Here is my blog in forgiveness for anger.
Anger is a normal as any other emotion we have in our human experience. The trick is to be able to handle it in a healthy way. For me, it was always about never seeing a model of what healthy anger looked like. We are consummate mimics after all, especially as children, as part of our finely-honed survival skills. Everyone around me seemed to always erupt in anger unexpectedly and demand some sort of restitution for whatever injustice they were on about. I or someone I loved was often an unintended and undeserving target for their frustration, but a target nonetheless. I ended up developing a deep-seated fear of anger. It’s no surprise. My reaction was classic conditioning.
Anger + me or someone else getting abused every time someone is angry => Fear of Anger
Developing such a fear response can build up quite a reservoir of resentment inside someone. It certainly did in me. I shut down and froze, trying to disappear, whenever I witnessed someone express anger. I also feared my own anger. I turned this already unhealthy response against myself. I denied my own feelings of anger even to myself, and so amplified my anger problems. I was well into my adult years before I learned how to cope with this emotion in a healthy way. I also learned to release the tension build up inside because of past unresolved abuse. Forgiveness was and continues to play a crucial role in healing my anger issues.
We forgive our family members. We forgive our coworkers. We forgive our friends. We forgive ourselves. We forgive life. We even forgive our anger at our Higher Power and ask for forgiveness from It.
In a healthy world, we learn that anger is one in a range of human emotions. We learn to allow ourselves to feel it, and at the same time not become it. We learn to direct our anger appropriately rather than abusively. We learn to allow it to move through us instead of holding it. Holding anger in traps it inside the body as a knot of tension. Anger can lead to the body responding with inflammation if we are unable to process it in a healthy way.
We get angry when we make mistakes. Here, we can really turn anger against ourselves. We dole out a self-inflicted wound when we do this. We beat ourselves up. This is a problem for us. This is a problem for the world, too, for, one way or another, our inner unresolved inner anger will burst out of us unintentionally and uncontrolled. We will hurt someone in the process. So, it is just critical that we come to healthy terms with our fallibility.
We often feel justifiable anger around injustice. Here, we recognize that we are hurting, and we are angry at whatever happened. We recognize and acknowledge our anger. We allow ourselves to feel the emotions of anger course through and out of us. We then bring forgiveness and compassion to the situation, to those involved, and to ourselves. We move on with our lives unburdened by this anger episode because we have dealt with it and let it go.
Finally, when anger wells up in me, I take a somber moment of self-inquiry and ask myself, “What is it in me that is being so reactive to what just happened? Can I heal that part of me that feels so wounded?”
