Hi Riza and Maureen,
It’s a challenge for me to try to go back and figure how to explain it in DLP terms because at the time it wasn’t very intellectual at all, and I haven’t actually tried to explain it till now, but here goes.
My therapist (regular talk-therapist) at the time that helped me start to acknowledge that I’d been treated badly (at this time it was about my dad) and helped me see it was ok to feel angry. I did journaling exercises where I'd write hypothetical letters to him about how I felt. I unloaded all of how angry and hurt I felt on the paper and didn't worry about how bad it sounded. I think I did some screaming into pillows too, but I wasn’t really thinking in terms of techniques.
Things were so bad for me that I felt like I couldn't not be completely emotionally overwhelmed. So... I think a lot of it was that I was in so much pain by that point that I just gave up holding it all together and just let the floodgates open, because I kind of felt like I'd die if I didn't. I don’t recommend waiting until being in this much pain, obviously!
Even though I had some fears about emotional overwhelm, I was not resisting it, so I allowed the anger and more so the pain under it to be pretty intense. I was sort of afraid of the emotions making me go crazy or somehow shutting down my body and dying, but even that I didn’t think about that much because I already felt like I was going crazy and dying before I started feeling all those emotions, and so once I started feeling stuff it felt sort of relieving at the same time. I just felt what was there and didn’t try to slow it down or minimize the intensity. I also was open to the grief and pain underneath, so I don’t think I had a tendency to stay in the anger in order to avoid the grief. I can recall spending more time in the tears under the anger than the actual anger. I also no longer had any resistance to seeing how my dad really treated me and feeling that, and so that helped me get into the full emotion, too.
Though the CFS went away in about a year after I started opening up some emotions, what I can reflect on now is that in a couple years following that, when I was resisting emotions, I would sometimes go through phases of being more tired than usual, though nowhere near what the CFS was like. During those years (still before DT), I started to allow expression of anger by myself in a bit more overt ways. During part of this time I lived in a little cottage in the woods by myself for about 2.5 years and it was a good environment for me to scream and yell, and I would throw things in a non damaging way (like clothes). I had a concrete porch and I would slam my running shoes down on it which was a good release. But again, really the time spent in anger was a lot less than the time spent in the tears underneath it.
So I hope this is helpful; as I said before I didn’t analyze too much at the time so it’s a little hard to recall and explain it.
Riza, it does feel to me like you’re still quite in your head about it rather than working through the blocks you have and just allowing yourself to feel, and maybe you’re wanting to understand it all intellectually before just starting to allow the emotions. I think you’re right in what you said in reflecting your resistance to both the anger and the sadness, and that’s why you’re in your head about it. I’ve noticed you’ve mentioned a resistance to feeling your anger in a couple of your posts since you joined, so I’d just work through
why you don’t want to feel these emotions.
One of the biggest giveaways for me with adult vs childhood anger is, if I’m angry at another person in my current life who is
not one of the people who damaged me in childhood, no matter what the current-life person has done, if I’m angry at them then I’m in adult anger and I’m only angry at them because an addiction is not being met. Childhood anger will be about the persons in your childhood and will be related to the childhood events, and there will be no resistance to feeling it when you’re sincerely wanting to go there. Also, if you haven’t seen them, there are a few really awesome vids on anger in the FAQ playlist on emotions here:
https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=P ... 8_tDiaEGVB
Courtney