Mad

I wrote the book on "Anger" (that was a joke). You can "get over it", if you really understand its in your best interest, and don't tell me otherwise. I was forced to forgive the "guy" (and that's putting it politely) that murdered my best friend, the man who was the brother I never had. It wasn't easy, I existed two n a half years in the bottom of a bottle, one night my best friends voice comes through in a dream, boy was he pissed. I never heard him talk to me like that before. He told me there was nothing I could have done to change the bs that went down, fact is it probably would have been me, he happened to be sitting in my seat that night when all hell broke loose. [strike]He told me,[/strike] yelled at me to forgive, or i'd never be able to move on. Got a dead guy screaming in my ear to forgive the other dead guy who shot and killed him....yeah, I learned to forgive. It sucks, your ego screams for justice, vengeance, etc. Its not ok, whatever they did to you, its not ok, but if the only way left to heal is to forgive, you do THAT for yourself. Love yourself enough to forgive, so you can get on with your life....

there's a few of us that, because of our past with child abuse,bullying etc., could write a lengthy depressing book about anger/hate/rage etc...but we choose not to focus on that, instead we choose a positive focus...it's very difficult to do that with our pasts...the negative flows easily, while the positive takes effort...we make the effort to draw forth the positive....this is what you must do, make the effort to draw forth/focus on the positive in order to drown out the negative...with time you can replace the negative with positive anytime it presents itself...

Not to sound all cold and clinical, but in a psych class (take it or leave it) I was in they were explaining how the memories and emotions we choose to keep we keep because they give us something. Might not be a pleasant gift, but the thing to figure out was why were you keeping it (the emotions)? What did it give you? Was there satisfaction in being angry? A duty? Are you punishing yourself? The trick was to be honest with ourself (which can be hard).

In hindsight, I suppose I could say I held onto it because it felt justified. Made me feel good being the one to recognize an "evil" and point it out.

This is important because I almost always question my anger to the point of nullification. Viewing things from as many angles as possible, anger is usually not justified, needed or helpful in any way. In this case I was absolutely sure, which should have been my first clue that it was invalid.