Mental Health

As a trans masculine person I got the opposite problem. My anger was never treated as a valid response so after basically being treated as though my anger was funny, stupid or cute but ultimately unacceptable I lost my ability to feel it for a long while. I couldn't pick it out of the slurry of internal emotions. Functionally anger is a means to not just feel injustices but motive to externalize the source and feel empowered to do something. To fight on your own behalf. Not living without anger meant everything was turned around. I couldn't fight for myself . When something bad happened to me I would find ways to make it my fault. When I eventually snapped and tried to hurt someone, when I became temporarily physically frightening for short spell to another person, it was so far beyond a conscious process because if I was in the headspace of my conditioning I should have been rendered powerless.

Separating anger out of the mass of just negative emotional mass and being able to not just feel it, but to indulge it and express it took me decades to manage. For a long while I couldn't help but feel whenever I was angry I was transgressing. I was doing something that was illogical and isolating. I also wasn't very good at it. I also couldn't meet resistance without just feeling powerless or like I was in the wrong.

My anger still isn't treated seriously by other people. I envy cis men their ability to have their anger actually taken seriously at the same time I recognize that a full range of expressions of powerlessness and weakness were always allowed for me and denied them. Not just allowed... but rewarded with sympathy.

I lost a job a year ago for a fairly tame expression of anger. The sort anyone more comfortably coded as a man would be excused for just for feeling his feelings. My cis male coworkers around me validated that anger as perfectly rational and my reaction as fairly analogous to stuff they had done and easily gotten away with in the past...but it was treated as an unforgivable sin in my case because I was held to a different standard of emotional control. I know that when it comes to interfacing with other am never supposed to act on my feelings of anger directly. I am culturally supposed to seek concensus and sympathy from other people by at best talking about it or outwardly displaying helplessness at the injustice. People who recognize and treat me as a man will acknowledge my anger better because they recognize that aspect of them in me. Those that code me as female generally however don't really don't recognize my anger as valid and treat me as though I have lost my mind. I recognize there are missing tools in my social kit that were stolen from me and it sucks absolute donkey nuts.

Gendering emotions cause real harm and internal disregulation. Being culturally frozen out of your feelings regardless of the targeted feeling is awful. I really hope it gets better for you. Being stuck with half a kit is excruciating.

I feel this in my soul. I'm currently at the point in my therapy where I understand what should be happening, but what is happening is completely different.

Hi. I went through a lot of therapy, and currently am not and am stable. The healthiest I've been in ages. Please don't be discouraged, you're digging up emotional corpses, so it's going to be painful and stinky. Feeling things that were painful originally will be super painful, but the only way out is through. Facing those feelings, untangling endless snarls takes a long time. It does feel worse and frustrating and horrific, for a time. With diligence, persistence and lots of self-compassion and unconditional love, it does get better, with decent therapy. After you get through the most horrific and scary parts, I encourage you to do shadow work. Due to financial and transportation issues, I was forced out of therapy before it was appropriate. I foundered for some months, then told "friends" stop coming over, stop bringing cigarettes, weed, alcohol, sweets, anything, if I wanted it, I'd ask. And I sat alone with myself and learned to see myself in every single person that harmed me, in some fashion or form, or how I could see me, if I thought this or it could come across in various ways than I'd meant certain things I did or said, after I dealt with and stopped justifying wrongs I did and said.

I'm so much more stable now. And I'm stuck on two different wounds, but one I think is largely irrelevant, because that parent and I have been nc for so so long, I seldom think of them anymore, and when I do, it's with understanding to an extent, and compassion. The other one in still in contact with and an able to maintain compassion, as long as they're not pick pick picking, when I can't remove myself immediately. I'm working with nonreactivity, returning to compassion for self, immediately after removing myself, and returning to compassion, for them, after regaining my composure. I will say, ignoring attempted triggers outwardly, acknowledging inwardly and also acknowledging I can't change them and how full of self-loathing and shame someone must be to have to project, hate and gaslight so many, for the greater part of a century must be so awful. Especially when it stems from being horrifically abused as a child and growing up and young adulting didn't have psychotherapy available to regular people, and celebrities were shamed for it.

You can do this. I've got all confidence in your ability to not only handle it, but genuinely heal.

You're missing fear. Which is a really important tool. Possibly the most important one.

But yeah, happiness, fear, anger and sadness are the basic emotions. But that's like red, blue, and yellow were the basic colors you used in elementary school painting. You get different degrees and different blends of them and that's where the complexity comes in. Rage, anger, annoyance? Different degrees of anger. Anticipation? It's some degree of happiness and fear. Grief? Usually some happiness, fear, and a lot of sadness.