Читать книгу Anger Work: How To Express Your Anger and Still Be Kind - Dr. Robert Puff - Страница 9

I am a clinical psychologist licensed to work with adults and children who have emotional problems. In the course of my training and work, I have specialized in working with children who are emotionally traumatized, even those as young as two years old. When I work with young children, I allow as much freedom and self-direction in the session as possible. This unstructured environment allows the child to explore his or her emotional pain, express it in play, and be healed.

Many of my insights into the benefits of Anger Work have come from working with children. Children, on the whole, take much less time in therapy to heal from their emotional wounds than adults do. This gives us reason to take a closer look at what children do to heal, and to learn from their intuitive wisdom. Children have much to teach us about the natural course of healing. Here are some of the lessons I have learned from kids.

In the fifteen years that I have been working with clients, I have seen children who have experienced a wide range of traumas like sexual abuse, death of a loved one, divorce, moving to a new neighborhood, or being teased at daycare. As surprising as it may be, I have observed that there are only two emotions which children express to help themselves heal. These two emotions are ANGER and SADNESS.

In affirmation of the wisdom of this natural choice by my young clients, I have noted a similar pattern among my adult clients. Those who make the most progress are those who get in touch with these primary emotions of sadness and anger. As adults we develop other defenses such as depression, anxiety, phobias, worry, stress-induced illnesses, and a myriad of other non-healing ways of trying to cope with emotional pain. Most adults are willing to try just about anything before grappling with their own raw feelings of anger and sadness. But these two emotions are the true, underlying, instinctual responses we all have to victimization and loss. Lesson number one from the children: in order to heal we need to go back to the simple pure emotions of anger and sadness.

When children are traumatized, they heal from it naturally as long as they are in an environment where it is safe to do so, by expressing their anger or sadness about the pain. Children tend to express and not repress their emotions. Babies, of course, are the prime example of this, crying freely whenever they feel like it. Repression is a learned response. It is only as we grow older that we learn to suppress our feelings.

Now occasionally the ability to repress your feelings can be helpful. For instance, it sometimes comes in handy to repress your response of disappointment to a situation long enough to be able to get home and have a good cry or do Anger Work in a safe environment. However, most adults take repression too far. In contrast to children, some adults never cry or display anger. This is unhealthy and we need to learn lesson number two from the children: Express your feelings, don’t repress them.

The following cases of Shawn and Jaime are good examples of how children use their sadness and anger to heal themselves. (Please note, throughout this book client names and details have been changed in order to protect the confidentiality of my clients).

While I was in graduate school I directed a child care center. A two year old girl named Shawn was left in my care by her parents. It was the first time in her life she had ever been separated from them. The childcare center was open for only three hours a day, on Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays, to give graduate students with young children a respite. As I took Shawn from her anxious parents she immediately started crying. I held her, switching her back and forth between my arms so that I could work with the other children. Shawn cried off and on for the entire three hours. She never did let go of me though I tried to set her down a couple of times. By the time her parents returned my shirt was soaked.

The next week, Shawn returned and of course started crying the second her parents left. I held Shawn for about five minutes, and then she stopped crying. After watching the other children playing all around us, she slowly made her way out of my arms. Though she kept a watchful eye out for me for a few minutes to make sure that I would rescue her, Shawn began to play. She never cried again when her parents left her at childcare with me. Shawn’s tears of sadness helped her heal from the emotional trauma of leaving her parents for the first time in her life.

As the case of Shawn demonstrates, experiencing and expressing your sadness through tears can be an effective tool for healing. However, I find that children between the ages of two and seven primarily express one feeling during their treatment: that is anger. They rarely cry about their trauma, they just get angry, sometimes very angry. Afterward they leave the session feeling better, and over time the symptoms which brought them into therapy go away. Children like Jaime in the following story have taught me that anger heals.

Jamie was a two-and-a-half year old girl with whom I worked for a year. She was brought to therapy because she had been sexually abused by a man and woman at a daycare center where she was being watched for a few hours. Evidence of this crime was her radical behavior change after the incident. She regressed to soiling her panties, began playing with her private parts, started pinching and biting her younger brother, and did not want to return to the daycare. When I saw her, she appeared to be a sweet little girl who just wanted to play. During all the sessions with Jamie, her mom or dad stayed with us in the same room, reading magazines or books, so that Jamie would give me her full attention.

Quickly Jaime began displaying intense anger towards toys as she played with them. She would growl at them, hit them, throw them, and even try to destroy them. Jamie had told her parents what happened at the daycare, but she never verbalized anything about the abuse during therapy. Her play clearly displayed that she was angry at the abusers who had fondled her private parts. The parents were instructed not to let Jamie aim her anger at them or her younger brother. Gradually during the year, Jamie’s behavior improved until she was back to her old self. Therapy was terminated and Jamie has never returned. She is reported to be doing fine.

Jamie had a severe trauma, came into therapy where she could freely express her anger, and got well (went back to her normal developmental process). She was never anxious, depressed, worried, or any of the myriad of other pseudo-emotions that adults experience. (By pseudo, I mean emotions that we often layer on top to suppress either sadness or anger.) She was simply angry.

Another observation I have made while working with hundreds of children, some of them for years, is that They need to express their anger at inanimate objects, and not at their peers or their family. The more they follow this guideline the more emotionally healthy they become. If they direct their anger inappropriately by becoming abusive to others, the expression of anger does not have the same healing effect for them. Instead they simply create additional problems for themselves. If they consistently lash out at others in a school setting, they are called bullies. Bullies are not happy. Let me share another example which may help to illustrate this point.

Tony was an eight year old bully. He was always getting in trouble at school for teasing and tripping younger kids. At home he would go into his younger sister Kelsey’s room and take her Barbie doll and hide it in the back yard. Other times, he would take strings that had bells or forks attached to them and tie them to the cat’s tail in order to torment the poor old cat.

Once Sam, the family’s golden retriever who loved people food, had to be rushed to the animal emergency hospital because he had suddenly become deathly ill. After surgery, the veterinarian found a cactus spine in Sam’s stomach. Tony confessed that he had given the cactus spine to Sam covered in butter.

His parents were very concerned and did not know what to do. First I helped them to come up with rewards for when Tony was behaving appropriately, and use time out for when he was taking out his anger on others. Time out is a discipline technique in which the only punishment is lack of stimuli or boredom. This might mean standing or sitting in the corner for a period of five to twenty minutes without interacting with any person or object. Having his parents reinforce appropriate behavior at home, in addition to bringing him to therapy was very helpful.

Very shortly, Tony began to love coming to therapy, because here he and I had lots of toys and he could do whatever he wanted. He was free to express his anger, as long as he did not direct it at me. His favorite “toy” was my couch. He loved to throw things at it, jump on it, hit it with bats, etc. Unfortunately, he was a strong 8-year-old and I had to replace the couch when therapy ended. But therapy did end and his bullying behavior had ceased.

When Tony first came to see me his anger was a constant threat, boiling just beneath the surface. he was expressing his anger at people and animals, and his problems only snowballed. His self esteem was very low and he felt that nobody really liked him. He was ostracized on the playground because he had done so many mean things to his classmates that most of them stayed away from him out of self-protection.

In therapy he expressed his anger by directing it at inanimate objects and his life began to transform. He was now releasing his anger regularly, instead of letting it build up. Without all that repressed anger, he didn’t feel as many impulses to do mean things. He started playing appropriately with his peers, made some new friends, and began feeling much better about himself.

There was no magic in Tony’s treatment, only a free expression of his anger directed at inanimate objects. This simple method of healing works just as well for adults. Lesson number three from the children: Having an appropriate object for your wrath is essential to your recovery; acting-out on people will only take you backwards.

Another point on which we can learn from children is their natural propensity toward physical activity. The medical profession is constantly emphasizing the need for regular exercise; children are naturally active. Kids are always wiggling or running about, playing games of tag or soccer. In fact, teacher friends of mine tell me that it is not uncommon to see a young child running all around the playground during recess with no apparent direction, flapping her arms, screaming or making noises which are strange (to adult ears). If the child is questioned about this behavior, she will inevitably give a sheepish grin and say that it was nothing.

Imagine how you would feel if it were socially acceptable for you to take a break from your home or work place two or three times a day as needed, and work off your stress in a similar fashion! How cathartic that would be! Well, I don’t recommend that line of action; however, doing Anger Work can give you that same kind of release.

If you think about it from a historical perspective, it has not been long since our world was much more physically active, like our children’s world. In the past, people did more physically demanding work for a living. They spent 5-12 hours a day doing something physical, like chopping wood, harvesting fields, hand-washing the laundry or grinding grain. This type of work provided more natural opportunities for letting off steam.

Today our lives are often more sedentary. We need to be proactive in creating opportunities for exercise and include a healthy expression of anger at the same time. My young clients are almost always throwing, shooting, or hitting something during their sessions. In reading this book, you will see how often I combine physical activity with Anger Work. It is not only good for the body, but for the psyche as well.

There are other ways of doing Anger Work, but our bodies are meant to be active, not sedentary. By coupling Anger Work with physical activity we address both the psychological and physiological affects of stress. Physical activity promotes overall health and is one of the best means of doing Anger Work. Lesson number four from the children: Stay active and use your body to express yourself, especially when you’re doing Anger Work.