Monday, October 19, 2020

Rage IS a Stage...

...and it can be used to empower early recovery by energizing the movement out of denial into contemplation and consideration, as well as identification and acceptance of what happened (see the five stages of therapeutic recovery), but the benefits of blind rage don't last very long.

Grief-processing expert Elizabeth Kubler-Ross posited decades ago that anger is the second stage of another five-stage process of "grief relief." And that posit has stood the test of time and efficacy research. One almost always does need to move through her five stages, the keyword here being "through."

I assert this not only because of my own experiences processing grief resulting from having been neglected, ignored, abandoned, discounted, disclaimed, and rejected, as well as invalidated, confused, betrayed, insulted, criticized, judged, blamed, ridiculed, embarrassed, humiliated, denigrated, derogated, victimized, demonized, persecuted, picked on, dumped on, bullied, gaslighted, scapegoated, and/or otherwise abused by others upon whom I depended for survival in early life, as well as schoolyard bullies, badgering bosses, cult gurus and other authoritarian persecutors trying to suck me into their Karpman Drama Triangles. If have seen it work for many others over the course of more than 30 years in AANAACAEACoDASIA and AMAC, as well as other groups.

But many so-called "experts" on grief processing whose pre-mindfulness-era books and articles are still in circulation (e.g.: most of what was published before the turn of the millennium, and almost everything published before 1990) asserted that some combination of "talking about one's anger with a trusted listener" and "ventilating such emotions via energetic expression" (including beating on punching bags and screaming in the shower) was The Way to Freedom.

WRONG.

But... understandable given the prevailing beliefs among the psychotherapists of the time, many of whom subscribed to the notions of one Arthur Janov, and his "primal scream" therapy, as well as the widely promoted methods of Richard "Riggs" Corriere and the Center for Feeling Therapy that spawned the "emotional release therapies" of the 1970s - 1990s. (I was soooo into that... then.) (Bad idea. Really bad.) (One could ask John Lennon if he was still around.)

Emotional release in and of itself is the objective, but vomiting as opposed to venting is not the path to that objective, as child development experts since Margaret Mahler's and Melanie Klein's day (including T. Berry Brazelton, John Bowlby, Mary Ainsworth and Daniel Stern) have known and written reams about. "Maternal attunement" leading to "self-soothing" is both more effective and less damaging.

If any single mental health professional "lead the charge" on "self-soothing" and "venting vs. vomiting" (that has revolutionized modern psychotherapy over the past three decades) it was probably Jon Kabat-Zinn, the author of such touchstones as Full catastrophe living: using the wisdom of your body and mind to face stress, pain, and illnessWherever You Go, There You Are: Mindfulness Meditation in Everyday Life; and Coming to Our Senses: Healing Ourselves and the World Through Mindfulness.

Mountains of efficacy research have testified to the effectiveness of venting vs. vomiting for anxiety, depression, mania, grief and anger release. The concept is a simple one: Shock happens. And if it is not allowed to run its course through Kubler-Ross's five stages, it becomes the fuel of the lingering emotions and sensations Bessel van der Kolk wrote about in his own monumental books, Traumatic Stress: the effects of overwhelming experience on mind, body and society and The Body Keeps the Score: Brain, Mind, and Body in the Healing of Trauma. As did the legendary Alice Miller in many of her books, including (most recently, so far as I know) The Body Never Lies.

The energy is like undigested food in the digestive track. If it remains undigested, that energy causes "emotional constipation." And it is that that causes suffering.

Thus, rather than vomitting or other forms of anything-but-self-soothing, may I suggest the methods first offered by Siddartha Gotama more than 2500 years ago that are now the bedrock of modern psychotherapy for trauma? One can read about them at the links below:

Workbooks for Anger Prevention, Management & Processing

Appropriate & Effective "Narrative Therapy" vs. Potentially Dangerous or Unproductive, Unguided Journaling

Emotional Bloodletting & Flashback Management

Why Memory Retrieval is So Important

Recalling memories from a third-person perspective changes how our brain processes them

A Recovery Program for Someone with Untreated Childhood Trauma

Interoception vs. Introspection

Choiceless Awareness for Emotion Processing

And if one is looking for books on the topic, see the final section of A CPTSD Library.

No comments:

Post a Comment