Tuning into our Anger

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L1YFR9ppHN0

Many moons ago, I attended a wedding shower and also the wedding ceremony and reception for a friend who was marrying her beloved. Like a good Southern girl, I brought a gift to both the shower and the wedding.

At the time of this wedding, I was single and working for a non-profit organization, and my paycheck reflected the fact that I was laboring in a helping profession. Working for a non-profit is such meaningful work, but the pay often makes it so single people just barely scrape by.

Even though my budget was tight, I decided to go all out for my friend’s wedding. Between the two presents I purchased for the shower and wedding, I spent nearly $150. This friend eventually had a baby and so I mailed her a present from her baby registry, to rejoice with her over this new sacred season in her life. Despite my limited budget as a single woman, I had spent several hundred dollars on this friend.

As I look back and consider my financial status at the time, I recognize this was a lot to spend on someone who I had only gone out with socially a handful of times, who was not in my circle of best friends and who I had not known for very long. But at the time, I felt like it was important to celebrate these two important seasons in her life.

When it was my turn to get married, I invited this same person to my wedding. She and her family were unable to come to the wedding, but I remember feeling disheartened when I did not even receive a card from her, to commemorate this joyful time in my life.

The word frustrated, disheartened, or irritated is a way that Southern women soften the word anger. So in all honesty, the emotion I felt at this time was anger and it was important for me to feel this.

Even in the midst of my anger, I allowed myself to feel empathy for my friend. There was a lot going on in her life and her respective roles as an employee, wife and new mother all required so much of her self. I decided to give her the benefit of the doubt, by entertaining the possibility the postal service had lost the congratulatory wedding card she had sent me. And if my optimistic thought of the card being lost in the mail was not true, it was important to remind myself that gift-giving was my love language and not necessarily her own.

It also occurred to me that many people on my journey, have extended more generosity to me, whether in emotional or financial ways, than I had ever been able to return to them. And even though experiencing mutuality in relationships can be nice, we know that sometimes in life we give more and sometimes we receive more in relationships. So, why did I feel so let down by this friend?

Eventually, I decided that my friend had actually given me a wedding gift. My present from her, was that I needed to look at my anger towards her and see if it might point me to some ways I was actually angry at myself.

And so I did some much needed reflection. I reminded myself of my tendency to over-function in many aspects of my life, as a means to validate and prove myself. I told myself that in the future, if I give a generous gift to another person, I need to do this without any expectations of getting something in return. I also made a mental note to make sure that in the journey yet to come, I don’t give as a means to prove myself, but simply for the joy of giving.

My anger also directed me, to the fact that I needed to be giving a little more to myself. At this point in my life, I tended to give others more through both my gifts and time, than I gave my own self. My anger was asking me to care a little more for myself.

But so often when we offer more than we have to give, we become resentful when others don’t contribute as much as we do. Have you ever become mad at someone at work, because you feel like you are working harder than they are? Perhaps your anger has even built to the point that you are passive aggressive with this person.

But instead of breathing fire on your colleague, maybe this is an opportunity for you to look at yourself. In lieu of being infuriated at the person you think is under-functioning at work, it will serve you well to examine how you over-function at work. Maybe you are angry because you are not caring for yourself as much as your work associate does, which might lead to the important awakening that you need to integrate more self-care in your life.

So even when our anger seems justified, if we take the time to befriend it and listen to it, our anger can lead us to see our part in a difficult situation.