this post was submitted on 29 Jul 2026
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This is a difficult situation. There are many things one should be angry about, but one has few options to deal with it: either you can let it go and move on, actually try to do something about it (even if you fail or it takes a lifetime or not always possible), or just stay angry.
I’m not going to tell anyone how to feel, but I personally would either let it go or try to do something. I’ve lost people before and I refuse to feel that shitty all the time; it is hell.
You are conflating the pain of loss with the emotion of anger.
If you have an ounce of humanity, sympathizing with this person should be automatic. They have every right to be furious and there can be no resolution until the underlying material conflict has been resolved. That is the purpose of that emotion, to drive behavior towards affecting change.
The approach/philosophy you are approaching this from is useful for when the brain gets "stuck" after the underlying conflict has been resolved or when someone is hallucinating blame to deal with the pain of loss. There is no possible interpretation where either of those is the case. The situation has been logically analyzed and the emotion has been checked.
If you have an ounce of empathy you should be mad as well. You have been informed of the situation. You are aware of the pain they are experiencing. You understand that without change this can/will happen to you. Why aren't you angry?
I believe you and I are on the same page really. I do empathize, and yes, I do get angry (and I agree that anger is a necessary emotion at times), but I have to ask myself, is there something concrete I can accomplish or work toward? If so, I get to work. And if not, then I try to move on. I focus on what I can change instead of risking my own mental health focusing on things I cannot.
I don't think we are, but it depends on what do you mean by "move on"?
It is almost always used to encourage very deliberate, self-destructive, disassociation. That will wreck your mental health and you will have trained yourself to not realize it. Your feelings are valid, suppressing them and ignoring the problem won't make either go away.
If you are someone with an obsessive or single-minded kind of personality then that can be good advice. Obsessing over something you cannot change will wreck your mental health. However, assuming that's true of enough people that this is good general advice is insulting and damaging. It is also conflating obsessive tendencies with a specific emotion.
It is valid and necessary to remain angry at injustices, even those we cannot immediately change, because that is the only way to gather the political will to do so.
In my experience, these are conjoined. You try to do things (or, at least, stew about wanting to do things) while you're angry. And as the anger fads, the impulsive need to act fades with it.
So then you've got a group of people who are still angry. And they can turn to the people who have burned out from their anger and scream "Why are you not still angry?! Why are you so apathetic?!" And then these angry people can blame the burn outs for whatever failures accrue.
But it goes one step deeper, because there's no just one group of angry people. It's a melting pot of people with different views all competing to impose their will on the world. And any time any individual or group fails, they need to root out the cause of that failure. Which means blaming the out-groups and self-flagellating over personal weakness and bemoaning the neutral third parties for not being on your team.
Also, lots of money in selling people an outlet for their rage. Or selling them a cure for it. Or selling them a means of inflicting pain on the people they're angry at. Or just selling them on the promise of some future satisfaction.
An endless conflict fueled by rage, fear, greed, and ambition.
Yeah, I'm with you. I feel like there's a possibility that this person is experiencing a complex trauma that continues to affect their minute-to-minute life in negative ways, and the therapist was trying to guide them toward a kind of acceptance that could have eased some of those negative effects but their patient just wasn't having it. Maybe not ready for it.
I'm not trying to say I know them or what's right for them, of course, but just offer an alternative view