Anger and Grief: Processing our So-Called Negative Emotions

Astrid Burke, MHC

Feeling our feelings can be tough. The emotions of anger and grief can be complex and difficult to process, not to mention painful. It’s no wonder that we try to push them away, suppress them and avoid them for as long as possible. The tricky part is that both anger and grief are essential for truly healing after a trauma or loss.

Anger

As emotions go, anger gets a bad rap; it’s viewed as uncontrollable, dangerous, even violent. Personally, this used to be the hardest feeling for me to encounter in myself or in anyone else. For years, I would catch a glimpse of it and run for the hills. (You can read more about the “flight” response my other blog post on the “Four Fs or Trauma.”) But I’ve recently learned that feeling angry is important because it tells us when something this wrong. It’s the smoke alarm going off or the warning light on the car dashboard. Anger indicates to us that something needs to change. It tells us when our needs are not being met, when we’re being taken advantage of or insulted, when someone has hurt us. But when the smoke alarm is going off, we don’t pretend it isn’t and trying to ignore it is practically impossible. Yet we’re quick to find any way to ignore our anger. A healthier response may be to pause and examine what our anger is telling us needs to change. It can give us the clarity to recognize when our boundaries are being crossed and the conviction to maintain them.

Grief

As Susan Forward, PhD described in her book, Mothers Who Can’t Love: A Healing Guide for Daughters, “Grief, like depression, is something we always believe will never go away.” If feels like if we step into it, we’ll never be able to pull ourselves out of it, so naturally we avoid it or belittle it. We might decide that our grief and sadness is unwarranted because “other people have it worse.” But grief and sadness, like anger, are normal and important emotions despite how uncomfortable they may be. It tells us that what we lost was significant to us, which opens the door to for gratitude for what we had.

“The best way out is always through.” –Robert Frost

Both anger and grief can be difficult and painful emotions to process. We convince ourselves that it’s “easier” to pretend that they don’t exist. We might self-medicate with alcohol, food, over-working, etc., but these solutions are temporary. “Anger and grief are two sides of the same coin, and one often hides the other. Healing requires the extraordinary power of both of these emotions in equal measures,” urges Dr. Forward. The importance of processing these emotions is that doing so shows us what is important us: a meaningful relationship damaged, a non-negotiable boundary crossed, a significant person lost, and it gives us the opportunity to move through our healing with this clarity.