I should probably put this into
perspective. I endeavored to spare people discomfort, not inflict
pain, especially as a nurse. I even found the hard tasks as a nurse
that involved pushing people to recover when they had pain to be
difficult for me. Though I can be quite determined and courageous
when defending others, I was not a person that ever wished harm on
anyone. I often failed to defend myself, even when it was
appropriate.
My parents always punished the expression of anger, and I was very uncomfortable with displays of anger in others, too. (This was not ever couched specifically as a religious issue, just one of preference for my family.) I knew that I felt anger in theory, but I did all that I could to avoid it. I only expressed it in a passive-aggressive way, usually giving myself license to do some little thing wrong because of the injustice I'd suffered. I felt entitled, and taking liberties by cutting corners or sometimes taking what I felt belonged to me without asking as my way of comforting myself, but I didn't acknowledge that anger was at the root. I didn't know how to feel it for what it was, and I certainly didn't express it in a healthy way.
My parents always punished the expression of anger, and I was very uncomfortable with displays of anger in others, too. (This was not ever couched specifically as a religious issue, just one of preference for my family.) I knew that I felt anger in theory, but I did all that I could to avoid it. I only expressed it in a passive-aggressive way, usually giving myself license to do some little thing wrong because of the injustice I'd suffered. I felt entitled, and taking liberties by cutting corners or sometimes taking what I felt belonged to me without asking as my way of comforting myself, but I didn't acknowledge that anger was at the root. I didn't know how to feel it for what it was, and I certainly didn't express it in a healthy way.
I couldn't believe how suddenly and
easily any kind of perceived threat to me or someone else triggered
intense anger. I also did not readily identify the cause as the
sense of injustice and powerlessness I felt over what had gone on in
my cultic church. I would have said that I was depressed but not mad
over the circumstances there. Regardless, I felt like a volcano,
ready to blow, ready to spew a lifetime of unexpressed anger at any
opportunity. I froze in terror from it because I felt like I had no
experience with the feeling or its expression. Suddenly, I not only
felt an ocean of anger, but that anger was popping up with images
about how to violently express that it when I felt others were in
harm's way. (In hindsight, this happened so seldom that I can count
on one hand how many times I experienced this, but it felt so
terrible at the time that it seemed more often.) In terms of the
expression through action, I would freeze up, but I would fantasize
for an instant about inflicting physical harm on the source of the
threat. Where had this come from? I didn't understand, and I was
both terrified and overwhelmed. It was entirely out of character for
me.
Because of the spiritual nature of my
new problems concerning the abuse I observed at my cultic church
(especially their tolerance of the abuse of women and their blaming
of women as the cause of that abuse), I first sought out pastoral
counseling or “Biblical” counseling from Evangelical churches
that I believed I could trust. When I finally found “help”
through a church, I was assigned to an inexperienced counselor in
training, someone working on getting her clinical practice hours. I
learned that she was studying “Biblical counseling” with which I
had no experience, and I now assume that she assumed a “nouthetic”
type of model. I had prior experience with counselors trained in
psychology, so I didn't expect much of anything different from her.
I did not feel like the relationship
with the counselor was a good, therapeutic situation in the sense
that I think of one, both then and now. She was rigid, uptight, and
seemed socially uncomfortable, something I found quite strange for
someone interested in counseling. I also met her in a triangular
shaped room, and two of its three walls were constructed of pane
windows so that anyone walking through that section of the church by
could look in to see me (or us). I felt very vulnerable, and
I often wondered if people outside could hear us talking, as their
presence was a constant source of distraction. The room itself was
arranged in an odd way because of its shape. The sofa where I sat
was uncomfortably far away from the counselor. To make a long story
short, I didn't find her to be highly skilled, and I didn't feel
remotely at ease with her or the setting. I saw her for three
sessions only before finding someone else, and I was not prepared for
what happened during my final visit.
I was also deeply troubled because it
had been my experience that counselors start out allowing the increasingly
uncomfortable with Bible Study. I was petrified by my anger,
terrified that an elder had pronounced a “God's going to get
you” curse over me, and I felt alienated from everyone and
everything good in my life. I'd also started to have occasional bad
dreams that induced a great deal of guilt about a specific matter,
but those dreams were the least of my immediate and most disturbing
concerns. I was shocked because the counselor was not interested in
discussing the things that troubled me most. She wanted to focus on
the most minor of the matters that I presented to her.To draw an analogy, I felt like I went to a surgeon to get my inflamed, painful, blocked gall bladder removed, but the surgeon was only interested in removing a mole I'd had my whole life. This made no sense, and I've never decided whether this was a “Biblical counseling” issue or whether the inexperienced counselor in training wanted to only work on issues with which she felt comfortable.
client to deal with the most significant source of discomfort, based on their perception. I did walk in with several complaints, but the most significant one was the grief and fear I felt when I tried to attend services at new churches, and I became
I started much personal reading on
forgiveness in my devotions in my attempt to wrap up everything
neatly and quickly. I had a terrible time trying to read much of
anything anyway. I'd been hurt deeply, and to move on, I knew that I
would have to forgive the leadership at the church. In the third
session I attended with this counselor, I broached the topic of
forgiveness, especially after I'd been identified as the enemy of the
church for leaving “without the blessing” of the elders and
pastor. I felt threatened by this, but I couldn't yet give myself
permission to be angry about how ridiculous and anti-Christian I
found this to be. I expressed everything as disappointment and
confusion. I didn't see anger in that sense of pain, and I fled from
any suggestion of anger. Yet, anger was coming to the surface on its
own whenever it found any opportunity, and I wanted to find a way to
push it back down. The anger didn't feel very Christian to me, and I
just wanted to jump right into the end of the journey without the
work.
I could not believe how the counselor
in training responded when I expressed how I felt about forgiveness,
along with my fears, despite my honest desire to be forgiving.
During that final visit, the counselor very glibly said in a tone
that I felt was rudely judgmental in a manner that seemed to smother
me saying, “Well, you do know that you have to forgive them.”
Recounting her statement now in
a place of safety and healing, I'd say that she had a profound grasp
of the blatantly obvious. This statement did little else than repeat
what I'd just said. (And it wasn't a counseling technique of
mirroring, either. ...not in the tone she used.)
In my logical mind, this was also my
ultimate goal, though I had not exactly figured out what that should
look like. I came to this woman for help so that I could learn how
to do exactly that. Yet, I was constantly troubled by the fact that
these men were winking at domestic violence, some of which was
perpetrated by their deacons who were permitted to remain deacons.
They blamed the battered women for failing to “let love cover a
multitude of sins” and told them that if they were being good wives
that their husbands wouldn't hit them. I'd also suffered betrayal by
the pastor myself. He'd suddenly become like two entirely different
men to me – one whom I loved like a second father and another who
strengthened the hands of abusers and failed to protect women in his
care as a pastor. At the time, to forgive him without establishing
the gravity of the wrong he was doing so that he could continue
facilitating the wounding of women meant that forgiveness would call
evil good. I couldn't do that, and I didn't know how to forgive him.
I knew that it was wrong to jump right into mercy for him while
women were still being mistreated and blamed.
Though I wanted to forgive more than
anything and technically agreed with the counselor as she spoke the
judgmental words, my emotions seemed to both betray and shock
me. I'd come for help to learn how to control my emotions,
and I instantly became flooded with rage at what seemed like her
complete lack of understanding and sympathy. She communicated no
empathy that I could detect, either. My body froze as she spoke. My
mind, however, had a definite picture of what I wanted to do in
response to what she'd just uttered...
I wanted to propel myself across the
room in a fit of rage, flying through the air across that awkward
space so that I could wrap my hands around her neck to choke her.
An image popped into my mind wherein I was lunging at her, my body
vertically suspended in mid-air and horizontal as I pictured my hands
about to grip her neck. It was a horrible image that appeared in my
mind as though I was an observer who was seated in a different part
of the room near the door. It appeared for just a fraction of a
second as I felt so confused and belittled (and enraged) by
her words. The image disappeared as quickly as it had appeared, and
I'm not sure that I was aware of anything else that happened in the
session after that. I also recognized later that how I felt
described characteristics of dissociation
as a psychological coping mechanism. I felt so threatened that I was
no longer “fully present” consciously. I fantasized about
hurting her in a response to how I felt that she'd threatened me, all
in that tiny fragment a moment as I sat there, watching myself from
outside of my own body. I was petrified by what I was feeling, and
the idea that my mind created images of hurting people was terrifying
to me. What did this say of my character? What did this say of my
sanity? In that moment of rage, I felt entirely condemned and
hopeless. I'd come for help and found my problem intensify. I
decided that there was no help for me there. (Help should feel just
a little bit good!)
I think that the experience indicated
that I felt deeply threatened, and that I'd felt more personally
unsafe that I'd ever felt before. It meant for me that those systems
of justice and all things good and reasonable that I'd always hoped
in for vindication had finally failed, and I was now “on my own.”
I think that it meant that the emotional part of myself would not
allow me tolerate any more mistreatment of myself or others. I was
conflicted, but on some level, the brutally honest, emotional part of
me would not let me get away with ignoring the anger anymore. I
couldn't continue to be ignorant of the evil anymore, and I had to
take a stand. I had been willing to brave things for other people,
but I was finally so threatened that a part of me could no longer
ignore justice for myself. I don't know if it was a survival
instinct or whether I was just getting too old and frustrated to put
up with such things. I just know that I felt like I'd denied a
lifetime full of anger, and payday had finally come at age thirty. I
was forced to purge it, and I now had to learn to deal with it in a
healthy way.
In hindsight, I wouldn't be able to
forgive those who had hurt me until I felt and honored my anger and
all that it was trying to do for me. It existed and surfaced because
I didn't want to choose to protect myself, and some honest, emotional
part of me kicked in to make sure that I did. (It was God's gift to
me as part of the system that was created to keep me safe and to help
me survive.) The emotion also pushed me to mature so that I could
learn how to truly forgive instead of feigning cheap forgiveness. I
was going to have to walk that long, hard journey, though I wanted an
easy one instead. I had to learn to tolerate and express anger in a
healthy way, and I'd have to learn self care. Anger emerged for a
reason, and I had to let it do in me what I believe it was designed
to do. It became an ironic part of the process of letting patience
have it's perfect work in my life. Without the season of anger, the
season of acceptance and then forgiveness would not come. I had much
loss to grieve, and the anger was an essential part of that grieving
of so, so great a loss.
Since that time, I've found excellent
counselors. They gave me permission to feel anger and express it. I
always turned it into something else, usually self-disdain and
self-disgust, or I used it to give myself permission to sin and to
gratify myself. I had deluded myself my whole life, telling myself
that I rarely felt any anger. This was a lie. I felt it all the
time and called it something else so I could be the “good little
girl.” It was time to grow up. My counselors walked with me as I
learned how to feel what I didn't want to feel. They gave me
permission to be human, just as God had created me. I could then
learn how to give that permission to myself.
The episodes of rage were mostly
limited to about two years after I first felt them, just after
leaving my spiritually abusive church. I did have a single one a
couple of years ago while in a counseling session. I'd reinjured my
back, a chronically progressive injury about which little can be
done, and that day I could barely walk or sit during the session.
The counselor meant to encourage me by noting that people with
chronic pain often note that pain diminishes when they conquer their
traumas, especially using the technique that she used with me.
Because I felt so much physical pain that day, and having never
shared the rather depressing prognosis with her, I became very angry
at her. In my intense pain, it felt as though she was minimizing and
diminishing my pain and condition, even though I knew that she was
only trying to encourage me. She made this statement at the same
time that a firey, shooting and tearing pain roared in my body, and I
honestly almost felt like I could hit her. I was that angry. (I
said nothing about how I felt. I wanted time to think about why I'd
reacted that way. It did seem a bit like shooting a fly with a
machine gun instead of using a fly swatter.)
A week later, when I went in for my
next session, I confronted the counselor about what she'd said and
how I took it. I told her that because of the relationship of trust
that we'd built together as client and therapist, I wanted to clear
the air, and I had faith that I could do so with her. I told her how
I felt and how angry I was with her. When she asked why I didn't
express this to her a week earlier, I explained how I'd almost wanted
to hit her in that moment. Rather than act on it or talk about it, I
wanted to think about how I felt. I felt that same deep concern over
the idea of physically expressing my anger, much the same way that I
did when I was in pure emotional pain only, so many years ago. I
wanted to think about it.
Well, my counselor was overjoyed when I
told her, cracking the widest, most beautiful smile, much to my
surprise. She was thrilled that I had grown so much that I could be
this honest with my feelings and that I'd also chosen to confront her
about them. She said that the only thing that could be more
commendable would have been for me to have told her in the moment of
anger rather than waiting a full week to discuss it with her. Here
was a counselor who understood the function of anger as an expression
of pain and fear from a violation of a boundary, not as a sin or a
lack of virtue. These expressions of rage and intense anger were
self-protective and a function of God's gift of anger to me which
acted to keep me safe. It also served as a testimony of how much
healing I'd manifested.
That's the response of an excellent
counselor, and I'm so grateful that I've found more than once since
that overwhelming experience in that glass room with someone who
didn't understand. But I'd been blessed with others who would and
did, comforting me with the comfort and wisdom they'd been given,
finding all the equity in it and transforming their own troubles into
goodness (II
Corinthians 1:3-7).
More to come on
anger's role
