There are the principles of transference and countertransference in therapy that explain stuff we’re not prepared to face, whether these are issues for the one counselled or the counsellor.
We live in an age of outrage, as the fabric of society slowly tears at the end of an age. You only need to open up social media and it’s usually brindled with light entertainment, humour, popular pieces that focus you emotionally, comingled with conspiracies, scepticism, statements of incredulity, with the more than occasional venting.
Life is hard. No matter who you are, there are challenges for time, for comfort, for purpose and meaning, to find sustainable cause for gratitude. Yet, when we count our blessings, they’re usually innumerable. And still, there is something within us that scratches away at our identity, and those who can party with this fact face their truth, pretending none of reality away.
Just as transference occurs to a person being counselled when something ruffles them, and their counsellor can react to their own fears in countertransference, a response is found in each of us in the outrage our eyes meet. It’s designed to augment an emotional response.
Those things that elicit some emotional response in us take us to a primal place, and those emotional responses speak to a truth deposited deep within each of us.
These emotional responses speak to our core values that have been refined through the harder experiences of life.
The harder that experience was, for either us or someone we cared about, the deeper the furrows of pain we may carry for the traumas we endured.
And so it’s hardly surprising that we’re disgusted, angry, sad or afraid. Indeed, the gap that exists in us all personally means we tend to SEEK out the stuff that elicits these hot and high emotions. It basically fills the empty core within, but it’s erosive.
The trouble is, and you may have already noticed this, a constant or excessive outrage tends to create mental health issues, or it reveals something about what’s going on for us—that deeper lack.
The anger we transfer over to some person or group ‘over there’ is one way to deal with the sorrow we carry deep within. It actually feels easier to point our fury outward toward some target outside of ourselves.
But this is of course the projection of an external locus of control. Projections such as these fix nothing, and they usually make our mental health more complicated.
We can only enter healing by facing what’s deep
within us as much as anything to stop hiding from it.
This is a hard truth for every single one of us to wrestle with. It’s certainly not a popular truth, but it is THE truth.
Our outrage tells us a lot about ourselves. It’s a mirror to our personal discontent. We want our world to be different, but the tragic irony is the only one we can change is ourselves.
This is not to say we shouldn’t agree with social justice issues and advocate for them.
We just advocate differently when we’re not driven by outrage, and not only are we more balanced, but we’re also more effective, and we can sustain the effort for longer. Important issues need not consume us.
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