(art: Hope, George Frederick Watts, 1886)
Anger is a normal and temporarily helpful response to a hurtful event. As an emotion, anger can help us summon the energy to protect ourselves in a situation, or to hastily remove ourselves from a situation even if it means needing a burst of exertion to get past barriers. Anger may also serve the purpose of helping us avoid getting back into the same hurtful situation again.
The problem with anger is that when it outlasts its immediate usefulness, it turns into a mental and spiritual wound. Given the researched deleterious effects of longstanding anger on our physical health, we may add that anger can even cause a physical woundedness in us. Anger also has the effect of preventing the mental and spiritual healing needed to restore health and well-being to ourselves after a hurtful event. Anger is a formidable obstacle to a forgiveness process, and relatively common.
On top of anger being its own obstacle to forgiveness, we can also use our own mind to not even recognize that we have seething anger within us affecting our thoughts, feelings, behaviors, relationships with others, and day-to-day living in any number of ways. In his Guideposts to Forgiveness model, forgiveness researcher Robert Enright identifies the most common “defense mechanisms” that people often use to avoid dealing with their anger as part of a forgiveness process:
- Denial — convincing yourself that the hurtful event actually didn’t happen.
- Suppression — keeping thoughts about the event out of our awareness.
- Repression — locking away memories of the event, like a kind of “selective amnesia.”
- Displacement — taking anger directed at the person who hurt you and redirecting that anger to someone else.
- Regression — changing your behavior back to the behavior of childhood and its intentions, expressions, and functions during childhood.
- Identification with the Aggressor — adopting the behavior of the person who hurt you.
In the Guideposts to Forgiveness model, as much as we may be avoiding recognizing and engaging with our own anger, doing so is Step #1 in undertaking a forgiveness process. Forgiveness can’t happen, and can’t even be begun, without clearly seeing for ourselves the anger that a hurtful event or series of events has caused within us.
How do I know if I have avoided anger? There is more than one way to figure out if you have avoided anger. You may begin by simply asking yourself for honest answers to the following questions from the Guideposts to Forgiveness model, and journaling your responses:
- Have I been using a defense mechanism to deal with the hurtful event?
- Am I using a defense mechanism to prevent myself from confronting injustice?
- Does my use of a defense mechanism actually end up hurting me through my thoughts, feelings, behaviors, relationships with others, and day-to-day living?
- Are my relationships with other people impacted by my using a defense mechanism?
Some hurtful events may involve so much trauma, or have been experienced at a young age with limited ability to understand events, that we need the help of a mental health professional to approach these listed questions, or work through them if we become increasingly aware that the hurtful event involves a lot of trauma, including trauma experienced during our childhood. It is very important to connect with a mental health professional if this is your situation.
In addition, if working on these questions begins to bring up feelings that are suddenly overwhelming and unmanageable for you, it is important to connect with help using a crisis line, Anyone who needs help with suicidal thoughts, an emotional crisis, or a drug or alcohol addiction crisis, or who has a loved one in crisis, can connect with a trained counselor by calling, chatting, or texting 988 at any hour of the day. There is no charge for the support, it’s free. Please, please, use it! Know that no matter what, God still loves you and loves the people that you love, and still wants to give you and them a good life. Give God a chance and call, chat or text 988.
Prayer is always a support available to you, and has a lot of potential to help you identify whether you have avoided anger, how have you done so, and how that is impacting your life. Prayer can consist of connecting with God to ask for help in working through the listed questions, and even speaking with God as a trusted friend, companion, and helper as you work on your answers. Since God already knows what is in your heart, short prayer also works as well. I think a good one is the one sentence prayer from Psalm 70 that is used to begin prayer every morning in the Liturgy of the Hours. The prayer simply goes: “God come to my assistance, Lord make hast to help me.” It is an ancient prayer that has stood the test of time, and for good reasons.
Make no mistake about it, seething anger is a burden, a binding, and a blindness for a person. Over the long term, it takes life away from you rather than following through on its initial promise of protecting your life. Also remember that as much as anger is a burden, a binding, and a blindness for you, it does not and cannot define who you are in your soul — the place and part of you that is created in the very image of God (imago dei). No matter how tough the situation looks like in engaging with your anger, there is still that unchangeable and unremovable place and part within you — you can count on that! Remember also the words of Jesus (John 10:10): “I came so that they might have life and have it more abundantly.” That means you can also count on the help of Jesus Christ to free yourself from anger, reconnect with the image of God within you, and restore yourself to well-being and a full life. You have a very strong and dedicated friend in your corner! The best of friends! Take heart in that!
Please share these words with someone who needs them today.
This text is an original work of its author Tom Delaney and was entirely composed without the use of artificial intelligence (AI).
If your parish or faith community is seeking a deeper experience of forgiveness, healing, mercy, and spiritual renewal, Live and Forgive is here to help. To begin the conversation, email Live and Forgive presenter and facilitator Tom Delaney at tom@liveandforgive.com — he will be glad to connect with you for a conversation. Please type in your email and click “Subscribe” below to stay connected and get Live and Forgive articles delivered to you.
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