Dear Gaia:

What you described is anger, strong anger. “dark and nasty” thoughts and moods, getting “very verbally aggressive and vicious in my mind even when it’s totally uncalled for”, “entertain mental scenarios of me attacking of fighting someone I dislike”-

– that’s strong, unresolved anger. I say unresolved, because you feel that anger “even when it’s totally uncalled for”.

You are “perplexed with myself”- the reason you experience a lot of this strong anger, even in situations where it is uncalled for, is not because you were born with a mental illness, but because you really had valid reasons to feel anger, as a child/ teenager. This is where the unresolved part of your anger resides, and why it is so strong and persistent.

I figure you kept your anger down all through the years, pushed it down at home, and like a volcano, lava rises to the surface every once in a while, surprising you. But the anger (the magma, that hot liquid before it reaches the ground surface of a volcano) is brewing underneath all along, all the time.

anita