touch with my negative feelings but only feel less joy, creativity,
spontaneity and love. There is a good description of this kind of
unrecognized or unacknowledged anger in the book Healing Life’s Hurts, page
102,3: “I become more impatient and critical. Impatience makes me a clock
watcher shifting feet and tightening my jaw when people come late. I find
myself rushing what I am doing (eating fast) to get on to the next event
(reading a newspaper) and rushing that too. I even help people finish
their sentences so I can get on to what I want to say or alter their
insights with a ‘Yes…but…’ When I take time to talk with someone, I
only half listen, hearing what is said but missing how the person really
feels. I begin to teach subjects, not students, and look forward to
classes ending, not beginning. I impatiently work harder and alone, seldom
delegating a task because I feel that others don’t want to help or because
I don’t think that they could do a good job. I become a ‘constructive’
critic (because I am critic and not the target) of everyone??those who
don’t know I need help, those who are late, and those spreading injustice
by their apathy. (Communicate the message that you are damned if you do
and damned if you don’t.) When I pray, I treat God as I do others??half
listening, talking about my work, complaining about injustices that need
changing and venting impatience at God’s timetable. Much of the day my
anger expresses itself in continual wishes that something would change and
go faster or better.” These can be some of the symptoms of anger.
Uneasiness, disease. If anger is swallowed long enough, the body rebels.
I also believe that repressed or denied anger or anger that is clung to
causes cancer. Physical illness can also be a symptom that I am angry. One
of the results of denied anger is that it builds and builds and finally
boils over. It can be a small thing that brings about the explosion. Or
the explosion comes out not only unexpectedly but displaced. I direct my
anger at the wrong person.
Anger can be denied or unrecognized or unacknowledged for a variety
of reasons. But basically we don’t call anger anger because we believe or
have been taught that anger is bad. We don’t want to be bad. We learn to
hide our anger from our friends and ourselves. Sometimes though we are the
only ones who don’t know that we are angry. But feeling anger is healthy.
Nursing unresolved anger which results in hostility is usually unhealthy
and sinful. St. Augustine had a saying: “Hope has two lovely daughters,
anger and courage. Anger so that what should not be is not and courage so
that what should be is.
Suppose for a moment that you are driving down a road and someone
swerves into your path. You get angry but your anger also activates your
body to react and overcome the accident that you fear. It also sometimes
activates our tongue to “curse a blue streak”. When someone hurts me I
also get angry. This is a sign of health. It means that I am concerned
about myself and about the other. “We should love ourselves and others
enough to hate violence, selfishness, prejudice, sexual chauvinism
(machismo), and other injustices. Anger energizes us to change what
should be changed so that we can live in a better, more loving
environment.”
How can we work at our sinful anger? Some people find it helpful
to divert their anger. I’m reminded of our novice master who
got so angry with us for breaking silence continually during work period.
He walked briskly outside saying his office for about three quarters of an
hour before he confronted us with our misdeed. This is the person who gets
angry and goes for a walk, or a bike ride, or chops wood or cleans up a
storm or takes a hot bath or shower, or goes jogging, or, or… In doing
this we must be aware that we are simply diffusing the anger. These things
drain away the present tension but fail to heal past hurts that fester and
cause continuous anger.
A second way to work at our anger is to try to pin down our
feelings by talking to someone about how we feel. We must of course share
with someone not to nurse the anger along or be bolstered in our right to
be angry. A warm friend’s acceptance of our anger can be the beginning of
healing. This person may give me a different perspective on the whole
thing.
Sometimes we can directly tell whoever hurt us exactly how we felt
and why we are angry. When we are angry is usually not the time to do
this. How often in anger the worst in me meets the worst in you and things
get worse.
Prayer is also a means to work on anger. I can begin by telling
Christ how I feel. Sometimes this means getting beyond what first comes to
my mind to the deeper hurt. Sometimes we have to explore with Christ to
‘recognize’ our anger. If we have a distorted idea of God we will not
share with him at the level needed for healing. I must share with God who
loves me unconditionally. My prayer might sound like this: “Lord, show me
what I felt like saying and doing. Let me share all its ugliness and hurt
with you. Lord I feel drained and scared.” We have to know something of
the scriptures to do this well. We might find an incident in the life of