How many of us have felt anger?
Well, recently I felt it. I have been the angriest I’ve been in years, so angry I wanted to kick, scream, shout and cry. And to be honest I did. I did them all in that same order. Anger is an easy feeling, it is explosive and expressive but its also a mask.
Someone (ok my therapist) told me when I’m angry to look beyond that feeling and see what the anger is covering. When I heard that, I knew she was right, and looked back to the key moments I felt anger.
Most recently, the anger I felt covered up feelings of sadness, unfairness, sorrow, fear, excruciating pain and loss. All of these difficult emotions I bottled up tightly and let out, like a gush of air, as anger. Anger to no one in particular, to myself, to the person, to the universe… to God.
I actually thought that this would be easy to write, but these heavy emotional blogs are becoming more difficult by the week for me. When I force myself to put into words what was behind all the anger I feel and have felt, I have to face those difficult emotions. People don’t hide happiness or joy with anger, we hide difficult and painful emotions that we don’t want to feel or acknowledge.
Now that I think about anger as a mask, I look back curiously at my childhood and adult life and look at all the moments I felt angry and what I was really feeling.
There’s a theme to the emotions… abandonment, sadness, frustration, desperation, fear… and now I’m forcing myself to face those same emotions that loom over me like dark clouds right before a storm… Who want’s to open up that pandora’s box?
Anger is easier.
But all anger does is eat away at you and destroys you and those around you.
Sometimes we use anger to coverup what we really want to say…
“I want to fix my relationship with you”
“I feel hurt by you and it makes me feel small”
“I feel unloved and uncared for by you”
“I feel unlistened to”
“I feel afraid that I don’t matter to you”
“I feel afraid that I won’t be okay without you”
“I feel frustrated that I can’t get through to you”
“It feels unfair that this happened to me”
“it feels unfair that this happened to you”
And so much more. And as you read those sentences, maybe they resonated or you filled the silence in your head with your own sentences.
Now, I’m taking the time to scroll through my memories, and relive the times where my heart was filled with anger and peel away layer by layer to see what it really was I was hiding.
Emotions are hard. There’s no way around it, eventually you push them away and all you feel is anger or even worse, nothing at all. No love, no joy, no happiness… and what kind of life is that to never love yourself and others, to not have a smile creep across your face or feel your heart burst with joy. Unfortunately, we need to feel the bad to appreciate the good or risk being stuck in a cycle of anger and destruction or worse numbness.
Love,
Samantha
