You can’t stop being angry by forcing yourself to do it. In general, you can’t force emotions, of any kind.

Anger makes sense and is important. Anger at your parents for not protecting you, is something really common for survivors rather it’s their direct fault, or they were oblivious, or just didn’t listen. Telling yourself to stop feeling, isn’t going to make it go away. Fighting anger and hurt makes people much more distressed not less.

Emotions demand to be felt, it’s easier to let yourself feel the emotions. You have to go through this you can’t shove it down. Feel what you have to as you work towards living without so much pain.

The important part is to not act in harmful ways on the emotion. You don’t have to act on every emotion and the ones that do require an action you can take healthy actions.

Ways to express large amounts of anger safely:

• Exercise (IE Running)
• Throwing a ball against a wall. like wall ball or dribbling a basketball
• Dancing
• Rip up paper/newspaper (maybe make a collage)
• Splatter painting
• Singing songs really dramatically
• Scream into a pillow

Journaling, writing, art and other expressive acts can help process long-term anger. Talking about relationships with parents and the abuse over all is also going to be key to heal from anger. Talking about trauma will help make it hurt less overtime when it’s not sitting inside you eating you up.

If you think it might help you could also talk to your parents about what happened. This might get some kind of closure or might not there are lots of factors about if you can get that. 

You can’t kill the feeling but you can help yourself understand and move forward. Working to understand the other feelings with your anger. Like disappointment, loss of trust, neglect and other factors also helps you deal with and understand your angry feelings. The processing, integration, and understanding of other things in your trauma will also likely influence how you relate to your parents. 

You may never not have some “negative” (eg: anger, sadness, loss of trust, resentment) emotions about this and them. Ambivalence also might happen. And forgiveness, of course, can also be part of your emotions with your parents. The only real thing to be searched for is to allow yourself to longer be bound by and hurt by the feelings. 

-Admin 2