Anger Is Never the First Feeling We Feel

Most everyone is familiar with the old image of a ball and chain around the leg of an inmate. And many of us are aware of what this same sort of emotional ball and chain feels like inside our chests. As the chain wraps itself tightly around our hearts, the ball feels like a thousand pounds of lead against our souls. Our inner ball and chain constantly weigh us down because they are filled with many years of unexpressed, and thus unresolved, emotions. We’re aching with dishonored feelings of betrayal, disappointment, loss, abandonment, anxiety, hurt, fear and sadness. And every so often, when we can no longer repress these feelings, we erupt like a volcano spewing anger and rage at the world and any person in our path.

Unfelt and unexpressed emotions stay trapped inside of us. Eventually, they become buried within us and transform our souls into graveyards of the living dead. Unprocessed feelings never die. They moan, ache, shiver and screech, but they never die. At times they seem dormant and we mistakenly think they have left us. But sooner or later, when someone’s words or behavior touch on an old wound, those seemingly dead feelings awaken within their graves. They arise and shriek as they make their presence felt again in terrifying forms of anger and rage.

Anger is never the first feeling we experience in any given situation. We can’t feel angry without first feeling betrayed, belittled, disappointed, deceived, hurt or compromised in some way. I mean, why else would we be angry, right? We have to have a reason for being angry and that reason has a feeling all of its own attached to it. That feeling exists before anger does. If you believe anger is the first feeling you experience in any given situation, then you have stuffed and skipped-over many other feelings so quickly and automatically that you don’t even allow yourself to feel them. Talk about being emotionally unavailable.

Likewise, anytime we are angry and have no real reason for being angry or our anger is out of proportion to a given situation, we are staring at a huge red flag. Some people express feelings of anger or rage that are greatly out of proportion to whatever happened to trigger their tirade. For example, It isn’t rational to hit the ceiling if a child spills orange juice. Raging over spilled juice is a sign that we have many unprocessed—and now uncontrollable-- feelings inside of us. And they are screaming for our attention just as loudly as we are screaming at the child who spilled the juice. These turbulent feelings want us to free them from our souls by facing and processing them.

How do we do this? We sit with them. We allow feelings to surface and when they do, we sit with them. We may need to ask God to help us sit with them, to help us to sit-- period. Our natural inclination will be to further avoid these feelings by busying ourselves in some way, or by addictively numbing them back into submission. But they will never go away until we allow ourselves to feel them and free them from our bodies.

Painful memories may also pop into our heads at times, and again, there is a reason. It’s because they have feelings attached to them that we never fully allowed ourselves to feel. Now is the time to do it. The pain will never be gone and we will never be free to forgive and move forward in life until we face these painful old feelings. The sooner we start, the sooner we will peacefully, happily receive our lives back. Every time an old buried feeling is awakened from its grave, it’s your chance to put it to rest once and for all, by allowing yourself to feel it until it no longer has any life left in it.