Furia – Cum transferam Vinovatia, Ranirea si Frica

Proiectarea emotiilor vulnerabile pe altii creaza mai multe probleme decat sa le rezolve

De cate ori ati auzit un copil spunandu-i parintelui (pentru a scapa de pedeapsa) “ N-am facut eu.
El a facut. El e de vina !!” si angrenandu-se in aceasta tactica disperata chiar si atunci cand
vinovatia sa este evidenta? Probabil ca foarte frecvent. De fapt , ca si copil e foarte posibil – ca din
impuls- sa fii facut chiar tu asta.

Din pacate astfel de eforturi sincere de inselaciune sunt frecvente la tineri , facandu-i sa para chiar
inocenti. Totusi o astfel de tendinta neinspirata este una care s-ar putea sa nu o depasim niciodata.
Si un asa mod de ocolire a adevarului nu este neaparat cea mai bune trasatura. E un bun exemplu
de comportament de a scapa de a fi invinuit sau criticat prin ( nerusinatul) “ pasarea problemei” Si
proiectarea greselilor noastre, faptelor rele, asupra altora este o defensa psihologica , care in timp
ce ne protejeaza ego –ul nostru, creaza in mod automat mai multe probleme decat solutii.

O mare parte din furia noastra este motivata de dorinta de a nu experimenta vinovatia – si mai
departe, emotiile neplacute de ranire si frica. Este in mod general acceptat de acum ca furia, pe cat
de raspandita in specia noastra, nu este aproape niciodata o emotie primara. Pt a sublinia asta
amintim ranirile principale ca: a te simti dispretuit, neimportant, acuzat, vinovat, ne luat in seama,
lipsit de valoare, respins, neputincios si neiubit. Aceste emotii pot produce durere emotionala
consistenta. Este de inteles cum multi dintre noi cauta cai de a de indeparta de ele.

De fapt, aceia care in mod obisnuit folosesc furia drept “ fatada” pentru a tine la distanta emotiile
neplacute, in general devin atit de obisnuiti sa faca asta incat ajung sa aiba foarte putin awareness
asupra dinamicii ce ne determina comportamentul. Furia este emotia invulnerabilitatii (stare de
invulneralitate). Cu toate ca oferta imediata a acestui mod de auto-imputernicire ( a se citi “ graba
adrenalinei) este fals, ea poate fii foarte tentanta pt a ne “atasa” de ea – sau chiar “a deveni
dependenti” – daca experimentam frecvent ca ceva ne ameninta modul in care avem nevoie sa ne
vedem pe noi insine ( ex . ca fiind important, ca fiind de incredere, demn de a fi iubit etc)

In definitiv asa functioneaza toate defensele psihologice. La modul simplist, ele ne permit sa
scapam de a ne supara, de rusine sau emotii incarcate de anxietate, pt care nu am dezvoltat
resurse emotionale – sau forte ale egoului – incat sa facem fata cu succes la ele.
De ex. sa spunem ca partenerul ( fie intentionat sau nu) spune ceva care te face sa te simti injosit.
In loc ca tu, in mod asertiv, sa-ti impartasesti emotiile ca ai fost ranit, si sa risti sa arati mai
vulnerabil la ele, tu poti reactiona gasind ceva cu care sa-l ataci. Ar putea fii ceva minor ca de ex. a
uitat sa puna ceva la loc, sau nu ti-a raspuns referitor la programarea unei actiuni, sau o greseala
din trecut care a afectat bugetul familiei – pe scurt orice!. In astfel de momente, ceea ce tu faci de
fapt ( desi este in mare parte inconstient) reprezinta eforturi de a-l face sa se simta injosit, de a-i
rani sentimentele – sau mai exact, de a-l rani inapoi. Este o provocare nedeclarata, nerecunoscuta
de tipul “ dinte pt dinte” Si in timp ce esti angajat in astfel de represalii, ghiciti ce? Gata! Tu nu te
mai simti injosit – cel putin pe moment... Ceea ce din pacate, intareste acest comportament de
factura copilareasca ( ca in “ Tu esti cel care e rau”)

Si ce se intampl cu receptorul accesului de manie? Acum el poarta povara de care tu tocmai te-ai
scapat. Indiferent de ce emotii ranite ai avut parte ( si poti alege dintre cele italice de mai sus) ele
au trecut – sau “s-au transferat” – la el. Si reactia lui initiala poate fi nu ne-aparat una de ranire , ci
de frica. Pentru ca la nivel primitiv, instinctual, experimentand starea de obiect al furiei tale, el in
mod inconstient intelege ca in tine se afla un impuls ostil de a-l rani pe el. Asa ca daca el face un
pas inapoi, nu e pentru ca vrea sa-ti ofere mai mult spatiu pentru ati revarsa rautatea ( veninul) .
Este pentru ca are sentimentul ca are nevoie sa se distanteze de tine.

Oricum ar fi, reactia lui defensiva este mai mult ca sigur una de a da vina pe tine , inapoi – “ ca o
represalie intoarsa”- si care se poate transforma intr-un conflict intre voi , cu viteza luminii. Asta este
nu de natura fizica “ ochi pt ochi” ci de natura verbala “dinte pt dinte”

Alte reactii posibile ale receptorului devenit acum nefericit , al critici (razbunarii) tale sa se apere cu
viclenie ( cu rautate). Sau sa abandoneze situatia cu totul. Si, binenteles, niciuna din aceste reactii
de auto-aparare ajuta respondentul atacului tau, sa inteleaga ce ti-a starnit mania in prima faza.
Asta este un alt motiv pt care mania – in ciuda abilitatii de a oferi eliberare emotionala imediata, si
de a da drumul, de la orice a provocat-o initial – rareori rezolva ceva.

Deci, pt a schimba fundamental ceva ce poate fi un cerc vicios fara sfarsit , este vital pt a intelege
nu doar cauza furiei noastre dar si efectele ei negative. In cele din urma , a te simti ranit – si in
consecinta a actiona compulsiv ca o represalie la schimb – este “copilareste” In astfel de momente,
putem oare invata sa ne abtinem in modul cel mai rational al adultului si “ sa procesam” – intern –
ce se intampla in capul nostru? Si sa facem asta inainte sa alinam (usuram) emotiile noastre de
vinovatie, ranire sau frica prin transformare in furie? Putem incepe sa spargem un patern care
poate fii haotic pentru relatiile apropiate, armonie si incredere, spre care toti _intreaga umanitate –
ravnim puternic?
Asta e o intrebare la care sa ne gandim...

Nu-ti lasa furia sa se “ maturizeze “ in amareala (bitterness)

Amareala: Care sunt cauzele, costurile si vindecarea?

The Cause of Bitterness

All bitterness starts out as hurt. And your emotional pain may well relate to viewing whomever (or
whatever) provoked this hurt (generally, your assumed “perpetrator”) as having malicious intent: As
committing a grave injustice toward you; as gratuitously wronging you and causing you grief.
For anger—and its first cousin, resentment—is what we’re all likely to experience whenever we
conclude that another has seriously abused us. Left to fester, that righteous anger eventually
becomes the corrosive ulcer that is bitterness.

Fellow Psychology Today blogger, Stephen Diamond, Ph.D., defines bitterness as “a chronic and
pervasive state of smoldering resentment,” and deservedly regards it as “one of the most
destructive and toxic of human emotions.” I’d add that if we repeatedly ruminate over how we’ve
been victimized, our “nursing” our wrongs may eventually come to define some essential part
of who we are. Take hold of our very personality. And so we’ll end up becoming victims not so much
of anyone else but, principally, of ourselves.

Such is the inevitable result of becoming obsessed with blaming someone (or something) else for
our misery—rather than refusing to permit external hindrances or setbacks from blocking us from
pursuing our goals. But frankly, it’s all too easy to hamper ourselves by falling into the trap of
righteously obsessing about our injuries, or outrage. For doing so—and proclaiming our innocence
and virtue in the face of such deeply felt abuse—does afford us the gratification of feeling that we’re
better than, or morally superior to, the source of our wrongs.

The Cost of Bitterness

Yet the benefits of retreating into acrimonious victimhood—or rather, “defaulting” to the stance of
woeful bitterness—invariably carries a high price tag. It can:

 Prolong your mental and emotional pain—and may even exacerbate it;

 Lead to long-lasting anxiety and/or depression;

  Precipitate vengeful (or even violent) acts that put you at further risk for being hurt or
victimized—and possibly engulf you in a never-ending, self-defeating cycle of “getting even”
[And in this respect, see my earlier post: “Five Biggest Problems with Revenge and Its Best
Remedies.”];

 Prevent you from experiencing the potential joys of living fully in the present—vs. dwelling
self-righteously on the past wrongs inflicted on you;

 Create, or further deepen, an attitude of distrust and cynicism—qualities that contribute to

hostility and paranoid thinking, as well as an overall sense ofpessimism, futility, and
unhappiness. Moreover, such a bleak, negative perspective prompts others to turn away from
you;

 Interfere with your cultivating healthy, satisfying relationships, and lead you to doubt, or
disparage, your connection to others;

 Compromise or weaken your higher ideals, and adversely impact your personal search for
purpose and meaning in life;

 Rob you of vital energy far better employed to help you realize your desires, or achieve goals
that you coveted earlier;

 Undermine your physical health (by engendering such problems as insomnia, high blood
pressure, back pain, headaches, or abdominal conditions). For the chronic anger that is
bitterness can raise your stress baseline, thereby taxing (or “overloading”) your immune
system;

 blind you from recognizing your own role, or responsibility, in possibly having
beenvindictively harmed by another; and

 by keeping you in a paradoxical state of “vengeful bondage,” erode your sense of well-being.

So the question is: Do you really want to see yourself as a “victim,” with all the implications of
helplessness embedded in that defeatist label? Consider that if you obsessively ruminate on the
righteousness of your anger, your wrath will only become further inflamed. For it exists in the first
place to mask your underlying emotional distress by prompting you to focus not on the personal
injury you’ve suffered—and certainly not on what you need to do toheal that hurt—but on the one
who so wronged you. Besides, you don’t really have any control over the other person. Finally, your
personal power is pretty much limited to yourself. Even in the face of the gravest injustice,
redirecting your focus inwards is precisely how you go about empowering (or reimpowering)
yourself.
The Cure for Bitterness

Virtually every writer who has weighed in on the subject of bitterness has discussed its ultimate
remedy in terms of forgiveness. For forgiveness alone enables you to let go of grievances, grudges,
rancor and resentment. It’s the single most potent antidote for the venomous desire for retributive
justice poisoning your system . And if this impulse hasn’t infested you physically, it’s at least afflicted
you mentally and emotionally. So learning—with or without loving compassion—to forgive your
“violator” facilitates your recovering from a wound that, while it may have originated from outside
yourself, has been kept alive (and even “nurtured”) from the venom you've synthesized within you.

If, fundamentally, anger intimates an almost irresistible impulse toward revenge, then forgiveness is
mostly about renouncing such vindictiveness. And it can hardly be overemphasized that when you
decide to forgive your perceived wrongdoer, you’re doing so not so much for them but for yourself.
It’s your—not their—welfare that’s primarily at stake here. For, as already suggested, the longer you
hold onto your anger, the more you’ll sink into the destructive quagmire of ever-cycling feelings of
hatred and resentment. And the more, over time, your anger will “mature” (or congeal) into
bitterness.

It’s as though you’ve somehow cultivated your anger as some sort of analgesic and, rather than
devoting yourself to actually healing from your hurt, you’ve instead become addicted to numbing
it through a painkiller. And the supreme irony of this situation is that to have your painkiller (i.e., your
anger) continue to work, you must keep your wound fresh and open. Yet if you’re ever
to transcend your wounding experience, both your pain and its painkiller have to be allowed to
“expire.”

As I’ve bulleted above, any bitterness still dominating you will only augment the injury you’ve
already sustained. So what’s your choice here? In your mind, or with family and friends, you can
continue to berate, or castigate, the one who harmed you. Or, you can choose to become not
problem-focused but solution-oriented and contrive to put your ill-treatment behind you.This might
seem like a no-brainer, but in fact it may not be that easy to relinquish your “superior” position of
righteous victimhood. Still, if you’re up to the challenge, here’s what you need to be reflecting on:

Did the person who hurt you really consciously intend to treat you maliciously? Did they really have
a personal vendetta against you? Or might their motive simply have been self-interested—that is,
being so centered on their own particular needs and desires, they were oblivious to your own?
Typically, your offender’s prime motive wasn’t to gratuitously cause you pain but—albeit single-
mindedly—to achieve their own ends. And if they did wish to hurt you, might it be possible that their
motive was retaliatory? That they perceivedyou as earlier having hurt them? . . . and having done so
intentionally? In which case, their harming you back would have seemed altogether just to them.

Keep in mind that your protracted anger or rage is essentially interpretive. If you’re to move beyond
your acrimony, you need to amend your extremely negative assessment of their behavior. And to
the degree that you might actually have contributed to their (possibly vengeful) act, it might be time
to ask yourself whether you conceivably had some blame in their harming you. The main thing here
is to alter your attitude to free yourself of the bondage that, regrettably, is inherently linked to your
bitterness. You need to be willing to regard the other person anew—not as villainous, which may
conveniently have served to justify your bitterness, but as (first and foremost) insensitive to your
feelings or general welfare. Being able to reperceive them in this light—as far from admirable yet
innocent of any premeditated malice—can’t help but facilitate a crucial attitudinal shift softening your
resentment.

But it’s also key to realize that even if the other person has been guilty of intentionally hurting you
for no reason other their own perverse satisfaction, it still makes sense to forgive them. Whether
they’ve displaced their rage toward someone else onto you, or whether they’re totally devoid of
any empathy or common decency, your bitterness nonetheless causes you far more harm than it
does them. And your taking personallywhat they did also represents an irrational distortion of their
motives. So in such instances forgiving them is really about letting go of your retaliatory rage simply
so that you can move on to enjoy—even savor—whatever satisfactions life continues to offer you.

The simplest plan that I’ve seen for implementing the intention of regaining your emotional
equilibrium through abandoning your resentment and bitterness is from James J. Messina.(link is
external)Here, considerably abridged and reworded, and with my own bracketed additions, is his
five-step plan:

(1) Identify the source of your bitterness and what this person did to evoke your resentful feelings;

(2) Develop a new way of looking at your past, present, and future—including how resentment has
negatively affected your life and how letting go of it can improve your future;

(3) write a letter to this person, describing [their] offenses toward you, then forgive and let go of
them (but don’t send the letter) [Note, by the way, that choosing to renew your tie to the individual
who seriously offended you is totally separate from your choice to forgive them.];

(4) visualize your having a better future having neutralized the negative impact of resentment; and
(5) if bitter, resentful feelings remain, return to Step 1 and begin again. [For it may be only through
diligently repeating this process many times that you can at last forgo the almost instinctual drive (if
only in your thoughts) toward retribution and revenge.]

Concluding Quotations on Bitternes

I think the following quotes forcefully sum up many of the points I’ve tried to make here. So I’ll close
this piece with them:

‘“Anger is a short madness’ (Horace) but bitterness is anger that has been boiled, simmered, and
then found so unpalatable that it has been thrown into the deep freeze of
our unconscious psyches.” (Elizabeth Spring)

“It is hardly possible to build anything if frustration, bitterness, and a mood of helplessness prevail.”
(Lech Walesa)

“I know from personal experience how damaging it can be to live with bitterness and unforgiveness.
I like to say it’s like taking poison and hoping your enemy will die. And it really is that harmful to us
to live this way.” (Joyce Meyer)

“Something my mum taught me years and years and years ago, is life’s just too short to carry
around a great bucket-load of anger and resentment and bitterness and hatreds.” (Kevin Rudd)

And finally, alluding to just how seductive the retaliatory self-righteousness of bitterness can be, this
simple edict:

Identifying Irrational Thoughts

By Sherrie Mcgregor, Ph.D.
~ 3 min read

One of the most common components of cognitive-behavioral psychotherapy(CBT) is

identifying and answering irrational thoughts. Once you can label and dissect an irrational
thought, you take away some of its power. The longer these patterns are allowed to
continue, however, the more likely they are to become ingrained, lifelong habits. These
habits of thought contribute to development of the hard-to-treat personality disorders that
often bedevilbipolar adults.
Problematic thought styles include:
 Catastrophizing. Seeing only the worst possible outcome in everything. For
example, your child might think that because he failed his algebra test he will get an
F for the semester, everyone will know he’s stupid, the teacher will hate him, you will
ground him, and moreover, he’ll never get into college, and on and on. No matter
what soothing words or solutions you try to apply, he’ll insist that there’s no remedy.
 Minimization. Another side of catastrophizing, this involves minimizing your own
good qualities, or refusing to see the good (or bad) qualities of other people or
situations. People who minimize may be accused of wearing rose-colored glasses, or
of wearing blinders that allow them to see only the worst. If a person fails to meet
the minimizer’s high expectations in one way–for example, by being dishonest on a
single occasion–the minimizer will suddenly write the person off forever, refusing to
see any good characteristics that may exist.
 Grandiosity. Having an exaggerated sense of self-importance or ability. For
example, your child may fancy herself the all-time expert at soccer, and act as
though everyone else should see and worship her fabulous skill as well. She may
think she can run the classroom better than her “stupid” teacher, or feel that she
should be equal in power to her parents or other adults.
 Personalization. A particularly unfortunate type of grandiosity that presumes you
are the center of the universe, causing events for good or ill that truly have little or
nothing to do with you. A child might believe his mean thoughts made his mother ill,
for example.
 Magical thinking. Most common in children and adults with obsessive-
compulsive disorder, but seen in people with bipolar disorders as well. Magical
thinkers come to believe that by doing some sort of ritual they can avoid harm to
themselves or others. The ritual may or may not be connected with the perceived
harm, and sufferers tend to keep their rituals secret. Children are not always sure
what harm the ritual is fending off; they may simply report knowing that “something
bad will happen” if they don’t touch each slat of the fence or make sure their
footsteps end on an even number. Others may come to feel that ritual behavior will
bring about some positive event.
 Leaps in logic. Making seemingly logic-based statements, even though the process
that led to the idea was missing obvious steps. Jumping to conclusions, often
negative ones. One type of logical leap is assuming that you know what someone
else is thinking. For instance, a teenager might assume that everyone at school
hates her, or that anyone who is whispering is talking about her. Another common
error is assuming that other people will naturally know what you are thinking, leading
to great misunderstandings when they don’t seem to grasp what you’re talking about
or doing.
 “All or nothing” thinking. Being unable to see shades of gray in everyday life can
lead to major misperceptions and even despair. A person who thinks only in black-
 and-white terms can’t comprehend small successes. He’s either an abject failure or a
complete success, never simply on his way to doing better.
 Paranoia. In its extreme forms, paranoia slides into the realm of delusion. Many
bipolar people experience less severe forms of paranoia because of personalizing
events, catastrophizing, or making leaps in logic. A teen with mildly paranoid
thoughts might feel that everyone at school is watching and judging him, when in
fact he’s barely on their radar screen.
 Delusional thinking. Most of the other thought styles mentioned above are mildly
delusional. Seriously delusional thinking has even less basis in reality, and can
include holding persistently strange beliefs. For example, a child may insist that he
was kidnapped by aliens, and really believe that it is true.
Not only are these thought styles in error, they’re intensely uncomfortable to the person
who uses them–or should we say suffers from them, because no one would deliberately
choose to have these anxiety-producing thoughts. When these thoughts emerge in words
and deeds, the damage can be even worse. Expressing such ideas alienates friends and
family, and can lead to teasing, ostracism, and severe misunderstandings.
Young children in particular don’t have much of a frame of reference when it comes to
thinking styles. They may well assume that everyone thinks this way! Older children and
teens are usually more self-aware. Unless they’re in an acute depressed, hypomanic,
mixed, or manic episode, they may try hard to keep their “weird” thoughts under wraps.
That’s an exhausting use of mental energy, and makes the sufferer feel terribly alienated.