A Sermon by Rev. Dick Weston-Jones
Reading: "A Love Letter from a Wife to Her Husband", from Anger by May Sarton
Dear Ned,
This is almost the only letter I have ever written you but I need to try to communicate with you after so much misunderstanding and anger lately. Please try to read this as from a gentle unblurred voice—it is very bad that we cannot talk. I know it is partly my fault. My quick temper freezes you into silence, a silence that seems to be becoming a permanent armor you cannot or will not take off.
You lay the burden of guilt upon me when you insist that I am simply an angry person and have been so since childhood. There is some truth in this but it is not the whole truth, Ned. I think you too are an angry person—I sometimes wonder whether everyone is not born angry, furious at having been torn out of warmth and safety and suddenly alone in what must seem a harsh cold world at the very start. But you were taught or learned quickly to bury your anger, to refuse to allow it out, and you have come to believe that if you do not show it, if you never let it out, that it is really not there. Your brother seems to have handled his anger by learning to attack first, to be always the attacker to preserve himself from attack—is that it with Paul?
My anger leaps out like a real demon and is terribly damaging to others—and to me. I am afterward filled with guilt and remorse and feel I am always in the wrong. But I have to admit that these sudden pounces out of the blue do break the tension for me and there is some part of me that recognizes that letting anger out rather than burying it is healthy. You will resist this idea with all your being. I suppose I am writing this letter to beg you to consider your own anger, not to deny that it exists.
We each have a demon or daimon, as it is sometimes called, only we handle it in opposite ways and maybe that is why we seem to be in a state of unremitting war. But, Ned, you show your anger by coldness, by withdrawing from me, by not giving, and if only you could see that this is perhaps as punishing as my violence, we might be able to make a bridge…. Whatever all this means to you when you read it, you must realize that I love you, and I must believe that you love me.
Ned, please read this with your heart, not as the prehistoric animal who hides itself away.
Anna
Sermon
Each of us bears a cocoon of feelings within which we struggle for life and love, as Anna Lindstrom’s letter reminds us. Anger is one of those, an unpleasant but necessary feeling. It can motivate you to change and warn you about things you can’t change. It can also destroy the life and love you want. How do you control it? How do you let go of anger? I have some suggestions about where to start.
First, you have power with anger, to use it or get rid of it. The key is understanding the difference between primary and secondary emotions. Primary emotions are direct and immediate in their effect upon you. You can avoid them, but you can’t choose to not feel them. Pain is a primary emotion and anger is a secondary emotion. Secondary emotions are your responses to your primary emotions and thoughts about them. They always come after feelings that have been caused by something else. You can choose to do what you want with them.
Here’s a simple example: We’re walking along talking when suddenly I’m knocked down. My first feelings are pain and shock. Then I realize you hit me and I get angry. We can’t always tell the difference between our feelings. Our responses may be so quick that we can’t separate them.
“Why’d you do that?” I shout angrily and push you. Then I see a board fall and land right where I was walking. You weren’t trying to hurt me. You protected me. How do I feel now? I’m embarrassed and confused, on top of hurting—and perhaps still a little angry. My feelings are mixed up.
One of these is a primary feeling because it resulted directly from something happening to me. I’m hurt. My embarrassment, confusion and anger were secondary feelings because they were indirect. I generated them when I thought about how I had been hit. My thoughts told me you hit me. It was my thought that caused my anger, embarrassment and confusion, not your hitting me. When a moment later my thoughts told me that you were protecting me, I felt grateful even though I still hurt. My thoughts about the event gave it a different meaning and I could choose between some feelings, choose to let go of the anger.
What caused my anger was not your hitting me. It was my thinking about you hitting me. If I understand that, I can let go because I can stop thinking that. Letting go of anger means I have to accept responsibility for the feeling. It’s mine; it always was and always will be. No one else caused it. No one else can let it go. Only I can by understanding that I generated the anger. Some people have a problem with this because they want to feel they are the victim of someone else’s act. To get rid of your anger you have to stop being a victim and take responsibility for your own feelings. That’s the price of getting rid of your anger.
Let’s say someone does something intentionally to hurt you. You feel angry at him. Do you want to feel angry? You decide. It’s your anger. Maybe you don’t want to get rid of it, and you do want to express it. That’s okay, but you have to decide how much it’s worth. Keeping the anger and using it over and over is expensive. You may lose your job. Or your spouse. In a moment I’ll tell you how some experts on anger say they get rid of their own anger.
How do you let go of anger? First you must acknowledge it. Some people hide their anger so well they don’t even know they’re angry. Psychiatrist Leo Madow says we hide our anger from ourselves three ways, by toning it down, by denying it or by saying we’re depressed. We try to “protect” ourselves and others from it. We’ve been trained not to show anger.
Once a woman in my church told me her husband of 30 years had deserted her. He walked out, just disappeared, without a goodbye or even a note. Months later she learned he had moved across the country and intended never to contact her. “Weren’t you angry?” I asked. She denied it. She said she loved him and felt sorry for him. Surely he felt bad, she said. She eventually found him. She said she just wanted to tell him she wasn’t angry, only sorry that he left. It’s hard living with someone who’s in permanent denial.
People say things like “I’m annoyed (but no, I’m not really angry),” or “You make me laugh.” Ever said that yourself? Psychiatrist Madow says we try to divert other’s attention away from our anger. We say things like “You know that’s against policy” or “Mama won’t like it.” We try to give anger away by blaming it on a third party. We don’t want to take responsibility for saying what we really feel.
Finally depressed statements let us hide anger within another feeling: “I feel down in the dumps” or “I feel hopeless.” It’s not hopeless. You’re angry. Own up to it. If it’s really hopeless you can quit. You’ll never get that one ton boulder up the mountain, Sisyphus. But if you stop saying you’re hopeless you might get 100 twenty-pound rocks up the hill. Get angry. It’s okay. Then do something good you can feel good about. Take responsibility for your feelings. Change things. Then let go of anger.
Some people choose to “let it all hang out,” so they feel relief from the toxic effect of holding anger in. That may cause more new trouble than suppressing the anger and living with the old trouble. You’re more likely to get what you want if you deal with your anger by yourself and later express your wants in a clear, non-angry way to those whose cooperation you need. Not telling them immediately about your anger doesn’t mean you should deny it to yourself. Deal with it.
I asked several psychotherapists what they do with their anger. One said he wasn’t sure he was as good at dealing with it as he was at helping others with their anger. (That was honest!) Each had a similar answer: “I jog,” said one, “and talk to myself.” “Out loud?” I asked. “Sure,” he replied. Others went to private places and hollered, or talked to a picture of the person who had stimulated their anger. One had a caring partner who listened patiently. Each released energy, by pounding or shaking or pushing or running it out, doing something physical but not hitting the person with whom they were angry. It has to be out loud. It doesn’t help to just think angry thoughts. That recycles and refortifies the anger. When I lived near the ocean I found it helped to walk the empty beach and shout my complaints into the pounding surf.
Few of us hide anger well. It comes out so others see it even when we can’t. We carry years of conditioning into everything we do. Everyone has distortions created in distant times with old relationships. How ancient? The book of Exodus in the Bible warns that the sins of the parents will be visited upon their children unto the third and fourth generations. Kids often express feelings that belong to their forebears that their parents taught them to feel.
In Escaping the Hostility Trap Johns Hopkins psychiatrist Milton Layden suggests all relationships generate hostility in response to what we perceive as a loss of respect. We’re barraged by stimuli that leave us feeling inferior. That doesn’t mean we think we are inferior, but only that our experiences produce feelings of inadequacy and failure.
You start the day behind. You know you can’t do it all today. You think “I’m just not up to this.” How do you get out of the feeling? Do what you can feel good about. Do the rest later at your own comfortable speed. Random events generate inferiority feelings. You leave home with just enough time to make an appointment and a red light stops you. Now you know you’ll be late. You feel anxious. Your self-respect shrinks. A car swerves by and the driver curses at you. You feel worse, even if you think he’s a jerk. When we’re subjected to the anger of others our responses build upon the foundations of our inferiority feelings that have been accumulating. Layden says our generation of hostility is a normal response, primarily caused by the reduction of our feelings of self-respect.
We UU’s say we value self-respect more than anything else. Years ago a study of the values people say guide their lives showed that UUs ranked self-respect as the most important of 18 possible choices. Self-respect was 9th in importance with Jews, 7th with Protestants and 5th with Catholics, but first with UUs.
I don’t know if we actually value self-respect more than others do but we may admit our needs more clearly because our religion doesn’t tell us to look outside ourselves for the ultimate meaning of our lives.
How can we break the chain of hostility? Layden says regular self-evaluation may uncover the sources of our inferior feelings and show us that everyone has such feelings. If everyone does, no one’s to blame. Treat others in ways that support their self-respect and they’ll want to do that which earns your respect even if they don’t realize they too are caught up in what Layden calls the “Hostility Trap.”
He admits we may not always get the behavior we want from others because they may be too deeply caught to escape from the Hostility Trap. No one has to stay where she is, caught in others’ hostility. You can choose not to be with people who are stressful for you. You can escape your own Hostility Trap and let go of your own anger when you choose to.
May Sarton’s unhappy couple, Anna Lindstrom and Ned Fraser met in a paroxysm of anger one night after Anna had sent Ned her letter suggesting they were both just angry people. His first response was to tear up her letter and refuse to discuss it. “‘Do you think you could listen to me for a moment, stop being defensive for a moment,’ Anna had said gently. Why is the only feeling you allow yourself anger? Please try to tell me….’ ‘Anything else is too dangerous,’ he replied in an unguarded moment.’”
But Anna was patient. Ned grew more open slowly. One night he told her about the anger he’d been harboring for years towards his dead father who had committed suicide when he was 10. With that Anna knew more about her husband than he had ever told anyone. Then he closed up again. Life does not change easily. “Yet last night…for an hour or more,” said May Sarton, “the struggle came out into light, and they had rested in each other at last. And as long as that had happened, there was the possibility of growth. ‘If we could only not each feel so threatened by the other,’ Anna sighed. ‘If only…’” The hostility trap?
“But whoever thought love was easy?” asked May Sarton. “Or that people change? No,” she said, “The tapestry gets torn again and again and then rewoven in the same pattern and perhaps as time goes on our skill at reweaving becomes a little wiser and more compassionate.”
It’s possible, if you choose to let go of your anger.
Dear