Originally Posted by
LifeRecovery 
I am coming up on four years divorced.
In the last 18 months I am FINALLY feeling anger for the first time in my life. I am angry at him, angry at stuff from when I was a kid, angry at myself. Just spewing venom and anger.
When I finally told my therapist I told her "I don't want you to tell me this is fear, sadness, depression or any of those other things anger often masks, I just want to be angry." She clapped her hands and said congratulations. When people like you that have stuffed for so long finally start to feel this stuff it is so great. She is okay that I am often angry at her (for no apparent reason, love that transference).
A lot of my anger is most easily accessed with my ex.....but it is about more than my ex. My job right now is to feel it so I can actually go through it instead of continuing to stuff which I have done for so long.
Just for the record for the first time I am uncomfortable that I am angry (and have been for so long), but I am far enough into this to understand that I have to feel this or I am going to be quagmired in this for the rest of my life.
Hopefully one of these days (after going through this) I will be grateful for this experience with my ex.....for getting me to right where I needed to be. I don't know that I could have gottten here any other way.
That's funny, because I had the same exact conversation with my therapist about 6 months ago! As a side note: I am not angry anymore at the past or at him. I am just ready to move on. I still get angry about stuff from today or things that my son tells me AH said or did recently, but I let it go, don't confront, and use it as fuel to motivate me to keep putting one foot in front of the other to get on with my life without him.
I'm sure another wave of anger will hit me once I don't live in the chaos anymore and I have a chance to decompress. Yet, I believe that Al Anon and recovery in general have given me the tools to face it. Like Lillamy said, I realized that I had to feel it and walk through it or else I'd be stuck being angry forever and replacing that anger with secondary emotions such as sadness, depression, guilt, or fear.