Brokenhearted,
Back to anger....
I have thought about this for a long time and it's something that has troubled me. On the one hand, it seemed to me that others and myself were devoting to anger a LOT of energy that could have been usefully dedicated to other more positive concerns. But on the other hand, aren't survivors and their partners entitled to their anger at the colossal harm the acts of a cruel and selfish abuser have done to their lives and relationship?
But then two things occurred to me, one pretty simple and the other rather more complicated. The first is that the issue isn't at all one of whether we have a RIGHT to our anger - of course we do. The problem is whether and in what ways it helps us to express and vent that anger.
The other thing I discovered - and this is where it gets a bit difficult - is that there are really very different kinds of anger that show up among survivors.
One is a kind of general frustration and rage at the world. This anger has to be expressed somehow or it will burst out eventually. But this anger doesn't resolve anything, and if we allow ourselves to indulge in it because we have a "right to be angry" it will just occur over and over again without taking us anywhere. And it is often vented against innocent targets like partners, family members, friends, or colleagues at work; allowed to run at will, it can jeopardize our relationships and jobs and make us pretty miserable people to be exposed to.
The other kind of anger is the anger survivors experience as they come to recognize how horrific it is for a child to be abused and the incredible harm that abuse does to its victims - not just during the physical acts of molestation but through the emotional trauma that goes on for years and years. How can our thoughts of the brutality and horror of abuse fail to provoke us to anger? As everyone knows, anger is one of the normal stages a victim of trauma goes through.
But that's exactly the point. Anger that's aimed at the abuse itself is a healthy and necessary emotion. It leads on to another stage (that is, it isn't endless), and it's aimed at the right target: abusers and what they do to children. It's a part of our recovery rather than a distraction from it.
Coming back to your specific questions, Brokenhearted, yes, anger would be a normal and healthy part of recovery since it's part of coming to terms with what has been done to us. But as we all know, we express our anger at abuse in different ways. If one feels that he has to rage and express his anger vocally and physically, well, he should go ahead and do so. But not all of us express anger like that, so if your partner isn't raging that's not necessarily a sign that he isn't angry. He just isn't angry in a way that would satisfy YOUR anger!
On helping him to express anger, I would be careful here. Genuine safe steps in recovery come from the survivor's heart when he is ready; they can't be hurried. If you try to provoke him, you may instead badly traumatize him or just evoke the kind of anger that really doesn't help him.
Time frame? I know that one is a source of major frustration for partners, family members and friends, but I have to say that so far as I can see there's just no way to predict this. I can't say how fast I will deal with this or that issue, and sometimes a problem is long past before I notice that it's been resolved. I can never predict whether today will be a good or bad day; all I know is that the good days are becoming more frequent than the bad ones. Still, I never know when some new (or not so new) problem will ambush and challenge me.
Where anger is concerned I have to say that though I have felt anger about what was done to me I don't get all that vocal about it. But then, that's not my way in general. What I notice is that when things happen that in the past would have made me angry, my attitude now is more to welcome whatever it was out into the open where I can "see" it and work on it. The feeling is a kind of focused resolve, like I'm taking aim at something.
I'm not a T and I'm not sure I am getting all this right, but this is how the issue of anger looks to me at the moment. That said, I do feel that this is giving me a useful tool that I can use and trust in my recovery. I hope it will help you as well.
Much love,
Larry
