Have you felt anger, really felt the fire that burns your heart, confuse your tongue so that words do not come and in frustration you might burst into tears? It is no accident that anger and tears are intertwined. Anger is the flip side of hurt. When we are hurt and we try to deny it we get angry and try to overcompensate for our hurt by hurting the one who is making us sad or who has disappointed us or hit out at those closest to us who may have had no direct involvement with what’s eating away at us.
There have been many media reports about women being hurt by the men who supposedly love them. Those men are broken spirited people – this is not an excuse, it is a fact. They try to protect themselves by using power and force to ensure that they are not hurt. In their private moments they cry and ache and can’t understand why they behave the way they do. It is the reason why counseling could be helpful to abusers. Counseling peels away the various facades we use to cover up our raw feelings and helps us to face them and get to the bottom of them and find ways in which to cope and to deal with those feelings.
I think that during this journey we call life, there is a surety that we will be hurt but most of us are born with some sort of inner resources to deal with these everyday occurrences or stumbling blocs in our lives but some of us are not. We take on little hurts and they pile up into one big heap that weighs on us and makes us suffer and feel so bad about ourselves.
People who can afford it visit a counselor or a psychiatrist regularly, not because they are having a crisis but just to check in, so to speak. I believe everyone should have access to counseling services because this was something friends used to do in the past but these days everyone is so busy with their lives that finding a friend to truly listen to you and support you could be challenging. Many of us believe we have too much on our plates and do not have time to listen to other peoples’ problems. That is why a counselor should be accessible to both the poor and the rich.
A counselor is trained to listen in a nonjudgmental way and offer feedback through such techniques as rephrasing, clarifying and probing to become conscious of our own feeling.
If you want to live fully you have to look your anger in the face, turn it over and see the underbelly and find out what is hurting you so badly. Is it something that happened in your childhood, the way you were bullied or teased at school? The way your parents never supported anything you did but put you down all the time maybe because you were a little slower than your older brother whom they favored over you. Most of the time when we are angry and hurt - these are as a result of deep-seated hurt usually from childhood that result in us developing low-self esteem, unhappiness and at odds with the world and all that is in it. Talk to someone, or ask yourself what am I angry about? The answer will come. Take care of the hurt and show yourself some compassion.
