Anger In Our Grief

In our world today, most people are dealing with a certain level of grief and loss. As the worldwide Pandemic is just now beginning to ease up, many of us are realizing we have been dealing with a great deal of loss. The world has been a different place for the last few years. Our normal way of life, believing we have a measure of control to many of our daily actions, has been taken away. We are also seeing nightly news of a war in eastern Europe. It is unsettling to us all as we see people being overtaken by a larger, more powerful country, and the rest of the world seemingly can’t do anything to change the circumstances.

As we have discussed before, loss is inevitable in the human journey; therefore, we will all grieve. One of the most difficult parts of grief is dealing with anger. We see a lot of people angry over all kinds of things in their lives. One of the challenges of dealing with anger is, for the most part, we all have been taught we shouldn’t be angry. So we tend to try initially to repress anger. However, even the scripture says, “In your anger, do not sin”. We will get angry. Anger is actually a very normal emotion. Yet, how can we be angry but not sin?

I think there are two ways we might sin. One is, we sin against ourselves by just repressing the anger. This will harm our souls internally. The second is, we let it boil over and lash out at another. Neither are healthy or productive. So what do we do with anger, and how do we move through it appropriately?

First, we need to understand that anger is a secondary emotion. I use the illustration that it is like a chimney. Anger is what comes out of the chimney. Below that anger are the primary emotions. Two major categories of primary emotions are usually hurt and loss. Unpacked hurt could be many things, such as feeling unappreciated, rejected, misunderstood, taken advantage of, unloved, mis- portrayed, not listened to etc…

Ultimately we want to try to find the primary emotions and allow ourselves to feel those feelings and express them in a healthy way. You might find talking with a safe friend helps you unpack these primary emotions. Safe friends are confidential and validating in that they are not trying to fix you or get you to stop feeling the feeling. They are simply there to be with you and support you in your anger. Some people find writing out raw emotions to vent them is a release, and it helps them identify their primary emotions.

Writing out our feelings and talking with a safe friend can help us move through the anger and begin to release it. This, in turn, can decrease its intensity and frequency.

Ultimately, forgiveness is the final resolution of anger. We will talk about this more in another post. But finding a way to see those who hurt us in a different light and realizing they are acting out of their own hurt is a step towards mercy. Mercy is a first step towards forgiveness.