Anger Management Revisited

My psyche has been marinating in anger. Why have I been “stewing” in it? As a child, I felt, although I could not articulate it, that my anger would hurt my parents. And even without the fear of harm, expression of anger was not modeled in my home. Expression of any emotion was discouraged. So what did I do with my anger? I turned it against myself. The unsaid but felt words of my mother became the words I directed towards myself. “Don’t be angry; it’s unappealing and scary. Your anger will hurt others, or will drive you to hurt others.” And in the circles I associate with now, the voices I hear say “live in the light,” “think positive,” you create your experience,” you attract what you focus on.” Many voices whisper warnings against expressing and even feeling anger. So I oblige.

Is Anger Bad?

I think I am like most people. We civilized people are expected to control our anger. We label anger as bad and joy as good. But at what price? Do we want to control to the point of repression? What are the consequences of ignored anger? What happens when we can’t even feel our anger?  Obviously we don’t need anger management classes that teach us to count our breath or wait ten minutes when we feel furious. We don’t need lessons in preventing outbursts. We don’t need books or articles or therapists coaching us to stay calm when we feel murderous. We need help feeling murderous in the first place!

Why Express Anger?

Why? Because unfelt feelings do not go away, they mutate. Anger towards a mother may turn to anger towards the self, which can feel like depression. Repressed longing may become an eating disorder. Unacknowledged frustration may turn into chronic headaches. An unidentified anxiety may manifest as hives.

Let's Feel the Feelings

So what’s the solution? Not anger management classes. Maybe Anger Appreciation 101! Which could look like meditation; sitting with the feeling. Notice what happens in our bodies. Notice our thoughts. Feel the anger and then let it go. Maybe know the sadness beneath the anger.

Befriending Demons and Dragons

"Perhaps all the dragons of our lives are princesses who are only waiting to see us once, beautiful and brave.  Perhaps everything terrible is in its deepest being something that needs our love."  Rainer Maria Rilke

Let’s talk about demons and dragons.  What are the dragons in your life?  Who are the demons?  We all have parts of ourselves that we are not proud of. How do we deal with these parts? Do we challenge our demons, shun them, or embrace them?  Do we slay our dragons or do they slay us?

Our Exiles

Maybe what seem like demons are repressed feelings or exiled parts of ourselves. We all have a part or parts of us that we imprison. This part could be a wounded inner child, or angry feelings, or a shameful memory. We hide those unwanted feelings or parts in a dark place. Unfortunately, the darker the dungeon, the angrier or more lonely or more ashamed they become. The spurned feelings get stronger.  Once we get to know them, however, they don’t seem so threatening. If we attend to them, talk to them, they calm down and stop yelling. We can open the door, let them out, and find that they can actually be quite civil after a nice tea-time chat.

Exiles Reconsidered

Maybe these feelings or parts are like histamine.  Histamine helps our bodies fight off pathogens like cold viruses, causing us to feel sick. Our noses run, we develop a fever, we feel run down. We don’t like the histamine, the mucus in our nose, the fever, but they are our helpers. Similarly, our inner critic tries to protect us by criticizing us. He or she may believe that criticism prevents us from getting into trouble; if we feel shame about an act, we will probably refrain. How about our inner child? He or she may throw a tantrum, wanting attention, rest, or love. Our Shadow is another part of us that feels like a threat. But when we shun our Shadow, we project it onto others and lose a potentially valuable part of ourselves.

Kissing Frogs

Our immune system, our Shadow, our inner child, our critic; all may make us feel sick, but it it a love-sickness; the phlegm, the criticism, the walling off don’t feel good, but they are our body’s and psyche’s attempt to heal or protect us. So perhaps what seem like demons and dragons are hexed princes. When we embrace our inner critic, tend to our wounded inner child, love each part of ourselves, the demons, like the kissed frog, become princes.

Jung said it first :-) -- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FvgmyaSTosg

The Use of Touch in Psychotherapy: Beyond the Controversy

While working towards my counseling degree, I wrote this research paper advocating the use of touch in psychotherapy.  I hope that you can look beyond the paper’s formality and enjoy the content!

The Controversy

The use of touch in psychotherapy is controversial. Many therapists and counselors nonetheless find it beneficial and some even necessary, for facilitating health. While physical touch is widely acknowledged and scientifically proven to have a healing impact on physical health, (Dworkin-McDaniel, 2011; Zur, 2011), the use of touch in a psychotherapeutic setting has historically been perceived as questionable if not absolutely forbidden (Pinson, 2002). This paper will briefly discuss the origin of this ambivalence and will defend the use of touch as beneficial and ethical.

Why Not?

There are many sources feeding the ambivalence surrounding touch in psychotherapy. Touch has the possibility of conveying inappropriate power and/or sexuality. Teachers, childcare workers, and of course mental health professionals are cautioned against touching clients and students for fear of being misinterpreted or even sued. What the professional intends as therapeutic touch may be perceived by the client or student as a sexual overture, crossing a boundary, or a display of power. Especially in Western culture, touch outside certain contexts such as romantic coupling and handshakes is suspect. From a Freudian perspective, touch can impede transference or can inappropriately gratify the “Id” and thus delay its mastery by the “Ego” (Pinson, 2002). Many therapists avoid touch, citing fears of unintentionally harming clients or of engendering culpability.

Why Touch?

In spite of these cautions, therapists and healers have been using touch in many forms throughout time, to the recipient's benefit. As stated above, touch has been proven to be physically beneficial to humans. Touch can decrease stress hormones, increase serotonin, oxytocin, and dopamine levels, decrease anxiety, and improve the immune system's functioning, among other benefits (Dworkin-McDaniel, 2011; Field, 1998; Zur, 2011). Studies have shown that patients in traditional psychotherapeutic settings appreciate and have benefited from touch (Horton, Clance, Sterk-Elifson, Emshoff, 1995; Smith, 1998). Jesus, mothers, lovers, shamans, as well as massage therapists, use or have used a hands-on approach to facilitate spiritual, physical, and/or emotional health. And many scientists and health care professionals are questioning whether the three realms (spiritual, physical, and emotional) can be separated. Therapeutic touch is healthy for body, mind, and spirit.

Many psychologists believe that not only is touch not inappropriate in a psychotherapeutic setting, it is actually beneficial. And scientists have proven the connection between the body and emotions (Beckes, 2015; Numenmaa, Glerean, Hari, & Hietanen, 2013; Pert, 1997). If the emotions and body are interconnected, it behooves a mental health professional to treat and even diagnose using the schema of psyche-soma unity. As Pert (1997) states, “...the deepest oldest messages are stored and must be accessed through the body. Your body is your unconscious mind, and you can't heal it by talk alone” (p. 306). Body-centered psychotherapy is based on such a premise. Body-centered psychotherapy encompasses many different approaches to healing, all acknowledging the direct effect of emotions on the body and the effect of the body on emotions. These therapies, in other words, assume the interconnectedness and possibly undifferentiated nature of body/mind. Ofer Zur, in his article on touch in psychotherapy, references more than ten body-centered psychotherapy methods popular today, beginning with an approach developed by Wilhelm Reich, a student of Sigmund Freud (Zur, 2011). Other respected psychotherapists who work with the body include Alexander Lowen, Peter Levine, Ron Kurtz, and Fritz Perls, the originator of Gestalt Therapy. If we see that there is no distinction between the body and the mind, or at the least, a direct effect of one on the other, then including touch as a diagnostic and a healing tool by mental health professionals makes good sense. All healing professions have ethical standards to curtail the inappropriate use of touch, and most therapists and counselors, when presented with proof of the benefits of touch and the interelatedness of body and emotions, will consider the benefits of touch to outweigh the risks. While therapists should use caution when touching clients, the proven connection between body and mind suggests that the use of touch in the context of psychotherapy deserves further attention. And studies involving recently developed body-centered modalities should prove their efficacy and win advocates.

References

Beckes, L., Ijzerman, H., & Tops, M. (2015). Toward a radically embodied neuroscience of attachment and relationships. Frontiers in Human Neuroscience, 9, 266 [article number]. doi: 10.3389/fnhum.2015.00266

Dworkin-McDaniel, N. (2011). Touching makes you healthier. Retrieved from http://www.cnn.com/2011/HEALTH/01/05/touching.makes.you.healthier.health/

Field, T. (1998). Massage therapy effects. American Psychologist, 53(12), 1270-1281.

Horton, J. A., Clance, P. R., Sterk-Elifson, C., & Emshoff, J. (1995). Touch in psychotherapy: A survey of patients' experiences. Psychotherapy, 32(3), 443-455.

Nummenmaa, L., Glerean, E., Hari, R., & Hietanen, J. K. (2013). Bodily maps of emotions. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 111(2), 646-651. doi:10.1073/pnas.1321664111

Pert, C. B. (1997). Molecules of emotions. New York, NY: Scribner.

Pinson, B. (2002). Touch in therapy: An effort to make the unknown known. Journal of Contemporary Psychotherapy, 32(2/3), 179-196. doi:10.1023/A:1020545010081

Smith, E. W. L. (1998). Traditions of touch in psychotherapy. In E. W. L. Smith, P. R. Clance, & S. Imes (Eds.), Touch in psychotherapy: Theory, research, and practice (pp. 3-13). New York, NY: Guilford Press.

Zur, O., & Nordmarken, N. (2011). To touch or not to touch: Exploring the myth of prohibition on touch in psychotherapy and counseling. Retrieved from http://www.zurinstitute.com/touchintherapy.html

Can Psychotherapy Feel Good?

Can psychotherapy feel good?   Or is psychotherapy all about swimming in the muck of shameful impulses?  “Getting help”  has come to mean exhibiting one’s dysfunction in front of a stranger.   What if there was another way to think of psychotherapy?  I believe that psychotherapy can feel good.  It may sometimes even be fun -- and maybe it’s more effective when it’s fun.

Freud and Shame

What are the origins of this aversion to psychotherapy?  Let’s go back 100 years or so.  Remember Sigmund Freud?  It seems that we as a culture can’t forget him.  And we shouldn’t.  But we may want to question some of his biases.  At the root of Freud’s theory is the idea that our Id -- our impulsive, untamed “inner bad-boy” (or girl), is continuously in conflict with our Superego; our conscience. We wish we could get rid of our mom and marry our dad, and we feel miserable because our superego tells us No.  Our desires and drives get us into trouble.  In this worldview the human condition is fundamentally unworkable.  We experience a never-ending conflict between what we want to do and what we “should” do.  What would a therapy session be like in which the therapist perceives the human condition as unworkable?  What would it be like to talk to a therapist who believes that he has to fix you?  How would the therapist interact with a client whom he/she believes is inherently dysfunctional?  I’ll call this psychotherapist Therapist 1.

Our Parts Love Us

Now imagine a therapy session in which the therapist believes that the human psyche is innately functional, maybe even sacred.  This therapist (Therapist 2), believes that our impulses are good.  She may ascribe to the Internal Family Systems model -- a model that identifies “subpersonalities” that help us cope.  She knows that all our subpersonalities or “parts” want the best for us, that each part is valuable and lovable. What Freudians call the Id, Therapist 2 might call an inner child.  What Freudians call the Superego, this therapist might call a taskmaster.  Therapist 2 would listen to the inner child, hear out the taskmaster, call on the inner nurturer, bring forth the Wise Self. She might encourage the inner parent to calm the child.  She might listen while the Wise Self counsels the taskmaster. Therapist 2 would facilitate a dialogue among parts, knowing that all want the best for their person. In other words, our inner wisdom, under the right circumstances, (and sometimes with a little nudging), can gracefully ease us towards health.  Humans are not inherently neurotic. We are inherently wise. Healers like Therapist 2 can help us access that wisdom and honor each part of ourselves. That kind of therapy session feels good!

Comparison

Here’s an analogy that might help.  Most of you have probably received a massage.  As psychotherapy aims to improve psyche functioning,  massage therapy aims to improve body functioning.  Using the model of two hypothetical massage sessions is a good way to compare the two psychotherapy approaches described above.  Massage Therapist 1 believes that bodies can’t self-regulate.  She may bully the body in order to bring it to her vision of health.  Massage Therapist 2 believes that bodies have inner wisdom and the capacity to self-heal.  She will approach the client gently and respectfully.  She may give a little boost to the body’s self-healing ability.  Massage Therapist 1 would probably (unintentionally) inflict pain, while Massage Therapist 2 would playfully partner with the body to facilitate equilibrium.