I hate it when a therapy appointment leaves me with more questions than I had beforehand and then I have to wait to ask them. I never think to ask them in the appointment since it takes me a while to process everything and make sense of my feelings.

I've finally quit denying the fact that I have an anger problem. I've been in denial about it up until this year, but it dates back to early childhood easily. I was a VERY aggressive child and I used to get violent outbursts too. So I suppose no longer denying it is the first step.

Now the problem is that I get angry about being angry because I'm very much not okay with the fact that it's an emotion that I feel. If I'm ever super anxious I can tell myself that it's okay to be super anxious and then I can use my coping skills. Anger is different though. I DON'T think it's okay to feel that way. Even if I rarely act on it. And that makes it super hard to use coping skills to address and while I have a million coping skills for other things I don't know how to cope with anger.

I've been overanalyzing why I don't think it's okay to feel angry and I think there's 2 parts:

The first part is trauma. I've been the victim of lots of abuse from multiple people because of anger. I was abused daily for 3 years by someone who had a serious anger problem who directed it all at me. And I think it's the ugliest emotion and want no part of it.

The second part is violence. I think part of the reason my anger bothers me is that my thoughts attached to it are often vividly violent. When someone seriously upsets me I fantasize about beating the living shit out of them. That's something that I never act on (if I act on my anger it is always in the form of arguments) but I still think those probably aren't okay thoughts to have. They can be super gory. I have elaborate torture fantasies in my head for my primary 2 abusers that I would never think of acting on since I would absolutely be arrested. But even regarding this horrible bitch supervisor last month, in my head I wanted to grab a metal baseball bat and attack her with it until she was covered in blood.

And those violent anger thoughts were often redirected at myself in the form of selfharm to avoid harming others in the past. I'd say a solid 25% of my selfharm was me redirecting my anger at myself. Basically any time I was selfharming in ways besides cutting with the primary method being beating myself up. I haven't purposefully selfharmed for 8 months (as of tomorrow) but a while back I got angry and accidentally hit my leg lightly and instinctively proceeded to punch my leg several times until it was painful to walk before I could even process what was happening. I never intended to hurt myself but it happened as an instant reflex.

So it feels like I shouldn't be okay with letting myself have angry thoughts. Not that not being okay with it stops them. I just feel like they aren't okay thoughts to have.

Any input would be helpful.