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Bottled Up! by: Sandra T. Spalding, M.S., NCC, CCMHC I cannot sit quietly any longer: it is time for me to risk and open up even though I know that what I have to say will be unacceptable to your ears. Los Angeles 1992 - helpless rage explodes - oppressed individuals cannot bear to hold the pain inside any longer, and so they act out their anger upon those around them. For nine years I have been a psychotherapist, and I have learned that to one degree or another each and every one of us suffers from helpless rage. It begins in childhood and it builds throughout our lives. Expression of this pain is shaped by the ways in which we have been socialized. Most of us have no idea that helpless rage is a problem for us because we have always been this way and we have nothing to compare it to. Some of us deny it and others intellectualize it away; as you cognitively live out your lives, it goes unrecognized. The disguises take many shapes and form like pains in our bodies, numbness from the neck down, and illness. Anger is an energy, a powerful feeling that must go somewhere. If we turn it inward it goes inside and builds into incipient depression or illness, and for those acting out in Loss Angeles it found no other way. They discharged their helpless rage upon one another and society in order to attempt to personally survive. What I'm inviting all of us to look at, since the old ways of coping are not working any longer, is that most of us developed methods of survival that got us through our youth, but have left us emotionally shut down. A major contributing factor to this is that the feeling of anger in particular is very much a not okay feeling throughout society. I can certainly see why, because we have two extreme examples of coping demonstrated here one is to bury anger and the other is to explode it out and act out on it, hurting ourselves and those around us. So we are afraid of this feeling. We deny anger, hide it, anesthetize it. L.A. explodes it out externally. Many of the rest of us internalize it and invite ourselves to burst internally in the form of ulcers, strokes and heart attacks, etc. I don't think we can afford to hide our heads in the sand any longer. Society as a whole needs new information with which to grow and transform. There are constructive ways to learn to deal with anger rather than kill it or hurt others with it. But, before this can happen, first we must admit and acknowledge the pain rather than deny or suppress it. Society needs help understanding new information so that anger can be identified, labeled, and expressed in safe ways. I want to begin to confront with each and every one of you a major problem, that in my opinion, is undermining America and the world today. By facing rage and learning to cope with it directly, it is possible to carefully dismantle this time bomb that lives recognized or unrecognized within each and everyone of us, thereby freeing us to use our energy in much more productive ways. I am dedicating most of my energy toward this end, as I continue to grow mid learn about new constructive avenues of self expression in general. This fall I will be offering workshops where I will teach Techniques for Emotional Healing. Let's begin to turn this world around. The power to do so lies within each and every one of us. |