Without realising it we do things on behalf of other people as much as we do for ourselves. People operate collectively whether or not they like it, even when they believe they are acting on their own.  Much of what I write about on these pages is about how our ways of living have been shaped by others organising life around us in our earliest years.

What’s hard to think about might be that those ‘others’ include people who were not physically present. They may have been on the other side of the world and unknown to you; they could have been long dead. This is a strange thought to have unless you already think this way.

No such thing as a single relationship

Let’s begin with a bold thought. There is no such thing as a single relationship, although sometimes we talk about one for the sake of simplicity. Each thing we call a relationship carries the effects of countless others, some so fleeting but so potent; their force like the glancing blow of a meteor now knowable only as we might trace some rock traveling through the outer limits of our universe.

Relationships involve the lingering presence of people who are long dead or events that occurred deep in the past. What we think about as being between two people, you and me for instance, is actually always a bigger adventure, a group activity.

Anger as a group activity

Let’s see what anger, which has a lot to do with CARE might look like as a group activity. My thoughts owe something to Foulkes’ rather hazy ideas about location and a lot to Nicolas Abraham’s and Maria Torok’s extraordinary ones about the dynamism of intersubjective functioning.

Imagine that people tend to get angry with you. Maybe you had an angry parent. You tend not to get angry easily (you feel it, you sometimes do it when that seems absolutely necessary, but something doesn’t feel free about your relationship with anger). You do some things with great force. Maybe you kick a ball, dance, sing or throw things with a kind of power that other people come to recognise. Maybe you even make a career out of it. At the same time you find people getting angry with you in ways that aren’t clear. You rarely get into a fight. Perhaps you experience others being envious of you. Things are more blurred than a straightforward fight.

Blurred anger

This blurred experience of others’ anger comes from you dealing with your parent’s anger when you were a child, but also from all kinds of other places. It may not be blurred: perhaps it has some other distinct form. See if you can find a way of describing it.  As your defence, a way of adapting to something that threatened you,  it operated along these lines. If someone is going to get angry with me (unavoidable) I will experience, when they start to do so, a kind of a tension that builds up to some kind of a release. That way I let go of the tension and I feel okay.

Being a lightning conductor

This is like being a lightning conductor. A catalyst for some immense force, taking it out of one place (your parent) and into the ground. Unfortunately ou don’t escape unscathed. Over time all of this catalytic work will affect your body. Entropy is inescapable and more profound when the same thing happens again and again.

Overall, though, you will seem okay with anger. By not responding angrily to someone who is angry with you you run less risk of immediate injury or insult.

How people feel safe

Perhaps you can see how your way of coping with anger can be a cornerstone of a group’s way of coping with anger. You are very likely to feel safe to other people, unless they are living some kind of a lie. You can become a go-to when people reliably want to vent their frustration. They know you will in some way stand up to them, even if they can’t quite see how, and they can see you are doing okay. The way you receive and release anger can keep a group stable.

Frustration

Groups need people like you. But you really need to make sure you care for yourself. What toll is all of this taking on you? Being a lightning conductor has benefits but predictable ways of dealing with difficulties inevitably become outdated. Nobody can live life as if they are trying to deal with a long-gone meteor.

You will feel so frustrated if you try to care about things you can do nothing about. Many of the things that might affect your response to situations are no longer happening. Their invisibility might leave you feeling what you care about is only straight in front of you, whereas you could be angry for all the cares in the world. Your world, that is, and whatever that may be is impossible to ever entrirely know.

Have a go though. Try to understand indirection. Always, we need to update.