Anger and bitterness
 

Hi everyone,

I am relatively new to ACA - just got my 3 month chip last week and I am working the first step. Finding ACA has been a great blessing and I am so grateful for it although I find the work quite challenging.

Right now I am struggling with a lot of anger and bitterness and it's hard for me to find a positive or constructive perspective on it. I am really finding it hard to see any way of ever releasing that bitterness.

Specifically, it is a bitterness about all the things in my life that I feel like I have missed out on because of the dysfunction in my life. I turn 38 in the spring and have never been in a longterm relationship (and I am still single), have no kids (which has always been a dream of mine), always had big career goals and although I have had some great opportunities through the years I have been selfsabotaging and getting in my own way and the chances of the level of success I dream of seem very small now and my entire youth was wasted on anorexia, depression, crippling anxiety etc.

There are so many things I wish I would have had the chance to experience and that I feel is now too late for me and although I see my parents for the adult children of dysfunction that they also are and although I know that I must take responsibility for my own life (and Lord knows I am trying and most days doing very well compared to where I have been) I am also feeling a lot of resentment toward my parents. I am angry and bitter at them because I feel like they broke me into a million tiny little pieces and my entire life has been spent feeling like a bad puzzle with missing pieces when it should have been spent enjoying life, enjoying my youth, doing all the things that young people do. I came into this world with such enthusiasm and gumption. For the first 6-8 years of my life I was so full of joy, excitement, boundless creativity, originality, courage and confidence and I feel like all the dysfunction, all the constant criticism, humiliation and emotional neglect and scary things I went through in my childhood home stripped me of all of that. I feel like I had so much potential and I have squandered it because my family dysfunction has stripped me of the best parts of me and left me paralyzed by fear.

I feel deep, deep shame writing this but it is just so present within me these days and I can't seem to find a way to reassure myself that I'll be able to get past it. I am so grateful that my Higher Power has led me to ACA and I am happily walking the path of healing - but at the same time there is a part of me that wonders if all my life will ever be is full of regret. Regret, bitterness and sadness over never having any of the things I so wanted in my life. Things that seem so easy for everyone else to achieve but for me seem impossible. I was never allowed to be angry as a child, it was one of the forbidden feelings and I was shamed and dismissed whenever I tried to express anger - but now that I am going to meetings, working the steps, reaching out, talking to my sponsor etc...I just feel so angry at my parents. So, so angry and bitter.

Do any of you recognize this? Is it possible to move past this?

Hi DottedZebra, I'm glad that you posted about how you feel. In short, yes, I can relate to much of what you have written and yes, I do think it can get better and you can move past this.

You are still young and have a lot of time to create the life that you want.
You can have children in your life and a career and get married if those are your goals.

I too wrote about my bitterness towards my parents (in 2009ish posts). But I can honestly say that things have evolved a lot and I really like my life now.

I got married when I was 48 (I'm in my mid-50's now) and I have a good career that I enjoy and I am healthy. Most of my focus now is on my career goals, my physical fitness goals and traveling goals and creating opportunities to be around people who I like.

I won't lie, the dysfunctional life my parents created for me as a child still smarts from time to time. For example, I sometimes wonder if I would be closer with my siblings had my parents not created dysfunctional family roles that affected how we interact. And I know what it's like to wonder what you missed out on in early life because you were just trying to survive.

But it can get better. It's gotten better for me.
Best to you.

Thank you Stella for your very meaningful post.
You make so much sense.
I hope you are well. xo

"Right now I am struggling with a lot of anger and bitterness and it's hard for me to find a positive or constructive perspective on it"

Grieving the grief; for me and as I've heard others share, involved anger and bitterness. For me it involved an awful lot of pain and misery to even reach the anger and bitterness stage. But reach it I did and pass through (much) of it...

Without wishing to appear to be minimising your experience... its all part of the process and as long as you don't get stuck, perhaps like me, you'll look back at that anger and be glad you didn't keep it stuffed down any longer than necessary.

Wretched really... the only way through much of this ****, as far as I can make out, is to suffer from all the pain and shame that's been locked away. It's like cleaning (unwanted) graffiti off a wall, each bit is hard work and mostly unpleasant, but done slowly enough, bit by bit the wall gets cleaner, neater and better and easier & as the progress becomes apparent... the positives become obvious to all.

Take it easy...

makomago, that was so well stated. It is so true. As you said, you really have to feel the grief deeply to move past it. Thank you for your post.

easier said than done Ive found :(

For sure. It's hard work. not easy. And sometimes scary.

I'm afraid so, but that's the way the world spins.

When I was a child I used to get really cross with my best friends parents... they wouldn't let my friends go swimming because "they can't swim". I used to think... you can't swim because you don't go swimming. Not going swimming perpetuates the problem. Bloody well go swimming!

Anyway, once its done (or mostly done/progressing - and I don't mean the swimming ;-)) you can say it with ease, it's called experience. That doesn't mean doing it is easy.

There is a choice. Live with the grief and the pain and find ever more cunning ways to avoid doing the painful bit adding a little bit more as time goes on and perpertuating avoidance and denial traits (of the codependent/Adult Child) or....

'Go back through our lives' in a process of self examination and discover, uncover, grieve the grief etc etc so that one can live more peacefully on a day to day basis. Safe in the knowledge that its only the new grief to attend to and not the cumulative grief ONTOP of the new grief.

A friend of mine, new to ACA but in very long term recovery rfom alcoholism, said this to me once (a good few years back now)... and I found it rather chilling and disturbing (then and now) but its a perfect description of not doing what needs to be done;

"I've buried all these problems, all these issues and I keep adding to them and burying more because I can't face it, I can't face the pain.... the problem is I buried them all alive and they're trying to get out and some of them do get out and they come back to haunt me"

******* YIKES almighty!!!!

Yep... it's not easy, but when you consider the alternative it's probably easier in the long term than not.

The worst two erroneous beliefs and pieces of flawed thinking I seen summarised as 1. Not believing I'm responsible for my own happiness and 2. Not believing I can cope with my own pain.

Armed with these two mistaken beliefs I was able to perpetuate my own problems and avoid doing what I needed to do for myself for many years all much to the detriment of my well being (phyically, mentally & spiritually)... not to mention to the detriment of those in my immediate circle.

But each to their own. My way and journey isn't the only way. More than one way to skin a cat etc etc

Do what you gotta do. Stuff'll happen on the way, but with a half decent attitude they'll be viewed as lessons and not mistakes.

Take it easy and if I'm not back before....

A merry christmas & happy new year to you all

Makomago
Somewhere in the U.K

I can relate. I'm 41 and nothing. I'm not sure how my parents pulled off their lives. They were always getting married and stuff, having affairs, stormy moods. They were always so quick on the draw with the bright side, particularly my mother. It seems pathological to me now. Men and women without a moral code just repeating things they hear. I'm not sure how well they would have handled the kind of aloneness that has defined my life. I don't think they would have liked it. I don't think they will ever completely face their own conceits and fears. Living in the details, in the middle, is too hard. I hope I am not too old to at least live in reality.

As far as I can tell, the way out seems to be morality, learning to listen, to accept that while I did not choose to be the person I became, I can at least try to see and hear clearly, to live in the real world which can change, as opposed to the fantasy of extremes, the high and the low, which is maybe as changeless as the voice of the crying inner person still craving the focus of an out to lunch parent.