Today was a therapy day.

What, on a Wednesday? What madness is this? Has the calendar swallowed it own tail and then gotten very ill and looked up its insurance coverage online?

Relax, it’s no big. The Doc called me up last Thursday in a bit of a panic and, after some phone tag, we managed to connect and he told me he needed to move my appointment to Wednesday instead of the usual Thursday. He sounded pretty stressed about the whole thing.

So being the cool, laid back, and flexible fellow I am, I said “sure!”. No big. I can deal. The time matters more than the day of the week. We do the therapy at 8:15 am because Joe (my amazingly awesome roomie) works the graveyard shift and gets off work at 6:30 am, and is usually up till around 10:30 am before going to bed, so 8:15 fits his schedule nicely.

So anyhoo, I had been feeling really dark lately. Angry, irritable, depressed, frustrated… that “caged animal” feeling.

So I kind of had an inkling that today’s therapy session would not be smooth and quiet. Doctor Costin has been encouraging me to open up and express my anger more. He even actively encouraged me to do so in our last session.

Well, today, he reaped the windmill.

I won’t go into what all we argued about. It would be indiscreet, for one, and tricky, for two, but mostly, it just does not seem all that important. Now that I am fully out of the situation and all calmed down back to more or less baseline, I can see that everything we argued about was more or less irrelevant compared to just how I was feeling.

So on some level, I feel that I was in a crappy mood and took it out on my therapist.

For me, that is, quite honestly, progress. I have a great deal of anger and bitterness and resentment deep down inside, and because I have been working very diligently at cutting off my impulse to take all that out on myself, it has instead been bubbling to the surface and manifesting as, well, let’s call it “grumpiness” for the moment.

And normally I would feel incredibly guilty about taking out my bad mood on my therapist, or on anyone at all, because I vowed as a child that I would never, ever take things out on others. That is what my father did, and to me, that seems like the ultimate of evil on a personal level.

It’s why I believe so strongly in self-control and it has been a deep part of me for a long time.

But I have realzied lately that I have taken it too far. Normal people are grumpy sometimes, normal people have mad moods sometimes, and these act to externalize and hence express and release their emotions. Without that outlet, the anger can only reflect inward and cause depression, self-destructive behaviour, and incredibly low self esteem and personal energy levels.

And while this seems like treason to me in many ways, part of me is increasingly willing to entertain the notion that if it’s take it out on the world or take it out on myself, maybe the world has it coming. You know what I mean?

I mean, what has the world done for me lately?

Jack shit, that’s what it’s done.

More seriously, though, obviously just “taking it out on the world” is not good enough. I am far too old to adopt a simplistic hostile attitude toward the world like some angry teenager who has just figured out the world has problems and therefore sucks.

And I am certainly not going to make a habit of taking out my bad moods on random strangers (or close friends) just because I can. That is still evil and wrong. I am hardly willing to turn myself into a raging dyspeptic asshole just for the sake of catharsis.

I like being a nice guy, dammit!

So the idea is to find some constructive (or at least, not very destructive) way to let all this crap out when things start getting dark inside this soul of mine.

Taking i out on one’s therapist is always a possibility, I suppose. After all, he’s paid to deal with everything a patient can dish out, whether it’s laughter, tears, anger, or ennui.

I am pretty sure my Doc did not quite know what he was getting into when he invited me to express my anger, though. I have a great deal of passion and intensity that I normally do not show to the world. I tend to keep it way down because honestly, it scares the crap out of people and tends to leave them pretty singed, to put it mildly. And of course, I am normally so mellow and sweet and polite that having the furnace of Hell open up when I am mad is quite a surprise to people.

Add in my finely honed verbal skills and knack for both deep and penetrating observations and high concentration acid sarcasm, and the fact that I am a big fellow and hence somewhat imposing and even scary when I stop compensating for it with the aforementioned sweet and mellow attitude, and you get a person whose anger can be highly destructive in force and hence who should keep it banked.

Or at least, that is what I have thought. But maybe it would not be so potent if I did not have so much suppressed emotion to focus through it. Maybe if I had other ways of letting these negative emotions out, I would not have to fear that if I let my anger out at anyone, it will just plain annihilate them like a whelk in a supernova.

One this is certain : if I am not going to take it out on myself any more (and I am not… that option is off the table), then it has to find another place to go, or it will simply build up until something I can’t control happens.

It’s release the energy, or melt down.

I think I will choose release.