Never felt angry

[Penelope35]

Hi everyone

One thing that I believe is holding me back from emotionally detaching from my ex is the fact that I never felt angry towards him. Although I am not excusing his behavior, the fact that he had talked to me about his childhood years together with the fact that I have reached to explanations about his behavior through learning about BPD doesn't let me be angry with him ever. We know anger is one of the stages of grieving and although I have been going back and forth between all other stages I seem to be skipping anger all the time... .

I am worried that this won't let me move forward with my healing. Does anyone relate to this?

[joeramabeme]

Hi Penolope35 - Yes!  I can relate to "stuffing anger".  I have had to ask myself why and the best answer I have come up with is because it scares me.  My parents anger scared me as a child and my own anger scared me as a young man.  When I did finally express my anger it was frequently out of proportion and mis-timed.  So the message I distilled was; anger is "bad" - avoid at all costs.  This message got intertwined with my religious upbringing - good people do not get angry - anger is the domain of God etc.

As a result, my anger gets suppressed and as I was once told by a T, it doesn't go away, it just gets turned inward - at me.  The T also said that anger turned inward manifests as depression; I could sure relate to that.

I suppose that the real issue that I had with anger (and still do but to a lesser degree) is learning how to deal with it in a healthy way, I only saw it expressed in extremes or repressed altogether.  I believe all our feelings are given to us for a reason and suspect that anger has a healthy self-protection component to it.  To discard it as bad or immoral is not helpful nor healthy. 

Some healthy ways I deal with my anger today is to name it; what am I angry about?  With whom am I angry?  And for me, the most important question, why am I angry?  After identifying it I can plan an action.  Perhaps tell a friend that something they did made me angry.  Decide not to put myself in a situation that angers me.

Of course when I started dealing with all of this there was a lengthy backlog of anger inside of me that had to find an expression.  Sometimes I could address the person or source of the anger, more often not.  Overall, learning to deal with my anger in a healthy way has taken time and practice. 

Do you feel scared of your anger?  Or do you have a hunch that you are suppressing it?

[Penelope35]

Hmm got me thinking here joeramabeme... .I do think I am suppressing anger. My T has told me in other cases that I turn my anger inwards and I keep attacking my self instead of expessing it in a healthy way. I used to have a really hard time expressing any negative feelings actually but I have gotten better at this through the work with my T. In this case I am not even feeling angry though  but yes I think I may be turning it inwards... .

Thank you for this reply. You really gave me food for thought.

I am glad for you for managing to identify the reasons why you were suppressing yours and getting better at expressing it in healthier ways. Nice!

[balletomane]

I've never felt angry with my ex either, for the same reasons as you. He is obviously emotionally damaged and this prevented the anger from taking root. There are times when I wish I could have been angry, because it felt as if it might speed my recovery process. When he told me about my 'replacement' (the woman he'd cheated on me with/discarded me for) he said, "You need to be brave. I'm having to be brave. It's not easy for me to try a new relationship." I did feel something at that, but it wasn't anger, it was exasperation. I was frustrated that he couldn't see that ping-ponging between eight or nine different partners in three years (and ensuring he had a new relationship waiting before he let go of the previous partner) isn't actually brave. But no matter how I tried, I couldn't feel anger towards him personally, much less vent it.

But I'm still doing well and have made good progress in my healing. The main thing is that I'm able to see that a.) his behaviour to me was abusive and cruel and b.) I didn't deserve to be treated that way. Providing you can recognise the truth about how you were treated, you understand that you are not to blame for your ex's mental health problems, and you are looking after yourself, I think it doesn't matter so much if you're angry or not. People's paths to healing are different.

[MapleBob]

My anger came after, for sure. That might have come as a result of being blinded by love, or codependence, or a general tendency that I have to rationalize my feelings - but it's also when her mask came off, and things got a bit ugly. I was doing pretty well in the relationship, but out of it was another matter.

[Penelope35]

Thank you for your replies.

Balettomane the thing is when trying to see this relationship for what it was, I do realise that I did not deserve to be treated the way I was, but this brings me sadness. Not anger. At the same time I can see my friends fuming when I talk to them about him, things he did etc and I am pretty sure I would be fuming too if anything like this had happened to a friend or family member of mine. It kind of makes me think that it's not normal to not feel angry at all... I don't know... .I feel like it would be a step further in my healing if I did.


MapleBob I found out he is married after the break up and his behavior has been SO manipulative since then. He keeps sending me messages to tell me how desperate he is to talk to me, how much he misses and loves me and all. But all the while he knows that we cannot be together. He doesn't respect that he needs to leave me alone. And I am still never getting angry.

[C.Stein]

When he told me about my 'replacement' (the woman he'd cheated on me with/discarded me for) he said, "You need to be brave. I'm having to be brave. It's not easy for me to try a new relationship." I did feel something at that, but it wasn't anger, it was exasperation.

I'll feel angry for you because saying something like that is worthy of anger IMO.

[Narkiss]

I have a lot of trouble getting angry also. I may start feeling angry and then I begin feeling compassion/understanding/love for pwBPD and think of him instead of me. And, trust me, he has done a lot to deserve anger -- even full-throated rage. I have never gotten angry enough at anyone I am close to. I disappear, shut down or turn it inward into guilt and shame. (I just realized that through reading people's posts). People think I am so easy-going and accepting. Too much so. Same reason, of course. Dysfunctional family. My mother was diagnosed with NPD and raged. I was never able/allowed to respond. Anger terrifies me. I wasn't heard. I became a really good listener instead.

My BPD heard me (at least seemed to). That is really difficult to let go.

Why do you think you can't get angry?

[balletomane]

Balettomane the thing is when trying to see this relationship for what it was, I do realise that I did not deserve to be treated the way I was, but this brings me sadness. Not anger. At the same time I can see my friends fuming when I talk to them about him, things he did etc and I am pretty sure I would be fuming too if anything like this had happened to a friend or family member of mine. It kind of makes me think that it's not normal to not feel angry at all... I don't know... .I feel like it would be a step further in my healing if I did.

I relate to this. I didn't tell my friends or family what he was doing to me for a long time because on one level I knew they'd be furious and I didn't want them to judge him unjustly - or what I saw as unjustly. I felt that I 'understood' him and his problems; they didn't, so they weren't going to be compassionate in the way he deserved. When I did finally tell friends what had happened, and started to accept their love and support, it took me a while to see that in their anger they were being compassionate to me in the way I deserved - they understood that what had happened to me was not right, they wanted better for me, and this was a fair and natural reaction. That was a revelation to me. It enabled me to focus on my own needs and healing and to stop feeling guilty about prioritising those needs instead of squashing them down and pouring myself into efforts to please my ex and look after him. I had fallen into the trap of devaluing myself and focusing only on him. He had certainly encouraged me to think that way through his treatment of me, but he would never have been able to make me believe it all by himself - that lack of self-compassion already existed, he just dug it deeper. My friends' anger illuminated the problem and encouraged me to focus on being kinder to myself. Perhaps self-compassion will one day include anger at my ex; I don't know. But I won't try to force it.

Writing that, something has just occurred to me: my ex was constantly accusing me of thinking the wrong thoughts and having the wrong feelings. It was as if he thought he could mind-read. A lot of his most vicious destructive outbursts were about things he either believed I was thinking, but wasn't; or feelings I'd expressed and he didn't think were valid (not getting angry with a friend and cutting off contact with her because she cancelled lunch with me at short notice, for example). I would get so scared of his outbursts and so filled with self-doubt (his certainty that he was 100% right was disorientating) that sometimes I would try to force myself to experience the 'correct' feeling. I think this may have led me to dutifully try and experience anger when I left the relationship, because I had been left with the belief that some feelings were valid and others weren't, and I thought that anger must be the 'right' thing to feel now. Do you think that some of this might be true for you?

However we feel in this moment is valid. That is where we are at, and that is OK. Maybe anger would help you and maybe it wouldn't, but you can't push yourself into it. Just try and work with the thoughts and emotions you have right now. I really think that accepting ourselves just as we are in any given moment and having patience with our own progress is the key to recovery, not how we feel or don't feel.

When he told me about my 'replacement' (the woman he'd cheated on me with/discarded me for) he said, "You need to be brave. I'm having to be brave. It's not easy for me to try a new relationship." I did feel something at that, but it wasn't anger, it was exasperation.

I'll feel angry for you because saying something like that is worthy of anger IMO.

Thank you. I've never told anyone about that before and affirmation from people outside the situation is still helpful for me.

[GreenEyedMonster]

Dysfunctional family. My mother was diagnosed with NPD and raged. I was never able/allowed to respond. Anger terrifies me. I wasn't heard. I became a really good listener instead.

My BPD heard me (at least seemed to). That is really difficult to let go.

Oh yes, this sounds familiar.  I didn't have the raging mother, but I was always punished for being angry, and always taught it was an inappropriate response to anything.  When being angry always results in being cut off as a kid, you begin to learn to associate being angry with being abandoned, and it leads to a kind of emotional constipation.  I respond with some sort of compassion to even people who wipe their feet all over me.  I gave my ex the benefit of the doubt for a long time even after the breakup.

It took some pretty egregious behavior on my ex's part for me to get angry, notably him threatening to try to send me to prison and doing things that could have cost me thousands of dollars.  It became apparent to me that he was really intending to hurt me, not just blustering.  I became righteously angry when some mutual friends didn't believe me despite copious written proof.  Now, he and I have split into different groups of friends, and he is getting lauded with all kinds of attention and basically "holding court" with his new friends (or at least making it appear this way for our benefit).  I want to puke on my shoes.  I am doing just fine, have moved on, dating other people, have great friends who believe me about what happened, and I have no warm feelings for my ex whatsoever.  But I fume when I see him taking in new victims, because somehow someone like that should get some comeuppance.  I suspect he does it partly so that my friends and I will see it and realize what an amazing person (choke) we have cut out of our group, because he does it very publicly and announces it so that we will see it.  I have to vent here because if I react in real life I will just give him what he wants.

In one of my early posts I compared my ex to the Black Knight from Monty Python, someone who suffers wound after wound but never reflects upon the situation to see that they are complicit in their own destruction.  Yeah, that's my ex.