Why am I so Angry?

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Where does irrational anger come from?  We all pretty much understand the kind of anger that arises with reason, but where does that anger that boils and froths like a churning sea, with what appears like little or no provocation, come from?  Where does that rage, that is so clearly an overreaction to a situation, emanate from, and why?  Even further, what should we do with the blistering heat of that emotion?

Lucky for you, I wouldn’t ask these questions out loud unless I had some answers for you.   After meditating on an incident in my own home this morning, I decided to share with you my thoughts where rage comes from and what to do with it.

What is it that you are actually mad about?

My husband Bill, who as you know by now is a wonderful husband and father, used to be very into physical fitness.  As a matter of fact, when we first met he was a personal trainer.  Of course over time, and with the transition to parenthood, that dedication to working out has waned, as it does for many of us. That should not surprise me at all, and it certainly shouldn’t make me angry.

Yet, it does.  It makes me very angry.  Some mornings when I get up to work out, and he hits snooze until 7:30 it makes me enraged.  Today I reacted by doing the a very mature stomping around the house in my high heeled boots routine, which prompted my very perceptive five year old daughter to give me an extra hug and an “I love you”, but elicited no response from hubby.  As I sulked out of the house, and began to seethe my way to my office, I was listening to Joe Vitale talk about clearing techniques, and I decided to shut off the CD player, and just listen to my emotions to try to figure out the root of my anger.

Was I angry because we were paying for a gym membership that doesn’t get used? Sort of, but not enough to warrant the kind of hurt and rage I was experiencing.  Was I angry that I was getting up and he was still sleeping?  No, because, quite honestly I’m not the paragon of virtue when it comes to getting up each day to work out either.  So why was I so angry?

Then I remembered a dream from the night before and remembered that it is November, and it all started coming together.   The dream was of my late husband Billy. Thirteen years ago, on November 3, 1995, he  died from coronary thrombosis of the carotid artery. Basically his carotid artery burst in his neck, and he died almost instantly from lack of blood to the brain.

For at least a year prior to his death, I nagged and nagged him about his health.  He had gained quite a bit of weigh,t and became less active after we began dating.  While I continued to get up each morning, even in below freezing temperatures, to walk each day, he slept in.  He ate an unbelievably bad diet and, I discovered after his death, that my attempts to send him to work with healthy lunches resulted in him tossing those lunches away in favor of fried cafeteria goodies.  He had begun to get out of breath more easily and began complaining of fatigue.  I urged him to go to a doctor to get a full checkup and a stress test.  He refused, saying it was just the pressures of work, school and our coming wedding keeping him from getting a good night’s sleep.  He kept promising he would eat better, and that he would start exercising again.  Every once in a while he would get up and try to go for a run or lift some weights, but he never stuck with it.  He was only 38 when he died.  Several of his arteries were 90% blocked.  The carotid artery, the most important one in your body, finally became 100% blocked on the night of November 3, 1995 and he died.

It took years for me to recover from the horror of that night.  I seldom, if ever, speak of the terror I felt as he died in my arms.  Or of the nightmares that plagued me for years, where he died over and over again, as I tried in vain to resuscitate him.  No amount of counseling and readings from mediums has ever 100% convinced me that there wasn’t something I could have done to save him.  Even though there was nothing medically I could have done that night to revive him, shouldn’t I have insisted that he see a doctor? Shouldn’t I have made the appointment and dragged him there?  Would he be alive if I had just been better at being a nagging bitch?  Yeah, I really ask myself these questions!

I am still, after all these years, angry at him.  If he had loved me, really loved me, why didn’t he listen to me? He was my husband and he was supposed to protect me and he failed miserably.  Thanks to his pigheadedness, I not only suffered the horror of his loss, but complete financial ruin in the wake of his death.

My husband Bill knows this whole story.  So you would think he’d be a little more sensitive to my concerns, right?  Well, as I stewed over this situation this morning, and realized how much of my rage was really directed at Billy, and how much was at Bill, I also began to try to think like a man.  You see to me not getting up to work out, and not eating better means that Bill doesn’t love me.  That’s how I feel about it.  As a woman I assign all kinds of emotional entanglements to situations.  Yet a man does not think that way.  To my husband it’s just about not getting up and going to the gym.  End of story.  There’s no insidious plot to make me feel bad.  There is no back-story whatsoever beyond, “I just don’t feel like going to the gym.” For all I know he now thinks I’m angry about the gym membership fee or his weight gain.  He probably doesn’t have a clue that to me, his actions mean that he doesn’t love me enough to live.  That I feel like he doesn’t care if I end up having to re-live the horror and terror of losing a husband or he doesn’t care if I have to raise Gracie alone and in poverty.   He has no clue that to me it means he doesn’t love me enough to grow old with me.

So you see there is a very deep root leading back to the past on this subject.  The intensity of my past experience inflames the current moment and causes me to be dispoportionately angry.  In reality my level of emotion should be somewhere in the range of annoyed or even amused each morning and instead I get rage.    I am not angry about now, I am angry about something in the past that can not be changed.

How much of the anger is directed towards yourself?

Another thing I realized was that a good part of my anger was about what I perceive as my failure to protect Billy from himself and I am reliving that now.  I am angry at myself for not being better able to inspire Billy to get healthy.  I am once again feeling failure and frustration and inadequacy.  I do not do these three feelings well at all.  I don’t fail well.  I keep thinking that if I could just say or do the right thing he would be motivated again.  I am a motivational freaking speaker for God’s sake!  I should be able to do this!  I am also very afraid, and I don’t like to be afraid.  As much as I try to rationalize with myself, I’m having a hard time letting go of the fear.  So a good helping of this anger is really directed at myself.

How can that anger be healed?

Communication is the key to everything, and communication with yourself is where it all starts.  Now that I know why I am so angry about this, I can work with that knowledge to free myself from this negative emotion.   I will pull myself firmly back into the present, and feel how much my husband Bill truly does love me and our daugther. I will know that in his mind love and exercise are not connected, well most of the time   He is not avoiding exercise as a way to hurt me, as a matter of fact none of it has anything to do with me!  I can always hope that he’ll feel compelled to hit the awesome elliptical trainer we have a few days a week, but if he doesn’t that is his perogative.

As for my anger at Billy.  I know that he never expected any of it to happen.  He really and truly believed that he was just tired.  I know that he would never have wished that kind of tragedy on me.  I have to take some time soon to really sit with that knowledge and forgive both Billy and myself.  It is way beyond time to move on from the anger and fear, and I believe that’s what he was trying to tell me last night in the dream.

Step-by-step road to healing…

• Take some quiet time to explore your anger.  Let is speak to you.  What is it saying? Is there an angry or hurt child you hear in your head?  Are you feeling a sense of loss?  Fear?  Abandonment? Does your current situation truly warrant this depth of feeling?  If not, is it similar to a previous event or events in your life?

• Is some of this anger directed at yourself?  Do you feel that you are failing?  Are you feeling guilty? Are you angry for being angry?  Really, that can happen too.

• After you have gotten your head around what you are truly feeling.  Can you talk to the person you are angry with?  My guess is that they are very confused as to the depth of your anger, and they would really benefit from some communication.  If so, here is the wording I recommend.  This phrasing is very important because you don’t want to lay blame. We are looking for healing and understanding, not arguing.
  • For example, in my situation the conversation would start, “When you don’t go the gym, I feel fear and abandonment.  I am reminded of Billy’s death, and that’s why I get so angry. I know you love me, but in my head I get it all twisted together. I feel that you are not taking care of your health, and to me that means that you don’t care about me.  I understand that you probably don’t mean it that way at all, but that’s why I get so angry.  I’m sorry.”
    • Notice that I did not accuse him.  I put the emotion and the feeling on myself, where it belongs.
  • Here’s how not to say it, “When you don’t go to the gym it makes me really angry. If you loved me you would take better care of your health.  You know how much I worry about being widowed again, yet you don’t take care of yourself.”
    • Notice that in this version I am putting all of the fault on the other person.  I’m blaming him for my anger.  His only choice is to become defensive, and then we’ve got a bigger mess.

• If you cannot talk to the person involved, I suggest you take it to your journal.  Write out your feelings.  Get it all out, but again I would be very careful with your words.  A journal entry about how much someone is pissing you off is not going to be very healing. It might feel cathartic, but you may not truly clear yourself of the emotion permanently.   Maybe write it in a letter form using the same technique above.  This is great if you are angry at someone who has passed.  You can also do this verbally, but alone.  Sit a stuffed animal in a chair across from you and tell them how you feel.  Again, explain to them that you are angry because of what the situation symbolizes to you.  Use the same kind of language I noted above and keep the emotions about yourself.  No blaming allowed, even towards stuffed animals.

• The final, and perhpas hardest step, is to let it go.  Once you understand the root of the anger, you need to make your peace with whatever it is in the past that is informing your present.  We live in the here and now.  The past is gone.  We cannot change it.  If you need help letting go you can use either the letter or the stuffed animal technique above to go back in time, state your case and release the anger once and for all.  When you are finished having your say I suggest you say something like the following:
  • And now this is over. I will not dwell upon this again as anything other than a faint memory.  This event has no power over me. I am forever free of this (anger,hurt,guilt,shame etc).  I love you and I let you go.

The last line is aimed directly at the emotion itself, not the person or event.  Might sound odd to say I love you to an emotion, but when something has been held so deeply as a part of you for so long, you can become very attached to it.  Even your own anger or fear.  Letting go of it can feel in some ways like a loss.  This is a hard concept to embrace, but I have found it to be so true.  Sometimes we love our pain, and that’s why we don’t let it go.  Yet, the very best thing is indeed to say good-bye.  So acknowledge that you love this part of you and then set it free.

I sincerely hope that this has been helpful for you and I encourage you to truly sit down with your rage and examine it to find its roots.  This might be frightening, but the freedom is worth it.  Now I am on my way home to my amazing husband to tell him why I’ve been so angry and to let it all go.

Update: I  held off on posting this article until I had actually had my conversation with Bill.  I will admit to some more immaturity on my part, as I kind of stomped around the house a bit. Finally I told him where I was coming from and he, of course being who he is, was sympathetic and understood.  He acknowledged that this time of year is very hard for me, and I admitted that my anger is aimed more at the past than at him.  We had a wonderful conversation, and we were able to reinforce for Gracie the lessons we teach her about dealing with anger.  She came over to tell me it was okay to be angry sometimes and gave me a big hug.  I had a wonderful night’s sleep and I told Bill to hit snooze this morning for both of us

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