“We love or hate our enemies to the same degree that we love or hate ourselves. In the image of the enemy, we will find the mirror in which we may see our own face most clearly.” ~Sam Kean
 
“It is not the mountain we conquer but ourselves.” ~Edmund Hillary
 
 “Even a goat can bite when conditions become unbearable.” ~ African proverb

The caption beneath the photo startles me awake. For years I had tried to deal with my resentment over my mother’s destructive rage. As she lay dying I sat by her bedside and attempted to soothe her heightened anxiety by reading the Psalms to her. Even though she had lost the power of speech, her menacing eyes said it all. She flailed her dying arms in an attempt to strike me. My heart broke. All attempts to reconcile would soon die along with her.
 
On the night she died my brother and I sat around our kitchen table recollecting our childhood. My dear husband attempted to steer the conversation toward good memories by asking, “What is one memory of your mother’s kindness?”  Stunned, neither of us could recall a single memory. In my spirit I already knew this. However, my brother reeled from this fresh realisation and it sent him into three days of drug-induced, profound grieving.

My decision not to attend my mother’s funeral hurt some of my family members who could not understand the complex relationship between us. Flooded by intense grief over what might have been, I could not bear to hear anyone say nice things about my mother just because she was dead. So, I nursed my wounds instead on a tropical isle. Later, her home unit needed to be emptied for new owners to move in. Barry’s brother died the night before the planned emptying. Wracked with fresh grief, we gathered her meagre belongings, gave them away to neighbours and threw everything else into a large, hired bin. I wanted to keep nothing that would remind me of her except a few photo albums and letters that I planned to read when the tsunami of emotions subsided.
 
The months after my mother’s death were challenging to say the least. Three months after her death I risked picking up one of her folders containing a sheaf of papers and began to read letters she had written but never sent. As I read, I knew she intended for me to eventually find them, as she was a bitter woman. An ocean of vitriol and hatred spilled out on the pages toward me, my family and humanity in general. The pain in my heart felt physical. (I had read that “heartbreak” is an emotional termattributed to physical symptoms of being broken-hearted. During an acutely stressful event, there is a massive rush of adrenalinetriggering something similar to a heart attack.) I knew I had to find a way to let her go, a way to release her stranglehold over me.
 
Three times I visited her grave. The first time I walked down the neat rows of gravestones I noticed exquisite white rose bushes blooming in full glory beside every headstone. As I approached my mother’s grave, her pure white rose bush lay dead, the only one. Something powerful exploded within me. I stomped on her grave and declared how nothing beautiful could survive in her presence. I expressed fierce anger and resentment and told her how difficult parenting was for me because she had left no healthy model to follow. I told her how I resented her powerful hold on my emotions. When my emotional outburst subsided, I prayed for freedom from the destructive oppression that had settled over my spirit.

A Powerful Emotion
 
Anger is a powerful emotion. Carl Jung (2019) remarked, “A man who has not passed through the inferno of his passions has never overcome them.” Uncontrolled anger is like an inferno or the bleeding of a deep wound that originates in our past by those who influenced us – parents, caregivers, authority figures who were unkind, abusive, legalistic or manipulative, school bullies and so forth. We may be angry at God, attributing to Him the characteristics of those who hurt us. This anger can drown out the Spirit’s voice and spill over to those close to us. The lyrics of Something So Right, by Paul Simon (1973), poignantly express this ache of anger:

They’ve got a wall in china
Its a thousand miles long
To keep out the foreigners they made it strong
And I’ve got a wall around me
That you can’t even see
It took a little time
To get next to me

Ephesians 4:26-27 (MSG) exhorts, “Go ahead and be angry. You do well to be angry – but don’t use your anger as fuel for revenge. And don’t stay angry. Don’t go to bed angry. Don’t give the Devil that kind of foothold in your life.” So, how can I be angry without using my anger as fuel for revenge? How do I refrain from staying angry? What kind of anger gives the enemy a foothold? Let’s explore the ache of anger from a couple of diverse perspectives and attempt to identify what is involved in healing. 
 
What is Anger?

https://unsplash.com/photos/UwEIvAwRg1A

Our anger vocabulary is rich with meaning. Angry people are described as:

Mad, bitter, frustrated, griped, fed up, sore, excited, seething, annoyed, troubled, antagonistic or antagonised, exasperated, vexed, indignant, furious, provoked, hurt, irked, irritated, sick, cross, hostile, ferocious, savage, deadly, or dangerous.

Anger often produces certain behaviours that counteract healthy communication. Communication-damaging behaviour is described as:

To hate, wound, damage, annihilate, despise, scorn, disdain, loathe, vilify, curse, despoil, ruin, demolish, abhor, abominate, desolate, ridicule, tease, kid, get even, laugh at, humiliate, goad, shame, criticize, cut, take out spite on, rail at, scold, bawl out, beat up, irritate, fight beat, crush, offend and bully

The ache of unexpressed anger in the early years of my marriage relationship nearly ended it. Kathleen Norris (cited in Knoll, 2003, pp. 4-5) worked as a residential artist at a provincial school, teaching children how to write poetry. The Psalms were used as a prototype. In her book Amazing Grace, she shares the story of a small boy, one of her students, who wrote a poem entitled, The Monster Who Was Sorry. His poem begins with an admission of how he hates his father, yelling at him and reacting (in the poem) by throwing his sister down the stairs, then destroying his room, and finally destroying the entire town. He concludes with, “Then I sit in my messy house and say to myself, ‘I shouldn’t have done all that.’” Norris notes:

 My messy house says it all. With more honesty than most adults could have mustered, the boy made a metaphor for himself that admitted the depth of his rage and gave him a way out…he was well on his way toward repentance, not a monster after all, but only human. If the house is messy, why not clean it up? Why not make it into a place where God might wish to dwell?

Similar to the messy house where I grew up, the messy house in my marriage was full of unexpressed anger, including the ache of depression that contained a cauldron of both love and hate. Mine was a desperate, suffocating neediness for Barry to come through for me in the way I demanded. Unable to express this verbally, manipulation became my primary strategy to hurt him and force him into being for me what he was never designed to be. Of course, this was destined to fail and only produced pain, hurt and sorrow. I longed to clean it up but didn’t know how.
 
What Makes Us Angry?
 
Reflect for a moment on what makes you angry. Anger is a God-given emotion and a fact of life. It can be either positive or negative and is one of the many human emotions that effect the way we communicate with one another. We tend to fear our anger, its capacity for evil, our desire for revenge and our longing to hurt back. The Scriptures claim, “Reckless words pierce like a sword, but the tongue of the wise brings healing” (Proverbs 12:18). What constitutes the tongue of the wise and how does it bring healing?
 
It may be helpful to begin by understanding anger as an emotion in response to hurt, wrong or injustice or a blocked goal – someone or something is preventing us from accomplishing what we want. There has been an unjust assault on us, our needs are not met, our values are trampled or our feelings are hurt or taken advantage of, especially by someone who is supposed to care. Take my story for example. I felt unseen and unknown by my mother. I also felt unseen and unknown in my early marriage relationship that promised the opposite. Both caused deep pain and the pain was too heavy to carry. Anger helped to dull the pain and made me feel powerful and morphed into a lust for revenge.
 
The Anger Continuum
 
It helps to realise that there are subtle differences between rage, anger, irritation, frustration. The illustrations below depict anger continuums:

Knowing the distinctions between different shades of anger helps us to express our feelings verbally rather than act them out inappropriately (a feeling word list can also be helpful).
 
There are also two other kinds of anger: legitimate and destructive. When a person sees or experiences injustice and gets angry, it constitutes truthful, legitimate and authentic anger. My anger over childhood abuse and neglect was legitimate. How I dealt with it was not. Anger held onto for years can be destructive to self and others. The pay-off for me was that my anger protected the vulnerable parts of my heart. The intention of my anger was to punish my offenders. I did not want my mother to get away with her legitimate wrongdoing, so I punished her by eliminating her from my life. Later, my anger was designed to prevent my husband from getting away with his refusal to move into my hurting world (my perception).
 
I now know the enemy loves to enter in at the point of the offence and establish his lies, so that he can take us out. Examples of lies are:

• “If I let go of this anger, they will get away with it.”
• “If I let go of this anger, I will get hurt again.”
• “If I let go of this anger, it makes them right in what they did.”
• “If I let go of this anger, I am weak.” 

It follows that one of the greatest lies was how I needed to keep punishing people for their wrongs for years, if not a lifetime. In this way, anger is like a wild horse:

Try to ride it and you most likely will end up eating dust. Probably you will break something that would better be left whole. Get back on the horse and the “’buckin’ bronc” will throw you again. You can keep trying, or you can get smart and have someone show you how to tame the animal. Once you have learned to tame a wild horse, you will discover a magical relationship between you and the horse. The animal you tamed will become a good friend (Gottlieb, 1999).

Research reveals that If we do not deal with it, chronic anger, resentment and bitterness will lower our body’s capacity to resist illness. Anger triggers the body’s fight-flight-freeze responses and the release of chemicals that enable the body to survive. These chemicals can cause damage if they are continually released into the body. The long-term physical effects of uncontrolled anger include increased anxiety and depression, high blood pressure, digestive problems, skin problems, headache, heart attack and stroke (Department of Health & Human Services, State Government of Victoria, Australia, 2018). This goes a long way towards explaining my continual lack of energy and susceptibility to sicknesses in early adulthood.
 
Conflict is somewhat different to anger. Anger is often a single event, whereas conflict consists of continual angry or negative feelings; for example, as two unique individuals sharing their lives in the constant and intimate relationship of marriage, we face friction. Events occurred in our relationship that ignited our anger, resentment and jealousy. In order to maintain harmony, it was easy to hide our feelings from each other, but this only put up a barrier that became higher, as we continued to ignore our problems and deny our feelings. Avoiding conflict did not make it go away. Instead, it turned into resentment and bitterness that defiled many; for example, when someone would cut me off in traffic, my anger flared, accompanied by destructive thoughts and words hurled at the person from the safety of my car. This gave me a sense of power and strength where I felt more in control than if I did nothing. I pounded the horn to let the other driver know they had violated my perceived rights.
 
How is Anger Like a Volcano?

Lava that spews out the top of a volcano is molten rock called magma that has been expelled from the interior or the earth. It comes from deep within the volcano. Similarly, the volcano is a metaphor for life, as illustrated below. Secondary emotions spew from the top of the volcano, while the core, primary emotions below supply the secondary emotions with powerful energy.

The following volcano diagram illustrates how my anger spewed from the top of the volcano expressed as negativity, criticism, contempt and attack. My husband’s anger spewing from the top of the volcano was expressed as rationalisation, resentful withdrawal and blame. These two responses to conflict were an expression of secondary emotions and created a never-ending cycle of disconnection that wore us down. Eventually, we perceived our relationship as negative and irreparable.

Despite the emotions streaming from the top of our relationship volcano, we knew the source was deeper within, covering our hidden, primary emotions that were less tolerable; emotions such as sadness, hurt, helplessness, fear, inadequacy and shame. To effectively reduce or eliminate our dance of disconnection at the top of the volcano, Barry and I needed to dig deeper to find the core, primary emotions that were covering, yet fuelling our secondary reactions. Only then could we begin to change our dance. In other words, we needed to shift the stories we believed about ourselves and each other and deal with our core beliefs, assumptions and interpretations of our differences. Anger and conflict do not come out of nowhere – other emotions are generally beneath them. Before we could change how we dealt with them, we needed to understand them.
 
Reflecting on the volcano, I see how my anger spewed out the top when the primary emotions of hurt, helplessness, abandonment and shame were triggered. Shame was associated with feelings of failure, worthlessness, rejection and feeling unwanted and unloved; for example, when I felt judgement from my husband or perceived that he viewed me in a negative way, I judged myself negatively for failing to live up to his expectations. Shame is a really painful emotion that tends to attach to early wounds given from those meant to care for us. I cleverly avoided experiencing my internal shame by covering it with anger that was directed outwards against other people, especially my husband. In other words, my anger was self-protective and a defence against shame. Unless I paid attention to my primary feelings, the vicious cycle of anger would be reinforced and strengthened.
 
Interestingly, John Gottman (2007; 2015) has spent years studying marriages with the intent of discovering why some marriages succeed and others fail. Rather than study only bad marriages, he intentionally studies those that endure. After many years he believes he can predict with 91% accuracy which couples will remain married and which ones will eventually divorce. He bases this on listening for just five minutes to the ways the couple argue. He also identifies which behaviours will lead to a breakup of the marriage. The key ratio is 5 to 1. In other words, as long as there are five times as many positive interactions between spouses as there are negative, the relationship is likely to be stable. If not, Gottman is able to predict divorce, as he finds that very unhappy couples tend to have more negative than positive interactions. In 2015, he highlighted the following six signals that indicate a couple will most likely divorce:

1. A harsh start-up;
2. Using the four horsemen of the Apocalypse (Criticism, Contempt, Defensiveness and Stonewalling);
3. Emotional flooding;
4. Distancing body language;
5. Failed repair attempts; and,
6. Negative memories

Criticism, contempt, defensiveness and stonewalling all spew from the top of the volcano, covering deeper primary emotions such as sadness, fear and shame. Unless we learn to connect below the line and communicate our deeper, softer emotions, the cycle of disconnection will continue to separate us.
 
Anger Myths
 
For my husband and I, even though our responses to conflict typically did not deal with the problem, we believed the myths that were:

• Ignore it: it is not really happening – if I ignore it, it might go away;
• Soldier on: this is my lot in life, I will put up with it;
• Blame: it is the other person’s problem; let them deal with it;
• Deal with it indirectly: enlist the support of others to get to the other person (friends, parents, Pastor) and hope they get the message;
• Express and dominate: win at all costs; everyone loses; and,
• Repress and withhold with silent treatment: put greater distance between parties. 

All of the approaches to conflict above the line will inevitably fail because they are grounded in protecting our softer, more vulnerable emotions. Conflict often means that love is very much alive and attempting to break through the barriers separating us. Conflict may be painful, but it also helps a relationship to grow. Faced honestly and caringly, conflict can lead to greater trust and understanding. In fact, constructive conflict shows that two people care enough about their relationship and each other to work at all issues, even on the painful ones in their lives.
 
Honouring My Mother
 
The caption that startled me was beneath a photo of my sad-looking grandmother and it changed everything:

Mum in main street of Katoomba, where she and I lived for 6 months after she had a nervous breakdown in 1932. I was enrolled at school there and Dad used to come up on weekends. We boarded at a guesthouse in Cascade St and I got lost in the heavy winter mists on way home from school.

Something deep and powerful cracked my angry heart open. It was the first and only time in my life where I felt any connection to my mother. With the eyes of my heart I saw my mother as a frightened little girl, her world shattered, her sense of safety obliterated. A desperate only child, she had lost her own mother to deep, dark depression and she was on her own. I understood for the first time how desperately lonely her life had been. Her survival as a child depended upon disconnecting from all emotions except blazing rage at being abandoned. In response, I walked the aisles of a toy shop until I found and purchased a fluffy toy, returned to her grave, and placed it there. I told her how grieved I felt for her inner, helpless little girl, knowing I was also grieving my own. It was a powerful opening up in order to let go.

https://www.pexels.com/photo/grayscale-photography-of-girl-holding-plush-toy-48794/

The third time I visited my mother’s grave I was finally able to let go of my anger and her hold on my life. My teenage daughter was struggling and we were invited to a weekend of family counselling. As I embraced the process of asking for my daughter’s forgiveness, the facilitator’s comments felt intrusive and off the mark. Later, I realised she represented my mother’s intrusion into my life and relationship. My mother’s profound wounds so marked me that I related to my daughter from those wounds, causing pain to myself and her.
 
This awareness broke me once again. I asked God’s forgiveness and found myself outside a florist in my local shopping centre, attempting to hide the flood of tears washing over and through me. I purchased the most exquisite bunch of white roses I could find, attempting to spare the salesperson the embarrassment of my grief that was a peculiar mixture of acute pain and blessed release. At the cemetery it was easy to find the grave with the dead rose bush. Placing the white roses on her grave, I told her that she would never come between my daughter and I again and she would no longer steal the beauty God desired me to embrace within myself and offer to others. Her grave was watered with my tears and I left as a prisoner set free from the ache of anger. A poem by Morgan Harper Nichols (2020) expresses my journey:

You have picked petals
without regard for their stems,
leaving them stripped of their color,
and when you saw what you had done,
you ran
and ran
and ran
eastbound
through the deserts
to hide
never to return to flowers again.
 
A new day is calling you
to stumble into the sunlight,
where the old ways
of thinking
are made right
so you can be at peace
to roam through the flowery fields again.
For mercy is always
louder than sharp cries of shame.
It knows where you have been
but still calls you by your name
inviting you to step forward
with the boldness to begin
a way of living that gives freedom
and to sow new seeds
into the earth again.

Closing Thoughts…

Anger is a powerful emotion. There is a continuum of anger responses. Anger is often a defence against the more vulnerable, primary emotions beneath the volcano, stemming from self-protective strategies that were formed growing up in less than perfect homes. Rather than a “one size fits all” approach to anger, I will explore several different perspectives in the next blog that help us to understand its power.
 
A Declaration…

I purpose and choose to forgive… (insert the person’s name here) with all of my heart for what they did to me. The hurt/s is… (state the hurt/s specifically). I set them free and place them in the hands of God.  I am confident that God will treat them according to His justice and mercy. I release any desire for vengeance, bitterness or resentment toward them. I cancel their debt to me; they owe me nothing, neither an apology or a change of behaviour to be forgiven. They do not need to value me because God values me. I set them free. I now declare myself free from any anger, bitterness or resentment that binds me to them.
 
A Prayer…

Acknowledgement
 
Dear God, I come to you with an overwhelming anger,
a bursting rage.
This rage is like a cancer shut up in my bones,
eating away at my soul.
Today, O God, I acknowledge this rage.
I do not suppress it, or hide from it.
Thank you, Lord, for accepting me – rage and all.
 
Expression
 
O God, I feel a burning rage within.
A fire gone wild.
Burning, always burning.
God, I hate what was done to me.
It was so evil.  So wrong.
Why this evil?  Why this degradation?
Why?  Why?  Why?
My hate, O God, is the only power I have against this vicious world.
That’s why I cannot let it go.  
Please, God, don’t ask me to let it go.
 
Turning
 
God, I cannot separate my hatred for what was done from the person who did it.
I despise the deed, I loathe the person who did the deed.
My hate is my only revenge.
But, God, my rage destroys me too.
I fear this seething anger searing my own soul.
O Lord, my God, deliver me from the evil
I would do to myself.
 
Forgiving
 
I refuse to allow this evil to control me anymore.
I will not be held in bondage to my hate any longer
But, the strength to love, is not in me.
I must wait for Your enabling.
Now, in Your great power,
and with a trembling heart,
I speak Your word of forgiveness.
 
Healing
 
May Your healing light shine, O God,
into every crack and crevice of my soul.
Rage once made me feel strong.
But now I receive Your light,
encircle me with Your love.
I have not forgotten what was done to me.
I will never forget.
But today I choose to live       
as Your child of infinite worth. Amen. (Source Unknown)

Reflect

• Ask God to forgive you for your bitterness and resentment against… (insert the person’s name) …

 

• As God to heal your heart, take away the pain and hurt, and tell you your truth about this situation…

 

• Listen for a message from God in a word, picture or feeling and write it down…
   
  (Adapted from: Mathias, 2010, p. 111).
   
   

About the author: Dr. Paula Davis is a clinical counsellor, supervisor and educator specialising in psychological trauma. She has worked in higher education over many years as senior lecturer in counselling. Along with her husband she designs and delivers marriage enrichment/education programs in Australia, Africa, Sri Lanka, India and Europe.
 
References
 
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2.     Berry, C. R. (2003). When helping you is hurting me: Escaping the Messiah trap. New York: The Crossroad Publishing Company.
3.     Brown, F., Driver, S. R. & Briggs, C. A. (1951). A Hebrew and English lexicon of the Old Testament. Oxford: Clarendon Press.
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9.     Gottman, J. (2015). The seven principles for making marriage work. USA: Potter/Ten Speed/Harmony/Rodale.
10.  Harper Nichols, M. (2020). All along you were blooming: Thoughts for boundless living. Grand Rapids, MG: Zondervan.
11.  Johnson, S. (2018). Escaping conflict and the Karpman drama triangle. Retrieved from https://bpdfamily.com/content/karpman-drama-triangle
12.  Knoll, M. (2003). Bread and wine: Readings for Lent and Easter. New York: Orbis Books.
13.  Lisitsa, E. (2013). The four horsemen: Criticism, contempt, defensiveness, and stonewalling. The Gottman Institute. Retrieved from https://www.gottman.com/blog/the-four-horsemen-recognizing-criticism-contempt-defensiveness-and-stonewalling/
14.  Maalej, Z. (2004). Figurative language in anger expressions in Tunisian Arabic: An extended view of embodiment. Metaphor and Symbol 19(1), 56.  
15.  Mathias, A. (2011). Biblical foundations of freedom. Internet: Wellspring Publishing.
16.  Satir, V. (1967). Conjoint family therapy. USA: Science and Behavior Books, Inc.
17.  Seligman, E. P. (1991). Learned optimism. New York: Simon & Schuster.
18.  Simon, P. (1973). Something so right [Lyrics]. Retrieved from https://www.paulsimon.com/track/something-so-right-4/
19.  Walters, R. P. (1981). Anger, yours and mine and what to do about it. Grand Rapids, MI:  Zondervan Publishing House.
20.  Wright, N. (1976). Communication: Key to your marriage. CA, USA: Regal Books Division, G/L Publications.