Anger on top of grief. Or a stage of it? Or both?
I can definitely see this, the anger layering over the grief. As I was listening to Dr. Levine yesterday, he commented that at first (infancy and childhood) the stress response is a response to an actual threat to survival, and then gets turned against our own unresolved needs, sensations, and feelings. One of those feelings I think is the grief of unmet attachment - love. And this becomes a cycle. Our behavior shifts to still trying to meet those needs as we age, and the shift is a subtle change as we do so. The teenage version vs. the child version, and then the adult version over the teen version, and it's still the unmet needs and the now years of grief because (moving into first person here) it seems that no matter what I tried, those needs don't get met. I then escape that pain with a behavior, which works for a while. Then fails, and I wonder just what the hell is wrong with me that I can't figure this shit called life out and why the never ending deep pain and emptiness and continuous feeling like a failure.
I broke down in my 56th year, on Christmas Day. On a call, and then went home to an empty house. Two years later I started to heal, and it even took another 6 years of healing before I invited grief in. In 2019, I had another breakdown, but it was circumstances this time, not me. There alone in the little cabin I was able to secure, I allowed grief to be with me. Sometimes I think it was a lot of the grief of the past that I cried out in April through December of 2019. Maybe not so strangely, I've had little reason to be angry since then.