Anger, part 1

Eleven years ago I wrote my first blog post about anger. That was a tough one to write about because I felt so ashamed of my anger. That I had it at all. That I couldn’t control it. That it didn’t make any sense. And I was angry that when I tried to get support, whatever people said wasn’t helpful.

I didn’t say specifically in the post what my friends said, but since the same thing is happening right now, I’m guessing it was something like, stop being angry. You’re making me uncomfortable. Go over there somewhere so I don’t have to feel it.

I’m not one to attack someone. But if you attack me by telling me something like I don’t know what I’m talking about because I’m just a psychologist and you’re a physician, you should start running now.

Because this is what my dad told me when I became a psychologist. Stuff like, because you’re just a sorry ass psychologist instead of an M.D., you can’t even afford a Mercedes Benz. Because that’s what’s important in life.

He has Narcissistic Personality Disorder (NPD), Bipolar Disorder, trauma, and Traumatic Brain Injury (TBI). Ironically, the TBI is because he was trying to save his Mercedes Benz when it was rolling down a hill backwards and he jumped in to hit the brakes.

These conditions are all examples of Autism. Or Neurodiversity. Or as I like to call it, good ol’ neurospiciness.

Neurospicy people become very easily dysregulated and have a very difficult time knowing what to do to self-soothe. Because they have no idea what they are feeling or what’s triggering them.

Recently I’ve been told 3 times by 3 different physicians that I don’t know what I’m talking about because I am a psychologist and not an M.D. At least that’s how I heard it. But it’s certainly possible that it was something like that and I got triggered and then became dysregulated. Because it was traumatic, hearing that over and over again.

Anyhoo, it inspired me to look up stats on ChatGPT related to clinical psychologists and physicians. Did you know that the percentage of people who say they want to be M.D.s and succeed in doing so is only 6%? So physicians are also neurospicy, but on the opposite end of the spectrum, toward the brilliant end.

Being brilliant is technically “abnormal” too, based on statistical infrequency. But since we value brilliance, we don’t call it a disorder. Disorders are just for things that people do that we don’t like.

It can all get kind of political, really. So I prefer not to pathologize anyone. I tell my clients that we are all just human beings, being imperfect, feeling all the feelings on the spectrum of humanity, doing the best we can trying to figure out how to do this very hard thing called life.

I couldn’t find an equivalent stat for licensed clinical psychologists, but the closest one was that only 7% of the people who apply to research-based clinical psychology Ph.D. programs are accepted. However, you still have to defend your dissertation and pass the licensure exam. So 5%, maybe? Also neurospicy individuals.

People with NPD like my dad are too ashamed to admit to any vulnerable feelings, especially hurt and shame, so they project them onto other people. It’s not me! It’s you! And then they get angry and want to beat it out of you.

When one of my brothers was learning his multiplication tables, my dad was inexplicably enraged that our younger brother, who later turned out to be a genius (also neurospicy), could learn them faster than he could. So my dad told my multiplication-deficient brother that if he didn’t learn them by the time he got home, he would be in trouble. Because there’s nothing like the fear of punishment to enhance someone’s capacity to learn.

Not surprisingly, he couldn’t learn them in the next few hours. So my dad yelled at him, which I could only hear from the other room, but it was enough to make me cry and remember to this day. Then he took him into the bedroom and beat him, which was far worse than whatever I could hear.

When we were young adults, my dad was reflecting on this incident, perhaps out of guilt, and his excuse was that he was afraid that our brother might have a mental disability. Because when our mom was pregnant, she and 2 other female residents in medicine got the measles or something, and the 2 other mothers had children with cognitive disabilities.

Decades later, my dad tells me in a rare conversation of vulnerability and honesty that he was teased for being stupid and “retarded” because he couldn’t read. Which was because he had dyslexia, but that term probably didn’t exist back then. His dad beat him and screamed at him so loudly that all of the neighbors could here it because in the Philippines they don’t have windows.

My therapist thinks that he thought if it were his genes that made my brother have difficulty learning, that would make it his fault. I never really understood why couples argue about whose side of the family this “problem” comes from. It’s not like you get to choose your genes.

Or your family, for that matter.