The Grief Under the Anger
A man with chronic anger problems goes looking for the anger and finds something else underneath it entirely.
I'm forty-one and I've had an anger problem my whole life. Not violence, but the kind of constant hostile reactivity that exhausts everyone around you, including yourself. My wife told me she was going to leave if something didn't change. I believed her.
My guide said: "Let's see what the anger is protecting." I didn't understand what that meant at the time.
We started in the forest in the late morning. Then, without any clear trigger, I was crying. Sobbing, actually, in a way I hadn't since I was maybe ten years old. My guide asked gently what I was feeling. She offered: "Does it feel like loss?"
It did. I was grieving. Something I had been grieving for thirty years without knowing it — the loss of a father who was present in body and absent in every way that mattered. The anger had been standing in front of that grief the entire time, being more acceptable than being sad.
I've been in therapy since with a focus on grief rather than anger management. My wife says I'm different. I don't fully understand yet who I am without the anger, but I know now what it was covering.
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