Reply #19: As a psychoanalyst [View All]

I appreciate your take (and others' here as well) on the perfectly appropriate response to both personal and societal horrors that give us feelings of fear, anger, avoidance, even bitterness. And I agree that anger is a reasonable response to a situation in which you feel helpless, are hurt, and which impacts your (you, general, not you, specific) life.

Bitterness is different from anger. Anger can be a powerful tool for change, can mobilize natural aggression and allow you to be active, powerful, to have what control you can over your situation and your feelings. MLK was angry, Mandela was angry, most people who seek change are angry about the way something is, be it the existence of cancer, the persistence of the denial of global warming, or someone who thwarted their efforts to accomplish something personally meaningful.

Bitterness, though, is stuck, helpless, immobile, and can become a way of thinking that keeps you in relationship with your trauma or the way of living that causes you pain. When you're bitter about something or someone, it is as powerful as if it was your lover. It shuts out all the active possibilites. It's often a product of fear. THAT's what good therapy should do; help you to appreciate how horrible something is for you to experience, and to find a way to USE it as a component of an active, happy life rather than to "move on, get over it" or to try to medicate the emotional response. It's screamingly hard work, expensive even at a low fee, and can in fact change you. Then you can do what the old AA script says, change what you can, accept that you can't change everything, and know the difference, rather than hanging on in bitterness.