***CHOICES IN ANGER: Emotions, Mind and Spirit, Part 4
Looking deeper
If you take a Spiritual perspective, assuming that every experience in life is a potential healing lesson, an invitation from your higher self to learn and to grow, then challenges in your life may have a different feel to them. This is a major reframing!
If someone does something that disappoints or hurts you (if you can catch yourself before anger rises, or also after anger has abated), you might ask yourself, What healing lessons am I being invited to learn?
Focusing on the other, you may come up with answers such as compassion, empathy, understanding, healing or gratitude (for being in more fortunate circumstances yourself).
Focusing on yourself, you might explore such questions as,
What in me might be similar to that which I am annoyed with in this person/ interaction/ situation? That is, what old hurt could there be in my bucket that has been stirred by this encounter?
If you notice that you find yourself angry repeatedly in similar sorts of encounters, you might begin to ask, What might there be in me that invites these angry interactions? It could be that your unconscious mind is bringing you to behave in ways that elicit provocations to anger.
When I was 8-15 years old, I was often left in charge of David, my younger brother (along with other household duties) because my single-parent mother had to work to support the family. There were periods when I resented the burden of baby-sitting, but couldnt allow myself to complain because everyone in our little family had to pull their share to enable us to get by. I would do things to invite David to misbehave and would then vent my anger on him. By doing this, I developed situations where I could vent some of the resentments I was carrying over having to be the man of the house in the absence of my father. I was totally unaware of doing this until my mother repeatedly pointed it out to me.
Lessons of this sort may also come out of the blue, without any apparent ways in which we could possibly have invited them through our behaviors.
In my 35 years of practicing psychotherapy, I have often found my clients teaching me almost as much as I am teaching them. The issues they are struggling with are precisely the issues I am - or need to be " examining in myself. And if I dont get the lesson the first time, a second or third client appears within a very short period, with a similar problem. Clients often offer general reminders, such as to be more compassionate and considerate of others feelings, but their lessons can be uncannily on target for more specific issues in my life.
Here is just one, from uncountable examples I could muster: I was festering and fuming at work, furious with my new clinical administrator, who was forcing us to document clinical interventions in increasingly greater detail. This appeared to me to be totally unnecessary and an enormous waste of time that could be far better spent in direct clinical interventions. Within a few days of receiving the printed directives that detailed the new, tedious charting procedures, a child came for psychiatric evaluation. He had a serious PTSD following an automobile accident. His mother was obviously upset and harried. I thought her distress was due to her own PTSD and her sons problems, but discovered that she was upset just as much by job-related frustrations. She is a nurse and her employer had just instituted much stricter charting procedures on her hospital unit. As I counseled her on how to deal with her job-related issues through relaxation and imagery techniques, I could not but smile inside " as I listened to some part of myself saying, And who else in this room could use this advice?
The skeptic will say these apparent synchronicities are purely coincidental. I believe they are choreographed by our higher selves and by an unseen wisdom that far exceeds our own " to nudge or jar us into greater healing awarenesses.
These lessons from clients have come so often that I now regularly ask, in each therapy session, Now, what has this client been sent to teach me?
Group angers
In inter-racial or international angers, ingrained prejudices tend to be perpetuated. The targets of our angers are dehumanized as others " who are less than human, less than deserving of our understanding or compassion; ungrateful recipients of our aid who are draining our resources, sending criminals into our neighborhoods or terrorists into our country; unfortunate but necessary civilian casualties in our crusade for our own causes, an anyway, if they had stopped their leaders from being the nasty people they are, they wouldnt have to suffer these consequences.
If we look only at the surface manifestations of problems, it is easy to escalate to avenging the wrongs we feel have been perpetrated upon us by these others. We fail, however, to solve the problem. We prosecute and jail perpetrators of crimes " but end up with criminals who are released from jail only to return to further crimes on the streets, more savvy for having spent lots of time behind bars with other, more experienced and vicious criminals. We attack Afghanistan, and in fact increase the likelihood of further terrorist attacks.
Choices: Revenge vs forgiveness Attributed to Mormon founder Brigham Young
There are two courses of action to follow when one is bitten by a rattlesnake. One may, in anger, fear, or vengefulness, pursue the creature and kill it. Or one may make full haste to get the venom out of his system. If we pursue the latter course we will likely survive, but if we attempt to follow the former, we may not be around long enough to finish it.
There are countries where revenge is the accepted way of dealing with interpersonal hurts.
In Iran, the relatives of murderers get to decide the punishment, which can include monetary compensation, precisely equal injury or even death. In many instances, injured parties or their relatives may physically participate in the exacting of the punishment " even to the extent of blinding the perpetrator of a blinding injury, or pulling the chair out from under a murderer to hang him. The rich have an obvious advantage of more alternatives in this system of justice, being able to buy their ways out of paying with an eye or other body part. Women are compensated at half the rate that men are; non-Muslims may have partial or no legitimate claims against Muslims. There are time limits on the acceptable exacting of vengeance (Blumenfeld, p. 91).
In Albania, personal revenge is the cultural norm, standardized in a Canon, compiled by a 15th-Century nobleman named Leke Dukagjini, which details injuries and compensation or the extent of revenge that is the accepted norm. This is the legal code for Albania, where revenge is a sacred duty " particularly now, in the chaotic social reality of a government that has collapsed and an economy that is disorganized and despairingly poor. However, revenge has been an essential element in the code of conduct of Albania for many hundreds of years (Blumenfeld, p. 75-76).
While the cultures of revenge circumvent the inequities of the Western legal system, where money, prestige and power can buy justice, it can bring into power those who have brute strength, weapons and a disregard for life. In Sicily, the Mafia maintain their power through the threat of murder and revenge. No one is beyond their reach. Judges, prosecutors and clergymen who have acted or spoken against the Maria have been murdered.
In our own culture, on a personal level, revenge may be sweet, but it tends to perpetuate and aggravate angry relationships. This is much more so in revenge between clans and nations.
Forgiveness
Forgiveness is one of the best alternatives to anger. While this is seen by some to be the choice of a weakling or wimp, it is actually, in most cases, the choice of a deeply wise and Spiritual person.
He who cannot forgive others destroys the bridge over which he himself must pass.
George Herbert
Some outstanding examples of immediate forgiveness were seen after the events of 9-11. Phyllis and Orlando Rodriguez lost their son, Joe, in the World Trade Towers. When President Bush began immediately his campaign to attack the terrorists, they wrote a letter to the New York Times editor:
- Saturday, Sep 15, 2001 8:35pm
Our son Greg is among the many missing from the World Trade Center attack. Since we first heard the news, we have shared moments of grief, comfort, hope, despair, fond memories with his wife, the two families, our friends and neighbors, his loving colleagues at Cantor Fitzgerald / ESpeed, and all the grieving families that daily meet at the Pierre Hotel.
We see our hurt and anger reflected among everybody we meet. We cannot pay attention to the daily flow of news about this disaster. But we read enough of the news to sense that our government is heading in the direction of violent revenge, with the prospect of sons, daughters, parents, friends in distant lands dying, suffering, and nursing further grievances against us. It is not the way to go. It will not avenge our son's death. Not in our son's name.
Our son died a victim of an inhuman ideology. Our actions should not serve the same purpose. Let us grieve. Let us reflect and pray. Let us think about a rational response that brings real peace and justice to our world. But let us not as a nation add to the inhumanity of our times.
Copy of letter to White House:
- Dear President Bush:
Our son is one of the victims of Tuesday's attack on the World Trade Center. We read about your response in the last few days and about the resolutions from both Houses, giving you undefined power to respond to the terror attacks.
Your response to this attack does not make us feel better about our son's death. It makes us feel worse. It makes us feel that our government is using our son's memory as a justification to cause suffering for other sons and parents in other lands.
It is not the first time that a person in your position has been given unlimited power and came to regret it. This is not the time for empty gestures to make us feel better. It is not the time to act like bullies. We urge you to think about how our governement can develop peaceful, rational solutions to terrorism, solutions that do not sink us to the inhuman level of terrorists.
Sincerely,
Phyllis and Orlando Rodriguez
Often, forgiveness follows a period of anger. This may come when tempers cool, immediately following an injury or altercation, or it may come only after years of bitter struggles and battles that leave the warring parties exhausted, bleeding and mourning their dead. It is helpful to have an outsider mediating between the aggrieved parties " to create a safe space in which to meet, to help explore differences in a gradual and reasoned (rather than heated) manner, to smooth ruffled feathers and calm prickly tempers, and to suggest alternatives to habitual patterns of perceptions, feelings, anticipations of being attacked and other dysfunctional and counter-productive interactions.
The most important part of such mediation is getting the parties to sit down together and have some normalizing human interactions, breaking the pattern of perceiving the opposing parties as other, as enemy or as inhuman. In many cultures it is acknowledged that if you break bread together with another, then you are much less likely to be unkind to each other. So a an introductory period of getting acquainted and rubbing elbows with each other is important, prior to exploring differences.
The most difficult parts of forgiveness may be forgiveness of self " for having let anger get out of control " and, even more difficult, examining the bucket of angers we carry from various personal experiences and realizing we have dumped an undeserved load of buried emotional garbage on a convenient target. The last is so difficult that very few people manage this.
Because forgiveness is such an important process in choosing healing alternatives to anger, and because we are coming to understand how to help people to reach this healing for angers, an annotated reference list has been gathered at the end of this editorial.
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