There is anger in grief and there should be. Anger is the natural response to hurt and grief is hurt on the major side. Some surveys rate the pain of grief as being one of the most devastating things that can happen to us. If someone hits us in the mouth the natural response is anger. When life hits us in the soul we respond the same. We may not call it anger, it may not feel like anger, and we may deny that we feel it, but somewhere in there is an emotion we can call anger. It does not come on like the fall down in the floor and hold your breath until you turn blue or start throwing things at people sort of anger. It is more like a deep resentment that we cannot seem to express. A sense of it being unfair and undeserved. An irritation we can’t seem to put our finger on sort of thing. All of those feelings come from the same emotion as anger so for this post let’s just call it by that name.
The anger is actually a sign that you are moving through the grief journey and making some progress. The anger seems to be one of the driving forces that push us along. It is sort of like we hit bottom, get mad, and begin to fight our way back.
The problem is not that anger is there. The problem is that anger must find a place to focus. Where it focuses matters. The worst place for anger to focus in on ourselves. It can internalize and leave us blaming ourselves for things we did not cause. I will write a complete post about internalized anger in the near future. There are some other things anger seems to naturally focus on that are very hard to deal with or get past. We will try to discuss some of these in the next few post.
Anger at God is one of the most complicated and difficult angers to get past. On the one hand no matter the cause of the death there is always the concept lurking in the back of our minds that God could have prevented the loss. I remember a minister standing up in a Compassionate Friends meeting and saying, “I have told people that we have Angels watching over us, where was the angel when my daughter died?” Whether or not his theology was right does not really matter, most of us have some kind of an idea that God is in charge and can keep this kind of thing from happening.
When it happens, we ask why and some of us end up with our anger focused on a God who could have protected us and did not do so. Some can face that head on. Others fight to keep those feelings from coming to the surface and do a great deal of denying that the feelings even exist. For the purpose of this post let’s say you have some anger with God over the death of a loved one. The question then becomes what do you do with that anger
The best thing to do with anger is confront the one you are angry with, talk it out and come to some level of understanding and forgiveness. When someone actually acknowledges that they have hurt us and understands the depth of our hurt we can move through the anger and find peace. But that is really not possible with our anger toward God. We can pray and that is very vital and important, but it is not the same as a face to face two way conversation with a live person. Some may argue with me at that point, but their prayer life must be more realistic than mine has every been.
When face to face confrontation is not possible, the next best thing is telling someone how we feel. Anger is bled off as we talk it out, but that only works if the person we are talking to is able and willing to simply try to understand our feelings without thinking they must correct or change how we think or feel. Being understood is a powerful substitute for face to face healing. The problem is finding someone who is comfortable just listening and understanding when it comes to our feelings about God. Most folks seem to need to defend God from our onslaught and we end up getting a load of platitudes and guilt about how we feel.
Most of the time the ones who will understand are the ones who have been there or are there now. That is the value of groups. That is the value of organizations like Compassionate Friends. That is where you will find those folks who will listen to your anger and say, “I can see how you feel that way and I know it must really hurt.”
That does not sound profound. I wish there was some magic formula or mantra I could give that would make the anger go away. I would if I could and I could if there was such a thing. Anger shared is anger reduced. Anger about God is shared very carefully with safe people who will not judge nor correct.
A WORD ABOUT OUR CHAT ROOM
I have been trying to get a chat room started where those who cannot find safe people who will listen and understand can share with each other and allow me to sit in. We have had a program installed but there seems to be some issue in the programming on our website. They are working on the problem but it seems to take a long time to get anything done. I may need some anger outlets before long.