It is only when the anger is pushed down into your unconscious mind and out of awareness that trouble begins. It is a hard core psychological law that says: When anger is repressed a symptom must appear. More specifically, when anger is repressed toward a specific person—a who—and pushed down into your unconscious mind, then that is when you will get a symptom.
Again, it must be remembered that your wish (Point One), starts it. When the wish is thwarted, you feel helpless and disempowered. You challenge this helplessness or disempowerment by becoming angry (Point Two) at the person (Point Three) who blocks the wish. And it is always a person, never a thing, who will be the who.
The whos are the personal cast of characters of your life. And it’s always important to know who it is that is responsible for blocking your wish. And this is the first job that you have to do. You must know who it is that makes you feel helpless, that has turned you down, rejected you, refused you something, or blocked the path to your goal—your wish.
At first glance this can seem like a hard problem to solve. Doesn’t everyone have scads of people in their lives? How does one narrow it down to see who the culprit is—the responsible who?
The good news is that the problem is far less complicated than it seems. The fact is that each one of us really has less than six or seven significant people who might be our culprit—our targeted who. In order to get the correct who, we need to identify who that might be. For this job we need to round up the usual suspects.
Of the usual suspects—those people who can affect us, scare us, or make us mad—the who will be that person responsible for us not getting what we want (not getting what we wish for). Thus, the who is the person that prevents us from getting our wish.
When we try to think of just who the who might be, we can get overwhelmed. After all, we know so many people. There are probably forty, or fifty, or even one hundred people in our lives. Right? Isn’t that right?
No, it’s not right. It’s wrong. Those people, or suspects, who can affect us enough to cause the kind of emotional stress and distress that leads to the appearance of some psychological symptom are really members of an exclusive club. How many members are in this club? The answer is anywhere from five, six, or seven, up to ten. That’s about it. Ten is even high. These few members of your Who Club can include your spouse, your child or children, one or both of your parents, one or more of your siblings, another one of your relatives, and even your employer, a particular coworker, or a close friend.
So when you’re experiencing a symptom and looking for the who, you need to do a mental roundup of about five or six or seven people in order to see which one of them might be the culprit—the one who caused your feelings of dissatisfaction or hurt, or who scared you, or made you feel stupid, helpless, humiliated, or who said “No” to you, and who made you feel helpless, disempowered, and then angry.
A spouse | A fiancé
A parent | A child
A sibling | An employer
A friend | A coworker
A relative | A business associate
The person with whom you are closest.
The person who has power over you.
The person with whom you’ve shared an important event.
The person you love.
The person you hate.
As we’ve pointed out, sometimes it’s very hard to realize that you are, in fact, angry. But if you’re experiencing a symptom, you can be sure that the anger is definitely there—underneath. So even if you don’t feel the anger, try to see if you have a feeling of dissatisfaction. The feeling of dissatisfaction is usually a good road map to follow. It will lead you to your destination—the feeling of anger, and the feeling of anger toward a specific person—the who.
Now, we still have one more point to cover in our dissection of the symptom code. Point One was a consideration of the wish. Point Two was an analysis of the issue of anger and Point Three covered the concept of anger toward a specific person—the who. Our final point, Point Four, concerns what to do with respect to the original wish.