Rage

ROOOOAAAAARRRRRRR! 

(Picture from University of Saskatchewan...May be copyrighted)

I had a dream last night. It was dusk. That exact time of night where you cannot see anything clearly, not dark, but not light either. I was in a yard crouching by a hedge when I saw a man walking towards me with a massive grizzly bear on a leash.
The man accidentally dropped the leash and the bear escaped.

I saw the bear racing towards me and I dropped to the ground. I thought if I could stay perfectly still the bear would not see me. I was so still I could hear my heart pounding. I was so scared every tiny move I made was projected one hundredfold. The bear tried to grab me and I ran.

I ran to the house, climbed onto the window sill, then up onto the porch and finally onto the roof. The bear was raging angry and began to rip boards off the house. With the tremendous power in his paws he ripped the whole house, walls, porch, doors, roof, apart except the frame. I clung to the top of the house terrified and then I woke up.

In my appointment today this dream came up. I thought of me as the scared person on the roof, but if I look at myself as all the characters in the dream I am also the person who released the rage, and the person raging. I believed my depressed persona is the person afraid of the rage.

I have so much anger inside that I am afraid to let it out. I am afraid of its power and its potential for destructiveness. I often feel like I am a volcano about to explode and destroy everything in its path. I get these intense desires to destroy things, to hurt myself, to kill myself in really violent ways. They are only thoughts, but all the feelings of rage come with the thoughts. I feel so afraid I will lose control and destroy everything around me, just like the bear in the dream.

My pdoc says I need to be able to feel the anger, without releasing it in a destructive way. I do not really understand what he meant. I am not one to destroy things...I DO just FEEL like destroying things...and it is an awful feeling. All I want is for the anger to go away. It is not me.