Džema holds on to her anger, looking at me suspiciously as I routinely explain who I am, who I am not, and how I could help her. He looks confused and angry. She greets everything I say with a silent, “Yeah, well?” but when she finally does, she wastes no time explaining how unfair it is that she had to leave her old school because of the fight, and how much she doesn’t want to be at this new school. He tells me about living with his father and horrible stepmother and how he hates it, really he hates his mother.

I understand that she is holding on to her anger because deep down she is hurt. Still, he can’t cry. I notice that every now and then he wipes the corner of his eye where there might be a tear, expecting to find something there.
However, it finds nothing. Like many openly angry girls, who are expected by their peers to constantly perform defiance tricks, she struggles to reconcile the man her peers applaud with the fifteen-year-old girl hiding deep inside.
Being a man is very easy – Džema can pretend that she doesn’t care all day long, sabotage all attempts to help her and position herself as an outsider in every situation.
ANGER AND RAGE OF TEENAGERS, Nik Laksmur: How to hear, recognize and control the anger and rage of young people
Translation from English by Jadranka Đerić-Počuč, Publisher Psihopolis, 2020. www.psihopolis.edu.rs
In this sense, her anger has become an advantage – it scares and distracts people and relieves her of responsibility. Anger simplifies everything. She holds on to it and feels safe.
However, Džema is unhappy. As she gradually admits, her anger is only part of her unhappiness. Her mother had been saying something to her for years that really hurt her. With the words: “I never wanted you, Džema”, it is easy to respond with the words: “Well, I didn’t want you either, mom!”, but deep in the soul it hurts that she lost her mother and that she cannot get her back.
It hurts when the boys laugh and treat her like she’s one of them, and it hurts when her father doesn’t notice her: “I think I got in trouble with the police just to get my dad’s attention!”
So instead of taking her anger for granted, we talk about sadness and hurt. We’re talking about a little girl that no one sees, who sometimes likes to “dress up like a woman” and wear make-up.
I have a difficult role because, by showing pleasure whenever we meet, by showing that I like her new earrings and complimenting her hairstyle, I have to repay her possibility to be respected by a father figure, while not avoiding the painful reality in which her own father is unable to notice that his daughter is growing up.
I have to make it clear that I’m not taking his place, but that I’m just, as a therapist, giving her more options to think about herself. She doesn’t always have to be a man.
We meet regularly, we review the ups and downs in her life. I listen and listen. And then one day she bursts into tears and doesn’t stop crying. He hates it school. Really hates her. The teachers don’t listen to her. They don’t care. No one does anything to help her.
This means that I am also among the people who do not try to make everything right. I don’t fight back. I know that school and I know that, although it has its flaws, like any other school, Džema’s description is exaggerated.
Her feelings about school are influenced by her feelings about other far more important people in her life who are supposed to listen to her, care for her, and help her. Like many children of divorced parents, Džema had to take responsibility for herself and her feelings too early.
She had to build a way to deal with people and situations, and her way was to develop her anger as a defense, as a way to protect tender feelings that others might trample on. The attitude that she doesn’t care about her has become a wonderfully regressive act, a throwback to the behavior of a more carefree nine-year-old who tested her limits before her parents divorced.
That’s why I’m taking responsibility for now. I propose to write something on her behalf to describe how she feels; something he can show others if he wants; something to help them understand. I sometimes do it instead of young people whose emotional voice gets stuck.
Then we go over what I wrote together, correct and correct it until it expresses exactly what the young person is struggling to express. Whether Dzema will show it to anyone later depends on her. That process works like mirroring, allowing her to see her reflection on paper.
Winnicott writes about the baby’s experience of seeing and hearing his reflection on his mother’s face and in his mother’s voice. In this way, the baby gradually learns to shape its own sounds into language—it learns what happy or sad looks and sounds like, for example—while its mother instinctively imitates what the baby expresses and adds something to that expression.
Through this process of mirroring or “validation” we learn to regulate our emotions by seeing them imitated.
Gerhart describes how the lack of attentive, attuned parental presence affects the development of our ability to later regulate our feelings and behavior, so later as we grow up, we have inappropriate emotional outbursts such as anger.
I don’t know what Gemma’s first experiences with her mother were like, but I do know that now her ability to describe the range of feelings and her ability to tolerate mixed feelings are limited. Her feelings are either black or white, with no shades in between. So I’m writing this on her behalf:
I’m writing this so you can understand how I feel.
I came to Thistle School after I was kicked out of Maybank. I didn’t want to come because all my friends go to Maybank. But I had to.
It is quite difficult for me to get used to newspapers because I have already experienced many changes in my life. My mom left when I was nine. Until then, I was the youngest in the family. Then my mom had a baby with another man. Now she has a new boyfriend. I still see her, but we have a bad relationship. I don’t think he really wants me.
After mom left, dad started a relationship with a woman who is now my stepmother. She already has children. Now I live with my father and stepmother. I love my dad and I know he loves me, but that doesn’t stop me, him, and my stepmom from fighting fiercely.
Friends are really important to me. I have wonderful friends at my old school, as well as some who don’t like me.
People think I’m feisty and tough, and I know how to be. However, they don’t see how I feel inside. A lot of the time I feel really lonely and empty – like I don’t matter.
Although I tried to fit in, I hate the Thistle school. It was very difficult for me in the beginning. People expect too much from me. School is another difficult thing that is expected of me and right now it seems impossible.
When I think about school, all the feelings I’ve felt in my life are awakened in me. I feel like no one is listening to me. I feel like nobody cares. It all seems unfair to me. Good luck getting back to Maybank. How lucky that everything is not this difficult. How lucky I am not to feel this angry and this sad all the time.
Whoever you are – if I let you read this – I hope you understand. You may not be able to do anything to help, but at least you know how I feel.
At the bottom of the page, I write Džema’s name and the date, give her to read and ask her opinion.
“That. Well, it’s good, I think.”
“Should we change anything?”
“Yes, I don’t want this about my family. I don’t want people to know that.”
“Anything else?”
“Not. The rest is good.”
I read the new version out loud to her and her eyes watered. The fact that we just made changes to hide some information about her is irrelevant: what matters is that she saw and heard a reflection of the story of her life.
The fact that Džema is currently against the school is also irrelevant. It expresses hostility and distaste because it canbecause the school won’t take any action against her because of it and because she knows that I won’t stop seeing her just because she feels angry.
For her, this is a new experience, a new story about anger that has been heard and accepted, that does not destroy anything and does not force anyone. In the coming weeks we will be thinking about her mother.
It is almost certain that in the end we will have a more complex and useful story than: “I never wanted you, Džema!” and “I didn’t want you either, mom!”
Young people use this word a lot: “I hate it school! I hate it when it happens! I hate it your dad! I hate it my life!” There is no harsher or stronger word that could be used. They can only make it stronger by adding a lot of swear words. And that word is not only powerful but also insulting.
Occasionally educators on training courses ask me not to use it. It obviously disturbs and arouses nervousness in some people, perhaps because somewhere in all of us is hidden the potential to hate.
Melanie Klein describes our hatred of the id – that undeveloped, primitive part of our unconscious being over which we would lose control if the rational ego did not restrain it with its influence. Id is dark and dangerous.
Klein writes: “The ego unconsciously knows that hate exists as well as love, and that it can prevail at any moment.”
For young people, hatred exists and must be accepted and acknowledged, otherwise its strength will persist. They may overuse the word, and they may use it to cover a multitude of possibilities, but when used accurately, the sentiment it describes is neither exaggerated nor inaccurate.
Hate is the humiliation we feel when our love seems to be rejected: when we extend our hand and there is no one to accept it, when we call out and no one answers, when we love and our love is not returned, when we hope and hope is given to us they tear down.
While describing the earliest love we feel for our mother, Satay writes, “I do not regard hatred as a primal independent instinct … but as a development or intensification of separation anxiety.”
When the time comes to separate from our mother (“I hate it partings!), we feel pain because we love her the most and we are most inclined to hate her because it awakens that feeling in us.
The same happens in later relationships. The purpose of hatred, as Sataj asserts, “is not the striving towards death or coming to an end with death, but the preservation of oneself… and the renewal of a love relationship.”
In working with young people, it is useful to understand hatred as reaction to the feeling that our love is rejected and like protection from further harm.
In other words, hatred is defensive rather than instinctive. It is safer to hate than to continue to love and risk humiliation when someone rejects our love because, when that happens, young people hate themselves for loving in the first place. They hate that impulse that makes them vulnerable, and they want to stifle that impulse in a multitude of ways…
„I hate it Mom!”
“But you used to get along really well with her…”
“I didn’t!”
„I hate it school! I can’t wait to finish it!”
“What will you miss from her?”
“Nothing!”
I know from experience that when young people with wide eyes say how they hate someone, many of them actually hate that they have such mixed feelings about that someone. Only if we first accept that hatred and listen to its intensity, is it possible to finally discover the love and longing that it so passionately protects.