How to let it go

[WonderOverWorry]

I recently told my therapist that I will never forgive my UNPD sibling for what they've done to our mother (moved her to a remote area near sibling with no other family or friend support, then abandoned her when Mom called sibling out on her bad behavior. They've been no contact for 2 years now, myself about 6 months longer than that.)
My therapist said "Anger is like drinking poison and waiting for the other person to die."
I can't get it out of my head. It's not inaccurate. But how do you let the anger go? When someone has wronged you and other loved ones? Those wounds are deep.
I know wanting my sibling to see things differently is a waste of energy. They won't change. But how do you let that anger go?

[Invisiblewoman]

I think if you stew in silence and anger it's bad. If you express it or it motivates you to take positive action, then you've harnessed the hurt in a positive way.

Anger is not necessarily a bad emotion. Anger at injustice and becoming drawn towards activism and helping others is a positive outcome of anger.

[DaisyGirl77]

I recently had this very conversation with my own therapist.  What I wound up saying was that I'd leave it in the past, behind me.  They will never earn my forgiveness for the things they did.  The best I can do is to focus on processing my anger, hurt, grief, & betrayal & get to a place where those emotions aren't the primary ones in my life.  Sure, if I let myself sink back down into the mire, all of it will come rushing back full force, but I don't let myself.  It only harms me if I do.  So I focus on my healing.  On getting myself to a place where the other emotions are either all or the majority of the ones I experience through the day, I'm okay.  Putting myself first takes precedence now.

Forgiveness will have to be meted out by their god.  But it will never be given by me.  The scale of harm they did to me renders forgiveness impossible, & that's something they'll have to live with for the rest of their lives, just like the catastrophic, cataclysmic destruction they issued me is something I'll have to live with mine.

In short, find your new equilibrium to balance your day & make it so you don't think of it but once every 20 years or something.   Live your best life.

Edit:  This reminded me of a post I made a while back.  https://www.outofthefog.net/forum/index.php?topic=87669.msg751129#msg751129  Hopefully something in here helps you.

Remember:  You do not have to set yourself on fire to keep others warm when doing ANYTHING.

[WonderOverWorry]

Thank you - noting that the anger and hurt aren't the primary emotions. It's kind of sad to think that I don't have other emotions for this person though. Even the 'good' times I can now see were manipulated and tainted. I'm no longer screaming with anger but I'm still angry... what emotion can/should take that place? Just peace knowing I'm no longer the target?

[Kaz1956]

My therapist said "Anger is like drinking poison and waiting for the other person to die."

I can understand where your T was coming from but given where you're at right now, it's like advising someone to bail out a boat with a teaspoon. That is, a pretty useless statement and piece of advice. I hope it was embedded in more helpful information.

Anger is a very big and complex emotion; and after witnessing the terrible injustice of what's happened to your M, a very valid one. I'm sure there is also a big well of loss, powerlessness and sadness to work through as well.

I get it myself as when I and my brother applied to the courts for a legal guardianship over our 86 year old frail uNPD M with dementia 7 years ago; another uNPD brother, who neither of us had had any contact with for 20 years, ambushed the hearing and demanded to be made guardian. Unbelievably the court asked M who she wanted. Cunning to the end , she said uNPD brother and the court agreed to her request. She had summoned him rather than have the responsible ones assume the role.

He promptly went back to his farm 8 hours away and for the next 5 years neglected all guardianship duties which left us and her worse off than ever. M lived in squalor, refused any healthcare or help, was financially abused by a 'friend' and was left infinitely worse off. He didn't care. We were legally powerless to intervene.

Eventually after a stranger was found inside her home , the police were called and uNPD brother had to act. He took her to his farm but after a day started calling saying we had to get her and 'do something'. Because we're not like him, we did sort out residential care very quickly, but we didn't rescue him. We insisted he cared for her for the few days till she could be admitted and that he bring her the three hours to the town where the facility was.

In those years I felt so much anger WonderOverWorry, I do understand. For you, it sounds like you love your M while I was basically in caretaker mode only after years of narc abuse. Still, your question is how to move past anger.

Having been the scapegoat child and the lifelong target of a multi narc family I have had a lot to deal with. I started my recovery many years ago using simple mindfulness and breathing.

This looked like stopping when I felt emotions rising; allowing myself to fully feel the emotion as it rose in my body while breathing in and out slowly. This meant that sometimes I moved through the moment calmly, at other times I cried a lot as the energy of the emotion left my body, sometimes I raged and belted a few bed pillows,  but I never shoved the emotion down. Painful emotions are stuck energy in the body and relief and healing comes from releasing them safely it by bit. 

As the rawness started to pass, anger would still come but perhaps be a specific anger about a specific incident/cruel comment or whatever. The same process works.

Movement is also invaluable in moving stuck and toxic emotions out of the body. I swim laps and do tai chi, others walk, run, bike or whatever. As I swim sometimes I'll align my breath with a simple mantra 'Breath in peace, breathe out anger/hate/shame or whatever it is you're feeling. That is very powerful. Be specific about the emotion you are feeling if you can as many more subtle emotions show up as anger also and there is great power in naming it.

Name it, claim, it and tame it !

Eventually you'll process your now potent emotions bit by bit and you'll find a more wiser, more detached and peaceful place.

Just begin as I always told my children when facing a challenge. Be gentle with yourself.

[bloomie]

"Anger is like drinking poison and waiting for the other person to die."

WonderOverWorry - I say this with the utmost gentle heart, but in my life experience, anger is not like drinking poison. Anger has very specific questions to bring to us and they are: what needs to be protected and what needs to be restored.

Until you welcome anger and move through the wounds honoring the grief, anger, depth of your experiences it is very difficult to embrace full healing and a restoration of peace and possibly even forgiveness of your sibling.

Sadly, most of us, myself first in line with what I am saying here, have no idea how to identify, much less, work with our emotions. And maybe, anger is first in line as the most misunderstood and underutilized energizing of emotions.

Without anger... boundaries cannot be restore and we may not have the drive to remove ourself from unhealthy and damaging situations and relationships.

The work of Karla McLaren around learning the language of emotions and working with our emotions has been profoundly impactful in my own healing journey.

This article that reveals the relationship between anger and forgiveness offers hope, a breath of fresh air, new insights (new to me, anyway) that I trust will be as encouraging to you as they have been to me:

https://karlamclaren.com/the-magical-relationship-between-anger-and-forgiveness/

And this article about the gift of anger explores and explains how to welcome and befriend an emotion that even highly trained, well-meaning professional listeners and advisers often do not understand.

https://karlamclaren.com/understanding-and-befriending-anger/

[JLS]

I was recently reading Disentangling from Emotionally Immature People by Lindsay Gibson and she has this exercise for anger. It's sort of a meditation.  Feel the anger, acknowledge it, accept that it is there.  Then as weird as this sounds have a conversation with it. Ask why it is there, what does it need, what is it trying to do, what will help it.  Don't force answers just let things pop up.  I tried this exercise and rather than just seeing that I am angry because this thing happened, I ended up with a deeper understanding.  By the end the anger seemed to have dissipated.

For a long time I thought certain emotions were bad and I didn't want to feel them because they were unpleasant.  Now I am realising that all emotions will come and go at certain points.  They can't really hurt us.  It's the stories attached to them that hurt.  If you do the meditation, it's worth noticing any thoughts that come up but remain as an observer.

Anger serves a purpose, yes we get angry at injustice and it's normal but sustained ongoing anger has a deeper meaning. If you can work out what that purpose is, it will hopefully flow on.  I have found that wanting to just get rid of emotions generally keeps them stuck.  In her book she recommends as things come up name them.  So you can mentally label anger, hurt, sad, story, label what it feels like in the body, fists clenching etc.  How does anger show up in your body, where are you feeling it. 

She also has this exercise where you write down answers to questions such as how did your family handle emotions and anger?  Were you told to suppress them or told how to handle them?  What happened if you expressed your emotions as a child?  What were you told when you did express them?  I was taught to suppress them, that they were bad, I got in trouble for having them, I was told I was bad, no wonder I have a poor relationship with emotions now.

This may help or not.  I agree that it's like drinking poison and wanting the other person to die but I also think this  is another version of just get over it.  It's like saying, just switch it off.  It can be switched off really easily when it's someone who cut you off in traffic but with a childhood wound, that runs deep and generally there are deeper areas which need to be addressed.  If we all could all just go 'oh I don't want the poison I'll just stop' we would.

[bspaulding2000]

I was raised in a family where anger wasn't allowed or considered an acceptable emotion. Like most of us in the forum, I have extreme anger over what my uNPD has done to me personally and to family. In fact, I've spent the last five days mourning the loss of the relationship and attempting to "radically accept" (to use a word from the meditation guru Tara Brach) what I'm striving to realize is my reality.

I find that accepting my reality -- for instance, admitting that my sister's behavior, words, and actions are insidious and destructive and will never change -- is incredibly difficult. Good memories creep in and in the back of my mind, I'm blaming myself with those such as: "Why didn't you do this or that to make things better? Why did you dig in your heels instead of just keeping in the peace? How could you ever cut off contact with a sister who loves you and even recently sent you a lot of childhood videos that she had converted from film into digital files?"

Thoughts like that really get to me. Radical acceptance of a tough reality is hard, especially when raised by parents whose only method of resolving conflicts was/is to say: Just apologize (for stuff I didn't do) and get over it.

I'm not sure what point I'm making because I'm in a deep, dark FOG right now as a result of abuse and a smear campaign by my uNPD. I've let my anger out over these last few days. I've screamed -- like really screamed -- in my house out loud, into my pillow, in the bathroom with the door shut. I'm raging mad that my uNPD sister did this. She coopted my baby sister, too, who has turned on me and is either a flying monkey or an NPD herself. I don't know. I only know that interacting with them is no longer safe for me.

You will get through this. Feel the anger and let it out. The anger is a good thing. It's telling you something. Chances are, the NPD in your life has accused you of having a bad temper and the like. (This is what my family says about me, and it's true because things have always been twisted and unfair.) Of course you are angry. This is a totally normal response to the abuse you've suffered. Embrace it and believe you will find a way through.

Best of luck and take good care. 

[sandpiper]

I found the empty chair technique really helpful, in my early days in T. It's a safe way to vent and release emotions, say what you need to say. One of the most therapeutic variations of that was when I went to the graveyard to say my piece over the grave of a long-dead abuser. I wound up kicking the headstone at the end of my rant. It wasn't planned and I'm not a fan of creating drama - having been on the receiving end of so much of it - but there was nobody around to care & it was cathartic. Give yourself some quiet time and put a photo of the person on a chair & let yourself go.
FWIW I'm still angry about how my father treated his mother and she died in 1981.
I don't sit and stew about it but my emotions are important because they clue me in as to when there's been an injustice or when I've been abused.