day.

I also remember many, many times where I wasn’t “allowed” to have negative emotions, so I just buried them. But like all things those emotions would lash out, spill out and become “a mess.”