Day 18 An accumulation of anger

"Take a look at your journal entries. What emotions are most prevalent?"

For me, it's definitely the anger. I think in some instances it's intense enough to qualify as rage. I've always known it was "down there," but I've most often consciously decided to ignore it, leave it alone, let sleeping dogs lie. Now, with the journaling, I've become much more aware of the accumulation of anger I'm carrying around.

My parents didn't allow for expression of any "negative" emotions, either from themselves, or especially from us kids. (In fact, now that I think about it, my father's chronic hip pain in the 1950s probably was TMS, too.)

I had what were probably the usual childhood disagreements and encounters with others that I felt angry about. But without any outlet for the emotion, I just basically decided not to feel it, which became a pattern for most all of my emotions. That's one reason I find Alan Gordon's program so helpful -- he provides very basic instruction regarding what emotions feel like in the body, something I've been pretty ignorant about.

I'm enjoying the SEP, learning a lot, and trying to find the middle way -- between attacking the problem in my typical, over-achieving way and not doing the work at all. Even if my back pain doesn't resolve, this emotional work is very helpful and worth the effort.

Mike

 

Hi, Mike. Your folks didn't do you any favor by not allowing you to express your emotions. But as you say your father probably had TMS, and your mother, too. They were probably repressing their feelings, or just not admitting their pains were psychological. That was the way it was in my family.

Thank God we learned about TMS. Anger, says Dr. Sarno, is the cause of most of our TMS pain. I learned to forgive. It relieved me of emotional and back pain.

My computer makes me ANGRY because it shuts down before I finish a post here.

I just laugh it off, or else I would bash it with a hammer. haha.

We can get over anger. It just takes forgiving, even me forgiving my computer.