From Chaos to Calm

I often find myself struggling with mindfulness, a method that supposedly allows one to find a space between anger itself and the explosive or implosive reaction it causes. The intended result is the ability to reflect on what caused the emotional response before acting out, therefore being able to express it in a healthy way. For someone like me, who lacks patience nearly all of the time, this is one of the most difficult things to accomplish in the midst of an episode. What also makes this difficult is my inability to focus on something, anything, other than how angry I feel in that moment. I've been told I can be very stubborn about certain things, and I suppose that happens to be one of them.

More than a small part of me wants to hold on to that anger because doing otherwise still feels like giving up or giving in. So much of it comes from feeling invalidated and unjustified, to the point that I've felt compelled to force my view of what's 'right' on the people I believe don't know better. There have been times in the past when I would become preoccupied with that idea, which is ironic considering how much bullshit I've allowed myself to accept whenever some sort of wrongdoing was directed at me instead of someone else. Maybe that in itself ties into the pattern I seem to have of ignoring my own needs and focusing far too much on those of specific people, to the point of becoming codependent.

While most of the anger I feel seems to be random as far as catalysts are concerned, I understand that some of it does come from a logical place. For example, take this series of events; an inability to sleep, followed by being woken up by the sound of mice digging somewhere inside the walls, which causes an anxiety attack, and is then followed by being told by my mother that this is a problem I should've taken care of months ago by helping to clean the house. Even in that situation, I'm now able to see that being angry about it is healthy and even constructive. Lashing out as a result, though     not as much.

In just over a month I will have been in therapy for a full year, and can see that some progress has been made in that time. And yet it bothers me that the way to finding mindfulness is still so challenging. regardless of the amount of work I've done to find just a shred of calmness within myself.