I really like everything that Cary has said here. He acknowledges the process by which we learn to become ourselves, he outlines some of the steps of individuation. Wisely, he recommends LW gets some help with the challenges she faces.

These are all great, and a lot of commenters have talked about anger, a few even having had smiliar issues. Something I haven't seen addressed fully, is what anger does to a nice person. Why it's so hard to deal with.

I know intimately, because I have often been the 'nice one.' I've spent a long time learning to recognize that I was abused in my youth, to understand the damage that was done, and to begin the process of healing. For a 'nice person' anger is anathema. It is a poison to us. We're allergic to it. As Cary points out it feels great to let it go, to feel the power and strength and courage of it.

But then it feels like shit. The adrenaline goes away, the pride in standing up for yourself vanishes in the wind, and you begin to cry. You cry because the power that has just used you is too intense, because it goes against your nature, and forces you to act in ways that aren't natural to you. You realize that your anger has made you an abuser, and you abhor that.

People tell us to enjoy our anger. To control it and get through it, but we can't. Anger makes us the person that hurt us, the very person we've spent our lives trying not to be. So we're stuck in between this anger and our terror of being an abuser. You can't really control anger, no matter how much we like to pretend we can. We can hold it in, we can supress it, we can direct it, but we can't control it.

So how do we survive? How do we get through the anger-rodeo into being healthy, assertive individuals?

Two things. The first is time. It takes time to come to grips with your need to stand up for yourself. It takes time to accept that we're damaged and that we need to heal ourselves. It takes time to understand the anger.

The second is compassion. Not compassion for others, compassion for ourselves (which will lead naturally to compassion for others as well). We have to be compassionate for our own injuries, our own needs, our own life. We have to treat ourselves with the same courtesy, the same niceness that we treat other people. When we realize that we matter, that our compassion demands we treat ourselves like real people, we find the strength to stand up for ourselves gracefully, with strength and determination.

When someone trys to inconveinence us to satisfy their own laziness, and we don't want to do it, our compassion kicks in much more quickly than our anger. (Indeed, this cycle is often what causes the anger, we let ourselves be trod upon and the anger rises as a result, perhaps after only a few seconds.) If we don't let ourselves be trod upon in the first place, the anger does not get a chance to take hold. We say to this person, "No, I can't do that for you, I need time for myself." Or we say, "Excuse me, I'm not going to make an issue out of this, but it's very discourteous to use this lane when you have such a large order. And its inappropriate to denigrate someone in front of their children."

It takes practice, and it takes patience, but it helps us get through it. One day at a time. Just like everything else.