Day 9: Allow yourself to feel
The one emotion I have always had the hardest time with is anger. I have done a lot of work over the years on allowing myself to be angry. It started when I was in therapy about 7 years ago and my therapist noticed that I never said I was angry about anything. We talked about why I was denying myself the right to be angry. It was rooted in my childhood experiences with anger. It was painful talking about those parts of my childhood. About how when I was very little, my father was always angry and when he was angry, he hit my mother. And about how after my parents’ divorce, my mother would hit me when she was angry. Talking about these things made me realize that I had formed a core truth that anger hurts people so I had decided to never be angry. I didn’t trust myself to be angry. I thought that if I allowed myself to be angry, I would hurt someone. Slowly I learned to let myself feel angry and trust that I can control my behavior. It still isn’t easy or feel natural to be angry, but I’ve gotten better at it.