Keeping Your Cool…When Your Anger Is Hot!: Practical Steps to Temper Fiery Emotions (16 page)

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Authors: June Hunt

BOOK: Keeping Your Cool…When Your Anger Is Hot!: Practical Steps to Temper Fiery Emotions
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Emotional Archaeology: Unearthing a Heritage of Heat
Most often, if we retrace the tracks of our unresolved anger back into the past, the trail ends at our parents’ doorstep. Who else had such power over our lives? Who more than Mom and Dad shaped our view of God, the world, and our relationship to both? It is often said parenting isn’t for cowards. It’s a big job—one that can’t be mastered, only practiced. Along the way there are bound to be failures, mistakes, and lapses, even among the most well-intentioned, loving people. That’s why, for many of us, the first names ever scrawled across our slips of paper—forming the deepest layer of our anger bowls—read
Mommy
,
Daddy
, or both
.
In fact, many incidents in which a child may feel wounded by parents are inevitable and necessary. A kindergartner might feel abandoned on the first day of school as mother walks away. Yet change and unfamiliar situations are an inescapable part of growing up.
It was our parents who had the ability to either provide or withhold what we needed to survive and thrive. As our immediate role models, it was they who, perhaps unwittingly, taught us how to handle our emotions, especially anger. There is truth in the old adage “With children, more is caught than taught.” What we learned spans the spectrum from an inability to express our anger (because our parents wouldn’t allow it) to expressing our anger in destructive ways (because our parents did). We also learned to
be
angry—like Holly—in response to ill treatment we may have received from them.
Like emotional archaeologists, we must often excavate long-past childhood relationships to answer the question, “Why am I so angry?” The purpose here is not to blame parents for our problems nor bash them for their shortcomings; it’s to understand the basis, the foundation, of our emotional makeup so we can identify and correct wrong beliefs we formed about life and how to live it. We need to know and understand
why
we are the way we are so we can have the wisdom to know
how
to change the way we are.
In fact, here’s an important thing to remember: Our parents were not—and are not—machines. They were not unpacked fresh from the factory floor the day we were born, made specifically to serve our needs. They are people, just as vulnerable and just as fallible as anyone. If they are angry themselves, it is surely in response to their own hurts, fears, frustrations, and struggles with injustice.
Chances are, the attitudes and behaviors you have adopted from your parents didn’t originate with them. You may be wearing a cloak of unresolved anger that has been passed down in your family for generations.
Knowing this will help you unearth the connections between your past wounds and your present anger without falling into the common trap of pointing fingers and laying blame. The point is not recrimination, but to obtain God’s healing.
Finding the Family Fire
Let me tell you about Ryan, a young man who learned in dramatic fashion how to see past his father’s angry exterior. Ryan grew up in constant conflict with his father, who he described as a “fuming, withdrawn, cynical alcoholic.” Everyone in the family had tried various ways to reach out to him, but they could never get past the wall of his deep pessimism about life and his mistrust of everyone. He kept his wife and children at bay by adopting a menacing, unapproachable posture at home.
Years later, Ryan began to see in himself evidence of his own anger. Girlfriends told him more than once that he was too sarcastic and brooding. His volcanic temper frightened them when all-too-frequent arguments erupted. Ryan quickly recognized his father’s imprint on his life, which made him even angrier. He felt helpless to overcome the effects of his upbringing, and he began to blame his past for everything in his life that wasn’t going according to plan.
Then one day, he got a rare and healing glimpse into his father’s painful past.
“I was riding in the car with my dad, something I hadn’t done for years,” Ryan told me. “We were listening to news on the radio when a story came on about a local man who had just been arrested for molesting several neighborhood boys. It made me really sad, and I said I couldn’t even imagine what those boys must be feeling.”
Suddenly, Ryan noticed his father’s knuckles were white and his arms were shaking as he struggled to keep a tight grip on the steering wheel. His breathing grew labored and his face turned red. The car hurtled down the highway, faster and faster. Ryan began to fear his father was having a heart attack, which was not far from the truth. Long-buried fear, pain, and anger had swiftly surfaced…and all-consuming rage was now coursing through his body.
“I
know
how it feels,” Ryan’s father uttered through clenched teeth. “It feels like you want to die, or kill the guy. It’s worse than dying. It feels like you’ll never be clean again.
Ever
.”
Ryan’s father knew all too well what victims of abuse feel because he had been abused as a boy.
Ryan sat in stunned silence, looking at the man he had feared and sometimes even hated, but had never understood until now. His father was no longer just the
perpetrator
of all that angry malice within his family, but also the
victim
of wounds so deep and painful he had stuffed and buried them for 50 years. Ryan experienced compassion for his dad and empathy he’d never felt before, and that became the key to eventually dealing with his own anger. He began reaching into his bowl of anger, releasing to God one tear-stained slip of paper after another…
God presents Himself in the Bible as the Refiner—the One who refines us so that we come forth as purified silver.
The truth is, we start feeding on conflict, woe, and disappointment long before we grow up to become men and women. Like children playing with matches, we learn early in life what it feels like to get “burned.” And though parents are sometimes responsible for childhood hurts and unmet needs, they are by no means the only source. Children can be wounded by any number of people in any number of ways. Hurt people
hurt
people.
Some of those wounds can, and do, lead to deep-seated anger later in life. We can feel just as abandoned or mistreated by siblings, peers, teachers—even society at large. Although the severity can vary greatly, it seems virtually impossible for anyone to go through life and not at some point need to release pain into the purifying fire of God. God presents Himself in the Bible as the Refiner—the One who refines us so that we come forth as purified silver.
“See, I have refined you, though not as silver; I have tested you in the furnace of affliction”
(ISAIAH 48:10).
Carrying Childhood Coals
Bonnie was a beautiful young woman, a smart and talented graphic artist with a bright future. She was also lonely and miserable. The older she got, the more estranged she became from her family, especially from her sisters, all of whom were married and starting families of their own. It wasn’t that her sisters excluded Bonnie—far from it. She was invited to every family event, but rarely participated. To make matters worse, she had endured one dismal dating experience after another. None of the men she was interested in stuck around very long.
“Why don’t you want to spend time with your family?” I asked her, sensing the answer to her unhappiness lay in those troubled relationships.
“Oh, it isn’t them,” Bonnie replied. “It’s their kids. For as long as I can remember, I haven’t been able to tolerate being around kids for more than a few minutes at a time. Everything they do irritates and annoys me.”
“Considering that our anger is always present for a reason, why do you think kids make you mad?” I probed.
“I don’t know,” she said. “Maybe it’s because they can be so
mean
to each other, really cruel. I hate that.”
I decided to venture a guess. “Maybe there was a time when a kid or group of kids was really mean to
you,
” I said.
“I don’t think so,” she replied. Then she thought about it. “Well, maybe there is something to that.”
Bonnie then relayed an incident that occurred when she was seven years old. Her family had moved to a new town a few months earlier. For some reason a group of kids in the new neighborhood took an instant dislike to Bonnie. They excluded her from games, pestered her at school, and yelled names anytime they rode their bikes by her house.
One day the family planned a birthday party for Bonnie’s younger sister. Her mother decorated the front yard with streamers and balloons.
“Before the guests arrived, those kids sneaked into the yard and tore down all the decorations,” Bonnie said, still outraged after all this time. “They shredded everything. When my mother confronted them later, they told her they thought the party was for me, as if that would make it okay.”
By the time Bonnie finished the story, she was in tears. Obviously, she had never gotten over the pain and injustice she suffered as a child at the hands of a few bullies. The revelation rekindled powerful emotions. Twenty-five years later, the traumatic event was almost as real—and as infuriating—as it was the day it happened. She conceded it was unfair of her to assume the same mean spirit was present in
all
children, particularly in her own nieces and nephews. Ultimately, that insight led her to see the high cost she had been paying for unresolved anger, and motivated her to get to know her nieces and nephews and even invest in their lives in some way.
You Can Transform Your Tomorrows
Without exception, we
all
receive wounds in childhood. We all bear emotional, physical, or spiritual scars. There is no way to turn back the clock and undo what has been done. We must live with the experiences we’ve been given. But
how
we live with them is entirely up to us. We can nurse our wounds, or ignore them and continue to suffer. Or we can take them to God and be healed by His infinite love and grace. Scripture makes clear which path will lead to healing:
“I waited patiently for the LORD; he turned to me and heard my cry.
He lifted me out of the slimy pit, out of the mud and mire;
he set my feet on a rock and gave me a firm place to stand.
He put a new song in my mouth, a hymn of praise to our God.
Many will see and fear and put their trust in the LORD”
(PSALM 40:1-3).
When we travel back in time to find the source of unresolved anger, the journey will lead to incidents we thought we’d long since forgotten. But undeniably they still have the power to shape our emotions in the present. No experience, no event, should be dismissed as trivial or childish.
Take each hurt, even the seemingly tiniest, to the Lord, and allow Him to apply His healing salve to your soul.
Firestorm: From Ember to Inferno
A
firestorm
is a conflagration that attains such intensity it creates its own wind system. The heat of the original fire draws in more and more of the surrounding air. This kind of raging blaze causes widespread damage and destruction.
Anyone caught in a firestorm would have great fear, as would anyone thrown into a blazing furnace. And yet, in the book of Daniel, we read the unusual account of a powerful king who makes a golden image of himself and orders his subjects to bow down before it. Three friends of Daniel refuse to bow because their allegiance was to the true King of kings, the living God.

 

Enraged, King Nebuchadnezzar gives them an ultimatum: bow or be thrown into a fiery furnace. But the three stand firm in their convictions. “If we are thrown into the blazing furnace, the God we serve is able to save us from it, and he will rescue us from your hand, O king. But even if he does not, we want you to know, O king, that we will not serve your gods or worship the image of gold you have set up” (Daniel 3:17-18).

 

You probably know how the story ends. The three men are thrown into the furnace—a literal
conflagration
—yet they remain unharmed. They walk around in the blazing heat and were joined by a fourth figure—generally regarded as an angel of the Lord or the pre-incarnate Christ. God indeed rescues them.

 

When you find yourself in one of life’s “fiery furnaces,” remember the three godly friends of Daniel—Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego. May your prayer be, “God, I know you are able to rescue me, but even if You choose not to, I will serve You wholeheartedly.”

 

How then can you withstand the heat from life’s inevitable firestorms? By resting in the knowledge that
all things
will work together for your good. God is unfolding a perfect plan for your life.

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