this post was submitted on 29 Jul 2026
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A mental health therapist can and should be able to help a client manage their righteous anger as they work their way through it together. Anger underlies a great many things, and grief is one of them. You don't just say, "I don't want to feel angry," or just decide, "I'm not going to be angry about this anymore," when the rage is this broad and deep and well-established: in time, that kind of denial and repression is just going to explode in your face, if it works at all.
Instead, because anger is very well understood, there are known ways to deal with it. Anger doesn't just disappear on its own, nor even very quickly, and a person suffering this kind of grief could use some assistance diving into the anger and the very exact specifics that are causing it. The therapist should be able to navigate this presenting anger with relative ease and guide the client through it, not just with skillful therapeutic inquiries to get to the very specific root of this writer's unique grief which is where they'd start, but also with coping skills to give the client to be able to self-manage their righteous rage for as long as it takes them to work through it and clear it so that their overwhelming grief can resolve.
This therapist is doing none of that. Instead, they are just offering commentary on the presence and length of the anger as though they're watching a movie, when they could and should be helping the writer sort it out and work through it. That's not on the writer, that's on the therapist.
Yes but to what end? It doesn't sound to me like they want to manage it and work through it and clear it. They want to hold on to their anger.
No, they really don't. What they want is to feel better, and for their therapist to stop playing "no shit Sherlock" with their pain by pointing out obvious irrelevancies in regard to it.
What they want to hold onto is the very specific, unique truth to their grief that is invariably found behind the anger. When they find it, that very specific point or points fueling the rage, they no longer need the anger: it has served its purpose.
That's not in the post though. It might be true but the post is saying they want to stay angry (until society properly deals with the fallout from the pandemic). Anything else is your interpretation based on what might seem logical but without even knowing them.
It's not saying that they want to stay angry, it's that being angry about it is righteous and justified, and everyone should be angry enough about it to prevent something like it from ever happening again. But half of people still don't even acknowledge covid was real, nevermind the social issues it exposed. Being angry is a reasonable response.
And I agree that it's reasonable. Which, in my mind, translates directly to "I don't want to stop being angry, stop trying to make me calm down."
I think it's more "stop telling me that being angry isn't an appropriate response to current social issues." The therapist could be working on coping strategies or mindfulness techniques to deal with the anger in constructive ways.
I don't know if that's what the therapist is saying. But even if so, the patient needs to be (or at least try to be) clear with what they're hoping to achieve in therapy. If the therapist is ignoring what OOP has told them, that would be the problem but we don't know if that's what's happening.
Lol, no. Why would this writer by choice be paying a therapist his time and cash to painfully bare his soul so that the therapist can say idiotic things to him and not just assist him in remaining exactly where he is, but actively make it worse?
Dude, he could get that for free (and probably already is from friends and family telling him he needs to "move forward" like that's just a decision he can make).
Look again. That person is simply telling the therapist they will not release their anger just because society has said it's been long enough. That's just not how it works, and this writer knows it. The writer will release the anger when the anger has served its purpose. That is not accomplished with facile lies, much less casual grief-shaming.
Frankly, a therapist should know what purpose anger serves off the top of their head: that alone would guide them forward. Not everyone does, and that's okay, just not so much in a therapist.
But when you can't recognize a overt cry of anguish and grief, and you mistake someone correcting their therapist from that place of inner agony for someone that "wants to stay angry," all you're really telling me is that you've never had a situation like the writer's, nor a therapist that could take you through your darkest hour and help you see what you needed to see to get back out of the cave of your grief again.
Truly amazing how you can diagnose people from a distance, solely from what they write.
I know this comes as news to you, but this has all been studied literally since the beginning of time. Anger was discussed by the earliest philosophers. The writer openly describes it himself.
So what's the diagnosis I've provided? Do you even know what an diagnosis is, or is that just a word you threw at me because it sounded smart and -- wait for it -- you're angry?