I have anger issues. I’m sure I’ve had them all my life but the first time I remember anger actually talking over me was when I was 18 years old. I was angry and I picked up an empty box and chucked it across the room as I was running out of the room. It felt good at the time. Later I regretted it as I heard someone say, “I knew she had an anger problem”. This person was looking for every bit of negative in me at the time and I just gave them more fuel for their fire against me. It sucked. Throughout my adult life I would continue to have anger issues which usually ended with me breaking something. In our first year of marriage I put a hole in the wall. Howie’s awesome response to that was, “you’d better call your dad to help you fix that because I’m not doing it.” Talk about embarrassing....”ummm....hi dad. I just put a hole in the wall because I was mad. Could you come help me fix it please?”. Fortunately my dad was a very kind, understanding man with very similar anger issues (ya, it runs in the family) and came over and patched up the hole.
I didn’t start working on my anger issues until I was in my thirties. It had really come to a head in the years that we were going through the worst times of our marriage. I broke quite a few things, vases, pictures, cups, plates. It always gave me this release when I would just break one thing, but every single time afterwards I would regret it. While working through my anger in my early thirties I focused just on the anger and how I responded in that anger. The Bible specifically says in Ephesians 4:26, “Be angry, and do not sin.” That was my focus, to not let my anger turn to sin. To calm myself down before I started yelling and threw something. I found verses that I could recite when I started feeling my blood boil:
-Proverbs, 19:11, “The discretion of a man makes him slow to anger, and his glory is to overlook a transgression.”
-Psalms 37:8, “Cease from anger, and forsake wrath; do not fret- it only causes harm.”
-Proverbs 14:29, “He who is slow to wrath has great understanding, but he who is impulsive exalts folly.”
-Ecclesiastes 7:9, “Do not hasten in your spirit to be angry, for anger rests in the bosom of fools.”
-Psalms 103:8, “The Lord is merciful and gracious, slow to anger and abounding in mercy.”
-James 1:19, “So then, my beloved brethren, let every man be swift to hear, slow to speak and slow to wrath.”
-James 1:20, “For the wrath of man does not produce the righteousness of God.”
I wrote these verse on note cards and had them everywhere to remind me and to help me get control of my anger. When I would feel the anger start to surface I would pray and ask God to settle my spirit down and then I would go over the above verses until I felt myself calm down. It took a lot of work to get into this routine and get my anger managed, but God was faithful through it all and got me through it. It’s been a long time since I’ve broken anything. Well, actually about a year ago I threw a glass and broke it all over the floor of our bedroom. My rage had come out of nowhere and took me completely off guard. I immediately texted three of my closets friends to have them pray for me because I was still feeling full of rage and anger and I was so confused about where it was coming from. Turns out I was actually having a reaction to barium. I had had a procedure the previous day and they had used barium and some of the side effects are irritation, anxiety and confusion. It was crazy and barium is now listed on my heath record as a drug I am allergic to. Needless to say, I don’t count that broken glass as part of my anger issues. I do still occasionally have moments when I feel the anger rising and I really want to break something but they are few and far between now and I always remember to go and pray and meditate on my anger verses and that always brings be back down to reality.
Now I am forty and God has recently revealed a new side of my anger issues to me. A couple of weeks ago the hubs and I had a bad week over a tough issue that brought up a lot of past triggers for me. We spent the better part of the week going back and forth on the issue and I was angry the whole time. I thought I was angry because he wasn’t hearing my side of the issues. He wasn’t getting what I was saying nor was he understanding my feelings and this was making me mad. I said a lot of mean things and yelled in this time of anger. It all came to a head one morning as we were talking and right in the middle of the conversation, right after he had said something that was new information to me, he abruptly had to go because he had a meeting to get to. I hung up the phone and the flood gates opened (does it seem like every one of my stories involves me crying? Geesh. I am an emotional gal.). The tears flowed and pain came pouring out of my heart. I was hurting because of this situation we were in. All the triggers were bringing up past hurts and I just ached. I immediately wanted to close the flood gates, shove the hurt back down, grab my phone and play a game to distract myself. As I reached for the phone I heard God say, “nope”. Ugh. Really, God? Now? Do I have to? Of course I do. I not only had to I needed to. I sat in the pain and cried it all out right onto God’s shoulder. And do you know what happened as I allowed the pain come to the surface? The anger went away! I realized that day, right there in the parking lot of the gym that my anger was masking my pain. I was allowing my anger to push down the real feelings I was having. It was easier for me, at least I thought it was, to just be angry then to feel the real feels. But oh my goodness, I was a whole new person once I let the pain out and the anger just rolled right off my shoulders.
This past week I found myself angry again over a situation. I allowed anger to consume for a couple of days before I realized that I needed to dig deeper and figure out what the anger was hiding. It didn’t take long to figure it out. I pinpointed the real feeling (It was abandonment this time) dug deeper into the feeling and all of its triggers and once again the anger just rolled away and I felt like a new person again.
People, can I just tell you how freeing and how healing this new realization is for me?! I wish I could go back to my twenties with this knowledge and re-do all the broken things I threw. Take back all the angry things that I yelled that I never meant and find the real feelings that needed to come out. But, alas, that was not God’s plan. He chose to wait until I was forty to give me this illumination and I trust, I know, that His timing is so much better than my own. So I take my new found information and I press on with excitement at conquering a whole new level of my anger.
What is your angry hiding? How are you using anger in your life to fight against feeling the real feels and dealing with the deeper issues? In your anger are you sinning? Yelling at your kids or spouse, breaking things? Is it out of control? Do you need to write the above verses down on notecards to help remind you to calm down and turn to Christ? It might be. A lot of hard work for you to get your anger under control but let me tell you, IT IS SO WORTH IT!
