Rage can be challenging to work through, and I’m still working on it.
I was quick to feel righteous indignation at feeling like I’d been tossed out like trash by someone I’d trusted so deeply for a year and a half. My therapist was considered a trained professional, and the job that he was paid to do was to be a supportive guide and hold space for me to safely work through my issues and challenges. His failure to do that and his subsequent failure to help repair the damage he caused was totally unacceptable.
I have a strong sense of justice, and my indignation at being betrayed and discarded soon grew into rage. For the first afternoon and most of the day after I was terminated, I welcomed my rage and clung to it because I was afraid I’d become weak without it. Without my rage reminding me that I deserved to be treated better, maybe I’d forget and begin to shoulder some of the responsibility for his behavior. No sir, that wasn’t going to happen. He’d made choices and his choices were on him.
I couldn’t bear the thought of feeling like I was broken, like he’d hurt me and won.The pain was excruciating, and without my rage, I thought I might melt into a puddle of despair and die from it. Sometimes I could picture A.G. sitting calmly and detached, looking smugly at me while I was on the floor writhing in pain and breaking into pieces. My rage seemed like the only way to keep that from happening and to reaffirm that I deserved better. My value as a person was way higher than how he’d treated me. I wouldn’t let him break me. I wished I could destroy him so he wouldn’t destroy me first, or if I was going to be destroyed, then at least he should have to go out the same way.
I wasn’t the one who deserved the pain, he was. Waves of anger crashed over me throughout the day without warning. There seemed to be no particular trigger; I could get angry from nothing and angry from everything. I was floundering in a sea of rage while frantically and clumsily grabbing at anything I could reach to keep from drowning. Eventually the anger would exhaust me for a little while and while exhausted I was numb, which gave me a break from the intensity, but it would soon build again.
My usual tools for coping, like exercise and meditation, weren’t cutting it. I made myself do my self-care routines and told me that I was worth taking care of, even when all I could focus on was the pain and rage. I tried, but I felt like nothing was working and nothing was actually working, because I was vacillating between avoiding the rage and clinging to it, instead of being willing to let it go.
I started to intentionally think of letting go of the rage, to concentrate on how much healthier I could be without it, but I wasn’t convincing myself. The more I tried to force myself to let it go, the tighter I held onto it. I couldn’t figure out why it wasn’t working. I was missing something.
I realized that my usual tools weren’t working because they weren’t speaking to my sense of justice. I’d been dismissed and ignored. When someone in a powerful position hurts someone they typically like to silence the one who they’ve hurt, and I’d been silenced. If I was going to let go of the rage, then I needed to be able to speak my truth. I needed to say what I felt, but A.G. had emailed 2 therapist contacts my way and then blocked me without replying to anything I’d sent him when I’d hoped to talk things through. I hadn’t reached out to argue with him or to try to persuade him to be my therapist again, but to try to get closure. I wanted to be heard and validated. I wanted to have the positive ending to therapy that I’d wanted instead of the awful one he’d forced on me.
I needed to find a way to communicate my feelings. I wasn’t interested in going to a new therapist at that point. The thought of starting over held no appeal and besides, I was angry with the therapy industry’s habit of causing pain to their clients and then sending those freshly harmed clients to other therapists where the clients could then have the privilege of paying to talk to another supposed professional to get help working through the shit that their last therapist had caused. No way, fuck that. I felt trapped because I couldn’t talk to my ex-therapist and I wouldn’t talk to a new one (at least not yet), and I didn’t want to do anything retaliatory without thinking it through first, which I couldn’t do yet either. I’d find a way to communicate my rage somehow though, I had to.
I really wanted to give the hurt back to Aaron Gleaves since he’d forced it on me. Hadn’t he taught me to give the unhealthy thoughts that people had heaped on me throughout my life, back to their rightful owners?
Of course I wasn’t going to hunt him down and hurt him, although that was appealing sometimes, but I decided that whenever I felt the anger start to build, if there was any way and any spot to step away to in private, I’d go there and physically motion like I was literally throwing the pain and anger through the universe straight back to him. I’d speak out loud, or very quietly, depending on the setting, while I used both arms to throw all of the rage and pain and bitterness right back to him, telling him that it was all his because he deserved it instead of me.
It helped me more than anything else had yet. I did that for 3-4 days. Releasing the rage safely in bursts that way was freeing me up little by little to think more calmly and logically for longer stretches of time. I soon began to utilize another tool. I started a rage journal. I was going to use my phone for it, which probably would’ve worked fine, but I craved something more physical.
The notebook I chose for my rage journal was my Olivia Rodrigo Sour 1-year diary that I hadn’t gotten around to using yet. It felt perfectly suited because not only is she cool; her songs are raw and real and I needed to deal with strong feelings that were very raw and real.
The only rules that I had for my rage journal were that I could only write about my anger and I couldn’t censor anything I wrote. No phrasing things nicely so I’d seem like a good person, no judging anything I wrote, no matter how horrible. To be able to keep the rules, I had to write fast and furiously. I didn’t concern myself with grammar and punctuation. My only job was to put all the angry feelings down on the paper.
Whenever I finished with an entry, I tore out the page and immediately shredded it in my shredder. There was a second in the beginning where I hesitated to tear the page out of my cute diary, but I’d given the notebook a purpose and would see it through. I could always buy a new notebook later. I had no shame about anything I’d written; all my feelings were valid, but I realized a couple of things. I didn’t want to worry about anyone finding what I’d written, and shredding the page immediately gave me peace of mind about that. Also, as the entire point was to release anger and not take more anger in, I knew that going back and reading the entries later on wouldn’t be productive. I wasn’t writing my rage out so I could revisit it, I was writing it to clear it out and make room for feelings and thoughts that would get me into a happier, more peaceful, and more productive state of mind.
Within a couple of days of writing in my rage journal consistently and honestly, I found that I was needing to write less frequently and soon didn’t have as much to write. Then came the day when instead of writing angry thoughts, I suddenly realized I was writing about how I was feeling less rage and was feeling more calm than before. I kept those pages intact because they proved how far I’d made it.
I was surprised that my rage journal has plenty of pages left. When I started it, I was worried I’d run out of pages too quickly. I still occasionally have residual angry thoughts that I write, but they’re very brief, and the focus naturally turns from the anger to the peace I’ve found in its place.
Update as of 3/05/2025:
I’ve felt plenty of rage this week after learning directly from Stacey Bolt, Aaron’s supervisor, that she ordered him to terminate me immediately.
I’ve been so sick over her robbing Aaron and I of the chance to get to end things in a way that was natural to us. I think in her mind she was convinced that she was being helpful, but she caused far more damage than was necessary.
She didn’t truly listen to me or pay actual attention to my grief-stricken emails that she stole from Aaron and read without telling me. If she’d been listening she would’ve understood when I kept saying over and over that I wasn’t upset by termination itself; I was hurt by how it was done. I really thought Aaron hated me because of how he terminated me. Maybe he did dislike being my counselor. If that’s what was going on with him, I really wish he would’ve told me. I’m not the kind of person who wants to trap somebody with me. If he was unhappy, I would’ve let him go. But he didn’t talk about it with me. Instead, he and Stacey talked about me and planned it behind my back, like I was a troublesome toddler they didn’t know how to handle.
I’m devastated that Stacey orchestrated the entire terrible experience. She doesn’t even know me at all and had no clue what a good termination would be for me. Or probably she didn’t consider me at all. My own therapy and I was the last person to be considered and the last one to know. What a despicable way to treat me.
She had me convinced that he hated me. I feel so much rage towards what she did. In my opinion she is a well-intentioned, but very manipulative woman who will bully people as she tries to get them to do things her way. I’m so incredibly hurt and angry by her actions. Therapists like her don’t view clients as equal people, in my opinion. They view clients as broken toys that need to be fixed, or as misbehaving toddlers who need to be handled.