Facing darkness : dealing with anger : inner renewal : some reflections

Some days the light shines so powerfully into our own darkness. We feel again those tender, raw wounded places and the healing for me comes when I can bear that deep glimpse or dive without splitting off into a deflection of blame or anger. Certain things happening to us were not our fault but as children many of us may have come to believe that they were due to the fact that children naturally take on blame.

For myself I still tend to think I am to blame for most things. Today my friend I had to draw a boundary with on Saturday rang to tell me he ended up having an accident later on in the weekend. I started to personalise it and think maybe telling him I needed to go when he was angry and upset had meant that he rushed off and as a result of that had his accident. I felt to blame for saying that I didn’t think it was helpful him lashing out at a guy who is addicted to ice when the person involved was not in a rational state and who am I to say what is wrong or right for anyone really. At times we need to set boundaries and be forceful and categorical in saying we wont take any more.

The rational part of me says my friend had his accident because he was not in a calm state and tends to push himself. He has also told me he has been very close to suicide on several occasions, suffering suicidal feelings myself at times I can relate but that very dark place of contemplating suicide is somewhere I don’t really want to be living lately. I think there is so much that is good in this world, even with all the tough stuff and its up to us to try to reach for the positive, even though at the moment this planet seems to be so knee deep in global and environmental crisis. Sometimes my doom and gloom side says that we have really left it all too late. My father used to say that every human civilisation seems to have the seeds of its own destruction sewn into it. He used to cite the rise and fall of empires that have come and gone to prove his point.

That said I keep trying to stay both realistic and positive. If there is to be any hope for us as humanity surely it will only come if we have the courage to face the place our own darkness and self destructive habits and tendencies can take us. As a recovering alcoholic I have had to do that many times. And on that note I wanted to share the following meditation from Tian Dayton. I have been facing a lot of my own darkness lately (well for years, really) and so its probably timely to share this for others in emotional recovery.

I am new inside. I feel pink and tender as if young tissue were growing within me. I have been willing to take the ultimate risk by looking at the state of my life and my own insides, not as I wish them to be, but as they actually are. I have experienced an inner death, I have walked through spaces inside my mind and heart that felt risk life threatening, and I have felt the terror of full honesty. What I did not expect was this sense of birth and newness. Somehow life feels full of possibility and new experiences. I thought that I would be stuck in anger and blame forever, but I see today that I did not need to feel so down on myself for feeling those feelings. They are just part of a process; I move and shift and change and move and shift and change.

This reading reminds me that anger can be survived and may even be part of the necessary process of transformation. Much depends on how well we contain our anger and our look into the dark. We can let it take us down into a place of complete hopelessness and despair or we can use it to propel us forward into a new place, one where we are cleansed from within by that fire or flood. In the end its an alchemical process, some people get burned up by it, others come out other side. Who knows if these are not actually burning cleansing, clearing times when we are trying to make way for a spiritual and emotional renewal?

As I contemplate posting this I wonder about the different approaches to anger. In 12 step fellowships I was sometimes told that anger was one of the seven deadly sins and it can be true that at times anger can be a destructive force that over powers and blinds us. At other times it can be a call for boundaries, arising out of a sense of injustice or due to boundaries being transgressed or disrespected.

I read a good book by Gary Chapman author of The Five Love Languages a few years back on anger in which he outlines a process whereby we can discriminate whether our anger is justified or unjustified, righteous or unrighteousness. Sometimes anger can be a cry from the willfull or damaged wounded child, it may contain traces of old injuries projected onto new situations which trigger them. At times like this lashing out may not serve a good purpose, for it may hurt someone in a way that may not have happened had we taken a step back or a critical or much needed ‘time out’ to explore the deeper roots of our frustration with what was going on.

To my mind anger (and its associated issues of assertion, aggression, self protection and personal agency) is perhaps one of the most important emotions we need to understand in order to live freely, peacefully and consciously with our fellow humans and improve all of our relationships. If we keep giving over boundaries and don’t own our anger, resentment may begin to poison us from within