There are 8 faces in my Many Faces of Anger. Of these there is only two that I call genuine anger. One of these is Righteous Anger.
 
Righteous Anger teaches you to find the power of your own truth. It is anger that is grounded in our personal truth. Many people are not aware that they carry personal truths within them. In my classes many participants didn’t know their own truths until these truths were crossed, and became angry at themselves because they didn’t stand up for them.
 
Personal truths are part of who we are and who we have always been. They arise naturally in us in childhood when our truth is denied by those around us. You can say a child’s first experience of real rage is in defense of their own truth. Later we may think about our personal truth as bottom lines.

Anger is a defense against loss: Our ability to accept loss is related to the way in which we were supported through the losses we have had in our lives.

The gift of Gestalt is that we have never “done life” alone. Even in the womb we are adjusting and expressing our relationship to space and time, to acceptance and non-acceptance. We have been relating to others our entire lives. In fact there is nothing about you or me that was not developed in response to how others saw or responded to us.

We carry inside us desire for many kinds of skin-to-skin touch – a mother’s hand on our cheek, a teacher’s touch of encouragement, a lover’s touch on our skin. In fact the skin, called the largest organ of the human body, is intended to relay information to us about the quality of touch, its honesty, and its level of health. We have had this ability since we were children. But more basic to this is the touch that comes from the intention of the other and my embodied response to it. This is the touch before the physical touch – the touch of our approach to one another, of the space between us.

This has to be the most “used” word in psychotherapy as well as being the least understood. For example, you might say: I have a problem taking support, or I don’t have people around me to support me… In the early days of Gestalt therapy, support meant self support — if we were lucky we created that as children to protect those parts of self-expression that no one seemed to appreciate. We grow up into self-sufficient adults, which socially is a highly valued state. But support doesn’t mean finding the right person or the right environment.