Posted by yona on July 23, 2000, at 6:07:06
In reply to Re: Rambling, unhappy post: Feeling awful, posted by shar on July 23, 2000, at 1:52:15
have to put my two cents worth in....
i have spent most of my life in a rage.. perhaps simular to your anger...
to make a long story as short as possible, after 5 years of not raging i see that it did 2 things for me. first the anger and the rage gave me enough energy to get thru the day. second, when i look back it is like i was stabbing myself with pain rage and anger everyday so that i could somehow get thru the pain rage and anger. i know, sounds pretty weird. but in order to try to make this post useful to you i wanna say the following things.
my life long rage seemed mostly directed at my father (who was violent towards me as a child and eventually killed someone, living the last 2 decades of his life in prison). forgiving him, all my life seemed an absolute impossibility. (i did pull this off finally when he died). but the upshot of my rage was my own self hate. my self hatred bred more and more anger, rage and hate towards the world at large. at some very painful moment i had the realization... i was becoming my father..(and of course i feared killing someone, namely me). (i am trying to make this short although it is an incredibly intense subject). after years and years of process (and many more to come i am sure) i have found only one thing (after i got the chemistry in my body straighten out) that can helped me transform the rage. you guessed it. i figured out how to have compassion for myself. and that compassion for myself eventually bred compassion for others. trust me, (and you already know i think) you can't just say 'i will be compassionate' or 'i will forgive'. it doesn't work. you have to grow your compassion for yourself a little bit every day, just like a giant potted plant, perhaps over many many years, and at some point it will be stronger than your rage. personally i think you already have a nice sized plant that you've been working on. anyways, i hope my post has not offended you, and that something, somewhere helps you thru all this shit. yona
poster:yona
thread:41212
URL: http://www.dr-bob.org/babble/20000717/msgs/41234.html