Fear, Anger and Sadness George Thomson Volume 13. No. 1. January 1983 Translation by Natalya Chelovechkova Abstract A model is presented for understanding the functions of some emotions of the Child ego state, and shows how people get stuck, experiencing one feeling while keeping others out of awareness. Some of the differences between functional and dysfunctional emotional states are explained by the fact that the former stimulate useful awareness and/or problem-solving behavior, whereas the latter do not. The functional and temporal qualities of fear, anger, and sadness are described; how one feeling can be used to hide another; and how a lack of clarity between them can cause feeling states to become dysfunctional. Included are therapeutic suggestions for making emotional states functional again. This article focuses on functional and dysfunctional emotional states, especially fear, anger, and sadness, and how to help clients release the discomfort of being stuck in dysfunctional feelings they no longer want to experience. Fear, anger and sadness are reactions of the Child Ego State to the threat of danger, to not getting what you want and to loss. Commonly accepted definitions of fear and anger stem from the concept of the fight-flight phenomenon. Fear is a feeling that accompanies “flight”, avoiding a threat. Anger is the feeling that accompanies “fighting,” confronting a threat. To this definition of anger I will add another, taken from Bob Goulding (1976): “Anger is the feeling that accompanies the desire for someone else to change.” (Sometimes "someone else" is another ego state of the same person, such as when guilt is associated with intrapsychic anger. However, in this article I will discuss interpersonal anger: the feeling that accompanies another person's desire, thing, or circumstance. Sadness. according to Arieti and Bemporad (1978), is a feeling that accompanies the process of focusing on what one has lost, and a plan for the future can be developed based on the awareness of this loss. The feeling of loss accompanies the grieving process. Additionally, I define sadness as giving up. anger; that is, the process of giving up effort and giving up hope that someone will succeed in getting someone or something to change. In many cases, fear, anger and sadness are functional, that is, they are useful in identifying and solving a person's problems. However, in other cases, these feelings are dysfunctional, causing the person discomfort, but not stimulating useful awareness or action to solve problems. Feelings are functional when they accompany functional behavior. Fear and fearful behavior are functional when they accompany action aimed at avoiding a threat; anger and spiteful behavior are functional when they accompany actions that accelerate change; sadness and grief are functional when they accompany the abandonment of efforts and hopes for impossible change, and are also aimed at planning for a future that excludes what has been lost. Functional sensations are not necessarily comfortable, but people generally do not experience them as intolerable. This is partly because people tend to continue to move through these feelings: as they solve the problem, the intensity of the feelings decreases, the painfulness goes away. Functional anger and fear are quite transient, that is, they last only as long as necessary to cope with a present or future threat to well-being. Functional sadness lasts only as long as necessary, but it involves a process that occurs over time: adjustment to loss. Small losses can be measured in hours, minutes or even seconds; Adjusting to larger losses takes longer. Whenever fear, anger, and sadness are functional, they each have a certain temporary quality. Fear is associated with the future and with what could happen but is not yet happening,including hazards that could have been prevented or avoided. Anger deals with the present, when someone or something is behaving in a way that the person does not like and wants to change. Sadness deals with the past; it accompanies adaptation to a loss that has already occurred. Proper fit of feeling and time does not necessarily indicate that the feeling is functional (since it is possible to experience dysfunctional fear about the future, anger about the present, and sadness about the past), but when feelings are not aligned with time, they cannot be functional. Fear of the past, sadness about the future and, most often, anger about the past are dysfunctional and can be defined as a racket. Several articles by Fanita English explain this well (1971, 1972). Below are examples of feelings that are correctly or incorrectly related to time. A man steps off a curb, hears a squeal of brakes, and feels fear because the squeal indicates that he might be hit by a car. He reacts by moving back onto the curb to avoid the danger. His fear concerns the future, although there is very little time left before this future. Fear is functional: it motivates behavior that avoids a threat. In most cases, a person can let go of their fear once the danger has passed. If he continues to feel fear, this feeling becomes dysfunctional. (It is now impossible to avoid a threat that occurred in the past.) Phobias are fears outside of a specific time, fears that are more related to past events than to threats to future well-being. A person suffering from a phobia often experiences being stuck in the past, a temporary incongruity that is both dysfunctional and extremely uncomfortable. Someone steps on a person's foot. He gets angry and shouts: “Get off your feet!” The other one removes his leg. The behavior that accompanies anger has accelerated the change that is happening here and now. (Note that functional anger accompanies problem-solving behavior, not unnecessary violence or simply "blowing off steam." Violence may be an inappropriate action that accompanies the corresponding feeling.) The anger and behavior were functional; a person has faced and eliminated a threat to his well-being. At this point, functional anger will subside. If a person continues to be angry, this feeling becomes dysfunctional. This can lead to being stuck in anger about the past, wanting revenge, or being angry about the future, waiting for one's foot to be stepped on again, and being angry about it before things possibly happen. A man in a boat catches fish. As he bends down to catch a fish, his lighter falls out of his pocket and disappears into the deep water. His first reaction will most likely be anger - the desire that the lighter “not get lost.” Then he becomes sad because the lighter had great sentimental value to him. For the next ten minutes or so, he thinks about the lighter, about the person who gave it to him long ago, about how reliable it was, and about what would happen if he no longer had the lighter. He continues to feel a little sad, from time to time, for the rest of the day. The next morning he buys an inexpensive disposable lighter. A few days later, while lighting a cigarette, he notices that he didn't think much about the lost lighter. He still regrets the loss, but his feelings of sadness return less and less often, and each time they return, he experiences less discomfort. His sadness helped him adjust to the loss. If, on the other hand, he continues to brood over his loss, telling himself that losing his lighter was unfair, terrible, and tragic, and refusing to provide himself with a convenient way to light his cigarettes, his sadness is dysfunctional and he remains stuck in it. He may even add other losses in his life to this sadness to maintain the depression. Sadness and mourning have long been recognized as functional feelings and behaviors after loss. However, oftenwhat is overlooked is the fact that anger is usually the first reaction to loss: the person wants whatever was lost to "change their behavior" and not be lost again. Surely the man in the boat said some strong words as he watched his lighter disappear. When he realized that there was no way to keep the lighter from sinking to the bottom and no way to pick it up, he put aside his anger and began to feel sad. Anger is also an immediate reaction to major losses, such as the death of a loved one. Unfortunately, this anger is not always recognized or expressed. I argue that the main way a person gets “stuck” in fear, anger or sadness is because they do not recognize that other feelings are also present. Because unhappy events are often related to a person's past, present, and future, they evoke a "feeling complex" that includes all three senses. The person gets stuck in one of them, without being aware of one or both of the other two feelings. For example, a depressed woman who feels stuck in sadness over a divorce may be unwilling or unable to acknowledge anger at her ex-husband or fear about what will happen to her when she is left alone: ​​she may not express anger out of fear that people will reject her (or because of the injunction "Feel no anger" the Parent in her head will reject her). She may not recognize her fear because she has decided to “Be Strong.” For some reason, she cannot deal with her anger and/or fear and is instead very aware of her sadness. Unexpressed feelings make her sadness dysfunctional, so that she does not cope with her grief or make new life plans based on acceptance of her loss. Karen Homie (1937) argues that anxiety (being caught up in fear) is primarily a defense against awareness of anger because such awareness is personally unacceptable or threatening. To this I would add that anxiety can also mask sadness. In our work with California Youth Services clients, we see rebellious teenagers who seem stuck in anger. Only after treatment do some realize that they are hiding from themselves and others the fear that threatens their survival if they express it “on the street” and the sadness about the hopelessness of their lives. Only after realizing their fear and sadness do they begin to better control their anger. The therapist's job is to help bring awareness to these hidden parts of the fear-anger-sadness complex. If a person is stuck in a fear (phobia or anxiety), I look for the unexpressed anger and sadness underneath the fear. If a person is stuck in a rage or anger racket, I look for unexpressed fear and sadness. If a person is stuck in sadness (usually chronic pain or depression), I look for fear and anger that have not been dealt with. Case History: Tom Tom was a well-functioning professional man in his early forties, with experience getting what he wanted out of life, and able to use psychotherapy when he wanted to solve problems. He returned to therapy feeling distracted and slightly depressed. He said his mother had been diagnosed with a degenerative disease that can cause disability and ultimately death. This news made him very sad. In fact, he was so consumed by his sadness that he found it difficult to be with his mother. He walked towards her, and after a few minutes he felt so sad that he wanted to leave immediately. This feeling of hopeless sadness colored his life and influenced his work. His mother's diagnosis was confirmed by a second set of tests, and doctors revealed the gruesome details of her expected rapid degeneration. He received this news just before a group therapy session I was doing with my partner Jim Heenan. Jim suggested that Tom imagine his mother in the empty chair and tell her how he felt. Tom introduced. He talked to his projection of his mother for a while and cried. He told her how sad he was about her illness and about her death, and how he feltweakness and fear. He was then told to change chairs and put himself in his mother's place. From his mother's perspective, Tom came into contact with some of the feelings she might have had and some of the attitudes he might have had towards her. This provided some clarity, but still did not solve the problem. Jim then sent Tom back to his chair and said, "Tell her how angry you are at her for dying." Tom exploded. He screamed and screamed and cursed her for dying, for being the one who took his mother away from him, for abandoning him. After about thirty seconds of expressing anger, he realized that his feelings could not keep her from dying. No matter how strong and lasting his anger was, she was not going to change her behavior, she was not going to stop getting sick or stop dying. Realizing this, his scream turned into deep sobs. He began to feel a sadness that he had never felt before, a sadness on a much deeper level. At the same time, he experienced a sense of accomplishment from recognizing and expressing his anger. Previously, he had not even allowed anger to enter his mind. (It is not good to be angry with your mother, especially if it is not her fault that she is dying.) Now that he had expressed his anger, he felt relieved. Tom felt depressed before this job; that is, stuck in sadness. After work, his sadness became functional. He felt the sadness of resignation, of expressing and giving up anger, of giving up the fight to make his mother change. In the deeper sadness that followed, he reported feeling very grounded and focused. It was nothing like the debilitating, depressive sadness I had experienced before. He no longer felt stuck. And although he still regretted that his mother was dying, he could now continue to move forward. For the rest of her life, two more years, he had a closer relationship with her than he had ever had since childhood. He no longer experienced his sadness in a way that prevented him from doing what he wanted, including his relationship with his mother and living his own life. As Tom progressed in therapy, he and his therapists realized that in response to illness His mother has three feelings: fear, anger and sadness. The sadness was dysfunctional because he did not recognize the anger and fear it was hiding. In this case there were two components of fear: the first was that his Child ego state was afraid that he could not survive without his mother; another was the fear of being rejected if he showed anger towards a loved one. The anger component was harder to process because it seemed incongruent: how could he be angry at someone he loved because of circumstances she couldn't prevent? While these feelings were hidden under sadness, he felt uneasy. Once they were revealed and expressed, his sadness became functional, a continuous process of acceptance and adjustment, a means of rebuilding his life. His sad feelings were not transient, as functional fear and anger usually are. Instead, Tom moved in and out of grief until he adjusted his life to the loss. He could not use his sadness for a positive purpose until he resolved his anger. He also couldn't feel anger as long as it remained hidden behind sadness. He had to divide his complex of feelings into three components and experience each of them before he could complete them. It is important to note that recognizing and expressing anger does not mean being aggressive. This means having inner awareness and the emotional expression of that awareness. The therapist's job is to facilitate this awareness and emotional expression in safe and appropriate ways. It so happened that Tom's father died before his mother, and he took care of her until she died. He was able to do this comfortably and without much resentment because his Childhood anger and fear had been resolved and his sadness wasfunctional. When his father died, he reported that he realized his grief and came to terms with his loss quite calmly. However, about two weeks after the funeral, Tom became ill. He was in his lawyer's office, discussing a number of details regarding the will. When I got into my car, I felt the same debilitating sadness that I first felt with my mother. However, now he knew what to do about it. He turned to the empty seat in his car, imagined his father sitting there, and said, “I’m angry at you for dying and leaving me with all this responsibility!” He laughed for a moment and then returned to sadness. When dealing with his father's death, Tom felt sadness, but it did not interfere with his functioning because at that moment, as well as at other times, he allowed himself to be in touch with his anger and fear, as well as sadness. When he got in touch with his anger, he allowed himself to realize that it no longer worked, that nothing Tom could do or feel would make his father change and be alive again. This realization allowed Tom to abandon his hope for impossible change and his anger and return to the creative sadness of grief. This way he was not stuck in either anger or sadness. He was able to move in and out of these feelings, rebuilding his life, including his loss. An important distinction between functional and dysfunctional feelings has become clear: if someone is feeling fear, anger, or sadness, and their behavior is appropriate and functionally consistent with that feeling (for example, fear and coping with a threat by running away, or anger and coping with a threat when faced with a threat), the feeling tends to be transitory and dissipate. When a person's behavior is functionally incompatible with a feeling (for example, when he is angry and does nothing), it is usually the case that a second feeling, and perhaps a third, is hidden under the feeling being felt. Inconsistent behavior is a response to hidden feelings. Because these feelings are not consciously experienced, no part of the complex of feelings is resolved, the original feeling is uncomfortable, and the person feels stuck in it. The process of hiding one feeling under another may be functional in childhood if expressing certain feelings leads to undesirable results. For example, in families where anger is not an acceptable emotion and the expression of anger provokes negative strokes or no strokes at all, but where sadness provokes positive strokes, the child may behave as if he has decided to cover up the anger with sadness. Tom grew up in such a family. When he was little, his family did not emphasize expressing anger, but petted him when he cried or looked sad. As he grew up, circumstances changed, and the process of hiding one feeling under another was no longer functional. However, he continued to hide his anger behind sadness because he did not realize it. It was not easy for him to feel anger, even as an adult, because he was used to feeling sadness or pain instead. This situation, which is a type of sadness racket, left him vulnerable to getting stuck in emotional complexes. Typically, healing one “stuck” feeling entails recognizing and expressing all three feelings. If a person is aware of and expresses his functional fear and anger, he will have little desire to hold on to these feelings and they will be accompanied by functional behavior. If a person recognizes that he is experiencing functional sadness, he will be in the process of recovery from the loss, rather than in depressive inactivity. When a person feels stuck in one of these feelings, we seek therapeutic interventions that will allow the person to recognize and express all three feeling states in a safe and appropriate way. We help him put them in temporal order. (What are you afraid of? What are you angry about, what do you want to change now? What are you sad about, what can no longer be changed?) By accepting and experiencing all three states, their functions,, 1980, 305-330.