Brandice.net Blog

Ironically timed journaling prompt:

“How do you deal with your anger?“

Boy oh boy, am I ever quick to anger at times. I think one of my biggest struggles is a temper that is easily triggered and requires an intense amount of energy to put away, especially when it’s accompanied by indignation.

I have a tendency to become especially angry on the behalf of others in a way that I’m still learning to rein in. I would never last a week as a social worker if I couldn’t process and move forward from the things we humans regularly and casually do to one another on any given day. Sometimes my anger and my indignation get a hell of a lot of things done at work, but only when I carefully channel it into advocacy for the patient.

In my personal life, I’ve recently taken a lot of anger and hurt that I’ve been feeling for months now, and I finally expressed it to one of the people who had caused the hurt and anger, and, as is usually the case with me, the minute I expressed those things, I finally let go of those feelings, acknowledged their validity, and moved forward without that baggage.

It’s frustrating to me that I have a hard time moving on without that process happening, but in this case it was completely deserved, and even my husband had told me it was well past time that I tell it how it is and move on from the relationship. He’d actually been telling me that the relationship was completely imbalanced (he said it more colorfully) long before I started to feel that the imbalance had become palpable. I just sometimes wish that the expression of my anger or hurt didn’t have to be such a crucial component to getting over it.

On the other hand, I like that I rarely take any shit, and that I’m capable of speaking my mind (sometimes in a fairly loud voice). ;) Something I recently took away from a spiritual discussion group is that even our imperfections are capable of being our best qualities at the right moment. I hope that I’m getting better at knowing which moment is which.

How do you handle your anger?

Still working my way through Wreck This Journal:

The liberation continues!! This one was fun, because I got to just tear out this page and leave it at Red Robin for whoever bussed our table last night. More to come!

Journal prompt:

What do you need to feel successful?

I know the question is about what I need in order to feel successful, but when I began to think about my answer to that question, I was more interested in whether I actually feel successful right now, and if I do, what is it that does or doesn’t make me feel that way…

I think in my personal life, I feel successful in the area of family because Jim and I have made it through our first year of marriage, and while I’ve struggled over the years to find a healthy place for my immediate family in my life, I have recently been very successful in building positive relationships with them, while not feeling like I’ve given up anything important to do so. My sister and I, in particular, have both grown and evolved to a point where we are actually sisters now, which is new as of the past year. I think that my family efforts in the past year or so have been successful and will continue to be.

When it comes to friends, things seem to ebb and flow. I’m often frustrated that the people I seem to have the most in common with are only accessible via the internet due to geographic distance, and that the friends I have more locally are the type that float in and out of things and each one of them only meets a portion of the criteria for what I would really like to have in a kindred spirit. Have I been successful in building friendships? I would say that recently my success has been more in recognizing what I want in a friendship and eliminating relationships that don’t provide enough (or any) of those things, so that my energy is best spent on those who reciprocate that energy.

As a professional, I have succeeded by finding work right out of grad school and in excelling at that work, but I think that in order to feel an ongoing sense of success I will need to continue to learn and grow as a therapist, and I will need to eventually incorporate more clinical work (counseling/therapy) into what I do later on as a mental health professional. I have a picture of where I’d like to be professionally when I’m “settled,” and I’m not quite there yet.

Are you a success? Why or why not? What does it really mean to be “successful”?

So, Laura and I decided to do the Wreck This Journal adventure together after recently talking about how we’d both like to do more creative and cathartic journaling. The book isn’t your typical journal and involves actively pushing you to do things to a journal that you wouldn’t instinctively do, like dump coffee on it or scribble on it or even light certain pages on fire.

One of the first (if you go through the book in order) tasks is the crack the spine:

Yikes… I’ve never done that intentionally to a book, but there you go.

Some of the other pages/tasks I’ve done so far:

Looking forward to wrecking the rest of the journal! Almost everyone I’ve shown the book to has gone out and purchased one… the wreckage is contagious. There’s a group on Flickr too, so I’ll be adding all my pictures to that group in addition to the album I started as well.

Let the wreckage begin! :)