Stomp. Stomp. Stomp. It’s almost fall, but it’s still warm enough to wear shorts. In this mild evening air, a brisk walk has me working up a sweat as I stomp my way through my neighborhood.
I. AM. PISSED.
Someone close to me was careless about a sensitive subject in a way that really upset me. And the worst part was that they didn’t seem to notice. It’s an old issue that’s rearing its ugly head yet again.
Stomp. Stomp. Stomp. My brain is working overtime now, trying to find the words to describe the reason why blood now boils in my veins. I survey the homes along the block as I pass by, taken in by the dimly lit porches and the buzzing insects that together create a calming, sleepy vibe. It’s a vibe I wish I could match, but I can’t, I’m too angry.
I want to go off. But I know that won’t help. It probably won’t make me feel any better either. The adult in me wants to handle this with care, carefully sussing out what has upset me, why, and what needs to happen next. But the child in me wants to fight, scream accusations with pointed fingers, and, when done, crumple to the ground in tears.
It’s the tell tale signs of what my trauma therapists call inner-child work. The child that lives within me, who was wronged all those years ago, is crying out for justice, and she has been all along. She’s been ignored for much too long and is now fed up… and flipping over tables. All the while, the adult in me is trying to apply healthy coping skills to an untended blistering wound. It’s a recipe for frustration and confusion, which, for me, creates anger.
Anger is work for me. It burns up a lot of energy that I’d rather spend doing almost anything else. It stirs up my imagination in ways that unnerve me. And I’ve found that even if I use that angry energy to push forward into some good thing, it only carries me so far before I flame out. Yet, I have to allow it to run its course.
Holding space for anger is a healthy thing. As difficult as all of this is, allowing myself to be angry and filtering out the noise to understand why, it’s progress. I’ve come a long way. I used to think that anger was an emotion that I should run from, in part, because it would be too hard to subdue the green hulking beast that would rear up in response. But also, once I started really walking with Jesus, I thought allowing myself to be angry would cause me to make him look bad.
A thinker first and foremost, I tend to grapple with the facts and perceptions first and deal with emotions last. By the time I’ve turned my attention to the emotions, they’ve usually been cooled down by the analysis, if I still even feel them at all. On the few rare occasions when that hasn’t happened, I’ve felt so out of control that I was afraid of how far I might go. It’s a serious shock to my normally cool, calm, and collected system, at least outwardly.
But when I first started working with a trauma therapist a few years ago, she helped me see that I don’t need to fear my anger. I learned that I could embrace it as an extremely useful signal. Because when it shows up, it’s a sign that someone has crossed a major boundary.
My issue was that I thought even feeling the emotion meant that I wasn’t honoring God. In my mind, I wasn’t supposed to get angry at all. But how in the world do you control that?
You don’t.
My reaction was to smother anger as soon as it started to rise up. So that’s what I did… for more than a decade… until I was challenged by that therapist.
For the first time, I actually thought about God’s anger. In the bible, both Jesus and the Father displayed a variety of emotions like joy, sadness, frustration, anger, and even, in the Father’s case, regret. They often used those emotions to communicate something important about who they were or the situation itself, like the crossing of a boundary.
At times, they definitely felt one way and behaved in another (just think of Jesus the night before he was crucified or all the times God held back from taking out ancient Israel). I realized that if I’m made in their image, then of course I’d have the same emotional palette AND the ability to decide how I wanted to respond.
From that moment on, anger was no longer a scary monster to be avoided, but a tool that God gave me on purpose for a purpose. I began to see anger as a signal and a call to action – an opportunity to make a choice. I didn’t have to run from anger or pretend I wasn’t feeling what I was feeling.
I could feel it completely and not be consumed by it. I could thoughtfully decide what the next action would be. And that action didn’t have to match how I felt. I could still think it through. Finally, dealing with anger didn’t have to be an all or nothing proposition. And it was freeing.
So yes, I am angry, but I’m also very much in control. Thank God.
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