Fireworks, my Father, and Rage...

This last year has been painful.

I ended a four year relationship, had to move out of my home, and find a new one, at the same time as facing losing my main source of work and money and trying to start my own business. In the midst of it all I went through a cluster of really painful experiences in my church which left me feeling excluded, judged, punished and angry.

Since then I've retreated and re-approached, retreated and re-approached. I've tried to go it alone. I've thought about finding a new church. I've tried just letting it be and waiting for something to shift.

Late one night two weeks ago I reached out on WhatsApp to one of the people I still felt strong trust for in my church and asked for help. I shared the image I had of myself as uprooted and laying on the surface of the soil, trying sporadically to push my own roots back down into the soil but to no avail. I felt so much further away from Him than I had 18 months ago, I really missed feeling like part of a community, and I missed worshipping in that community so much it hurt.

That was the thing that hurt the most and that I couldn't find anywhere else. The worship.

But I am still so angry and so confused about what happened, and even though a growing part of me wanted to come back more fully, and was more and more pained by the absence of a spiritual community, I was nowhere near being ready to forgive and reenter into a trusting relationship with people I felt had betrayed me.

I met up with my church friend and talked about what happens when it feels like our trusted church leaders have failed us. About the pain that can rear its head at these times because we were let down much earlier in life by a parent who shamed, judged and excluded us. We talked about the almost inevitable confusion that comes from unconsciously wanting our church leaders to be what a parent couldn't be. We talked about the confusion that comes from unconsciously assuming that our Heavenly Father feels and thinks about us the way our earthly father did, and perhaps the way our church leaders seem to.

And you know, so often it seems to me that the face-value teaching of my chosen faith is at odds with my psychotherapeutic perspective...

As an adult still recovering from childhood trauma of living with a controlling, frighteningly raging, sometimes violent, unpredicatable and melancholic father, I have had to learn to both down-regulate my nervous system out of hypervigilance AND re-sensitise myself to warning signs that someone or something isn't safe and give myself permission to stay away. And to feel ANGRY. When you grow up with someone who was dangerous and raging, you learn two things. Firstly, that you don't have a right to anger. If you get angry, you're going to get out-angried, and it's going to hurt. Secondly, because being on the receiving end of that kind of anger is horrific, you conclude that being angry is bad. For both these reasons, anger becomes a personal no go zone. The order of the day is keeping the peace, treading on egg-shells, and being as pleasing and inoffensive as possible.


From that perspective, the stereotypical Christian persona is a perfect fit. Gentle. Meek. Humble. Eternally forgiving. Eternally presenting the other cheek. Saved from anger. Full of peaceful thoughts and focusing only on the best in others with unfailing faith and hope.

But according to many of the best thinkers across a whole range of psychotherapeutic traditions, there are dire consequences - personally, socially, globally - of "spiritual bypassing" - outlawing our own anger and trying to replace it, at least too quickly, with peaceful thoughts and decisions to forgive.

Depression.
Anxiety.
Substance misuse and addiction.
Self harm.
Over eating.
Body pain and other psycho-somatic conditions like eczema.
Loss of creativity and motivation.
Sexual dysfunction.
Sudden outbursts of rage and even violence of our own.

From an elemental perspective we have banished our fire, and as well as being the stuff of our anger, this fire is the stuff of our life force, our passion, our creativity, our inspiration. You put out the fire of anger, you put out the fire of life.

And from a Jungian, radical, and more global perspective: you keep the anger in your shadow, you'll start to see it at every turn - your boss, the yob at the station, your housemate, (every single one of your therapy clients!), the rioters in the city centre.

The bombers and shooters and hostage takers.

And that until each and every one of us can take back our own shadow and say "Yes, that aggression is in me too. I am capable of great anger. Of violent rage. I AM angry, right now in this minute, with you. I am allowed to be angry." we will continue to live in a world where "they" are full of appalling rage. Not us. Them.

It's miraculous to me that I reached out with such a personal need for help with my anger just days before Paris, and right in the middle of my church's sermon series about God the Father. That my first Sunday meeting for a long time would include a sermon about how our understanding of our Heavenly Father gets distorted by our past experiences with our earthly fathers, and that it would happen on the same day as my church was letting off an evening storm of "prophetic FIREworks" across the neighbourhood from its roof.

What I hear God saying to me, I think, is that I'm in a process. That my anger is necessary. Ancient. Overdue. Important. Even (really?) beautiful. That I'm allowed to keep people at arm's length if I don't trust them. That I don't have to hug them, and act friendly to prevent awkwardness or avoid rejection. That I'm already too good for the wrong reasons at forgiveness, gentleness, rapprochement and this is a time for something different. That the quality of my capacity to forgive, be gentle, and seek reconcilliation will be something entirely Other and fruitful only when it is in Him and is unfolded for me through a process that requires me to go in the seemingly and mysteriously opposite direction.

So I wrote on the rocket stick of one of the fireworks my prayer, for myself and for all of us everywhere, for the transformation, not the forbidding, of rage. I can feel some trust in Him that He will unfold this with me.

In the meantime, I'm angry.

I'm angry with my church for not having taught more in recent years about anger.

I'm angry with some of the leaders of my church for being at least so clumsy if not downright heartless with me at a time when I needed them the most.

I'm angry with my Dad for terrifying me, repeatedly, and so distorting me into a doormat, as well as handing me an inheritance that I've had to deal with of depression, anxiety, addiction and chronic body pain.

Amen.