Last week we began talking about the stages of grief and death as they apply to crisis. We started by talking about denial and how it affects our ability to move forward in healing and in life. Today I want to talk about anger.
Anger is one of those stages that we need to go through in order to release the pain of our loss. I don’t consider myself a very angry person, but I do see a need to release the pain of loss through anger. Here’s the thing with anger, it can ruin relationships and events and cause them to turn into death or loss as well. Let me give you a quick example. I have six children and of those, one boy. He tends to have a bit of an anger problem. A variety of things can set him off but when he becomes angry, he loses control and his ability to rationalize and act in a coherent or respectful manner. Typically, when this happens, he lashes out at one of his sisters and creates an even bigger consequence for himself because I have to deal with him as being a man attacking his sisters. Quite often, if he would just be angry and not lash out at his sisters, he actually wouldn’t get in trouble. Have you ever been in a situation where the initial anger may be justified or even righteous but your reaction to it has caused greater pain and loss?
This is what we see in life as well. We’re going through some form of grief because of a lost job, school assignment, class, contract, or some other thing. We may become angry and, in our anger, lose control. It’s that lack of control that we want to keep an eye on. We can be upset because we have lost something, but we need to have control over our emotions. If we lose control, we will create greater pain for ourselves and those around us. And of all the stages of grief I look at anger as being the one that can make or break our ability to recover. Of course we can get stuck in any of the stages, but anger has a potential to be explosive.
