Anger Or Negativity – What Is The Difference?

by Mackenzie Littledale

Someone on Twitter engaged me in a (civil) disagreement over whether it’s humane or cruel to subject mental illness patients to long-term use of psychiatric drugs. I insisted that society needs violent mental illness patients to be on medications, even if a risk of physical disability or suicidal ideation might be in their future. She claimed I had a disregard for human life and insisted that these outcomes were not probabilities but inevitabilities. This lady argued that forcing people down a path with that as a known destination is cruel. She said she’d researched psychotropic drugs. I couldn’t make the same claim.

My Angry Questions

Even though her tweets weren’t attacks, I was angry and felt defensive. On reflection of my reaction, I realized my ego had simply gotten the best of me. What I perceived as a threat was that she had exposed me to my own ignorance of a topic that, by any reasonable standard, I should have known well.

I asked myself why I hadn’t done deep research into my own prescriptions.

Would violent behavior and suicide in my future if I stayed on these drugs?

Why wouldn’t I want to know that?

What the hell was I popping every night at bedtime? How could I be so trusting?

Why was I defending a position so strongly when I had no arsenal of knowledge?

I had a right to know. I had an obligation to know.

The Realization

I was plenty angry at myself for being so lax and blindly trusting my nurse, who was one small unit of the Westernized Medicine Industry, a system in which I professed no confidence. How could I be so hypocritical with my own mental health care?

Anger vs. Negativity

Some might advise me to go easy on myself. Don’t entertain negative self-talk. But I make a distinction. Anger is an emotion, and emotions are signals that something is in alignment or out of alignment with what we’ve come to accept as true. Anger just is. I believe anger is a strong signal that something is out of alignment with Truth. To ask myself a question in anger and frustration and incredulity isn’t the same as condemning myself with negative judgments. Finding an incongruence within myself is a signal that my actions and philosophy are out of alignment with each other. I could either willfully stay in my misalignment (be a hypocrite) or I could answer the questions I was asking of myself (become a seeker).

My Approach

I could have crushed the questions as some taskmasters do to children who ask insolent questions. But I admire children’s ability to question everything and everyone. I indulged my inner questions because they deserved answering. I sat with irritation and wondered what it wanted me to discover and search out. Carrying the diagnosis of bipolar, I owed it to myself to either learn more and be better for it or dispel the tweeter’s nonsense. Was it nonsense?

I let the anger fuel me into action. To stay angry and crush my insolence for even questioning myself probably would have led to depression. Not healthy.

I Educated Myself

Where would I find information on bipolar? I started with Google and searched for long-term side effects of psychotropic drugs (and sure enough, the drug I’m on came up in the results). Luckily, I’m on an atypical, so the risks of side effects are low even on a long-term basis.

The tweeter recommended I watch a YouTube video called Bipolarized. So, I looked it up. I watched and was profoundly uncomfortable. I’ve never seen my own bipolar behavior. To see what bipolar looks like from “normal” eyes was a real eye-opener. Jarring, yes, but an eye-opener, nonetheless.

My questions jarred me out of my comfort zone; the questions were irritations, much like sand in an oyster’s shell. The oyster doesn’t want the sand invading its space, challenging its status quo. I don’t want to admit bipolar makes me do “crazy shit.” I want people to believe that there’s nothing more to me than who I am on my meds. But that irritating sand in the oyster’s shell forces the oyster to produce a pearl.

Will I let the pesky questions irritate me into producing a valuable bit of wisdom? Or will I stifle them?

In the Final Analysis

Rather than suffocate my curiosity, I breathed life into the questions. I give myself full permission to ask any question I please, and also to decide whether the question merits an answer, and further decide what price I’m willing to pay to get the answer. To crush the questions as though they’re nuisances or threats would have been the same as telling a child to shut up, which is a motive from an unhealthy, insecure ego, in my opinion.

After watching the video, I’m curious now (again) whether the label the doctors have attached to my brain is correct. Perhaps there’s another treatment approach that will do just as well as meds. I give myself permission to inquire and seek.

About the Author

Mackenzie Littledale is a freelance writer who’s been writing since her early teens. Her first published article will appear in the January 2019 issue of Conscious Life Journal, which is based in Atlanta and focuses on mindfulness practices in business, spirituality, health, and relationships.

Her work experience includes her early years as a receptionist, but her ambitions propelled her to executive assistant on the commodities trading floor of a British bank. She made a radical career change to massage therapy in 2009 and built a modest private practice on the side while gaining experience in the spa industry. The next phase of her career is to leverage her talents as a writer. Profoundly influenced by Ken Follett, J. K. Rowling, Carol Edgarian, and Patricia Duncker, she is currently working on her first novel, This Darkness is Mine, which is based on a true story.

Mackenzie writes for her blog covering topics as diverse as vegan food choices, philosophy, goings-on in her community, new restaurants, random thoughts, poetry, and life with a bipolar diagnosis.

She lives in South Florida with her cat. Both avoid the beach.