Trip to the Marriage Counselor

I hate the navigation on this site. I really do. You get to the bottom of the page and you have to scroll all the way back to the top to navigate to the next page.

obobfla : while I agree with Bazz that it is perfectly good for a counselor to challenge your thinking, and the way you express your feelings, it is NEVER ok for a counselor or anyone in a therapy setting to invalidate your feelings. Your feelings are your feelings, they are genuine, and they are what they are. It is the counselor's job to pick up from there, maybe ask why such and such a thing made you angry, what you wanted different, if you did or did not attempt to make your feelings and expectations clear in the situation as it happened ... but they must not, ever, invalidate the way you feel.

Which is how I read your first post in this thread. Of course you have the right to feel however you feel. It may be inappropriate, or it may not be -- but, for fucks' sakes, they are your feelings brought about by the situation. A good counselor may look at this and try to point out better ways of coping. Better still, they might ask you what you could have done different, that's how you get results. We do have control over our emotions to a degree, and we can choose how we interpret a situation, and how we decide to feel about it to a degree. Being told what (not) to feel never works.

My personal take is that anger prevents clear thinking and when I am angry I do not try to deal with a problem; I generally try not to get angry in the first place, I re-interpret my agitation as sadness or regret or hurt for instance, but when I get angry I walk out until I cool off after making it clear why I walk out and that I need time to cool off.
But woe unto the counselor who would dare question the validity of my feelings in any case.

In your case I'd go back there and that would be the first thing I'd say: "where do YOU think you're coming from questioning the validity of my hurt and anger. There's no point in my being here if you don't accept me as the person I am as a baseline with my thoughts and feelings as they are, and work with me from there. If you think you can tell me which of my feelings are right or wrong, or what feelings I have a right to have, then I might as well go and talk to Fozzy Bear and Kermit the Frog".

my $0.02's worth ....