Anger, Guilt, and Shame in the Ledger, Part 1

Back in February I posted some thoughts on anger riffing off of a podcast from Andy Stanley. Stanley proposes that at the root of our anger is an open account: "you owe me."

Your friend owed it to you to not stab you in the back. They did, so you get angry.

Working off of this, guilt is also about an open account: "I owe you." I've done something to wrong you and now I'm in debt to you, I need to make it up to you somehow.

The problem is that usually the debt can never be paid back. Your friend said what they said, it can't be taken back. You can't take back what you said or how you harmed the other person.

So what we need to do is close the ledger, forgive the accounts. We need to extend forgiveness where we're angry. Otherwise that anger will destroy all our relationships. We need to accept God's forgiveness where we feel guilty (even if the person involved isn't willing to extend forgiveness to us), because guilt is a ball and chain, hampering our ability to take risks and love in relationships.

I've been thinking about this the past couple of days in relation to shame. I'm wondering if we might be able to uproot shame if we can understand some of how it is woven into our lives.

Leaving anger behind for a moment and framing guilt and shame a slightly different way, guilt is feeling bad about something that we've done, shame is feeling bad about who we are.

And so I wonder if we might use Stanley's ledger analogy and frame-up shame in this way: shame equals "I owe me."

If I bounce a check, I feel guilty as a husband for costing our family the bounced check fee. But at a deeper level, I feel ashamed because I have not lived up to my own sense of being the kind of guy that doesn't bounce checks.

I have a self-image as a responsible, reasonably intelligent human being who can balance a check book. And my sense of shame is the result of my inability to live up to the internal voices and standards that I have created or set for myself.

Shame, then, is a self-inflicted disease.

Anger and Pain Management Final Thoughts (For Now)

There are few places in our lives where I think we are more self-deceived than in our own willingness to become healthy and whole people. This does not mean that we don't, at some level, desire to be healthy and whole.

But the problem is that we want wholeness on our own terms. We are like the addict who can't imagine life without the addiction--we want to manage our pain/anger/self-righteousness/whatever, not do away with it altogether. Intervention comes our way, an opportunity to find another life--it promises wholeness but it requires that we altogether abandon life as we know it.

So instead, we cling, we dig in, we demand that wholeness look a certain way, most often shaped by the whims of our culture or the status of our hormonal/emotional/digestive life. This is particularly disastrous when the clinging and demanding-ness happens within the context of religion--Christianity, perhaps, worst of all. Jesus was ruthless towards those who used religious pretexts to prop up their addictions.

And so, as C.S. Lewis memorably says, hell is locked from the inside. Those who are there do, in some sense, want to get out--but only on their terms. They refuse the offer of life. They want to be strong in their own strength, the very strength that has failed them time and time again.

They (and we) must therefore be strong in His strength. He has no other strength to give us.

Further Thoughts on Anger and Pain Management (Thanks Ben)

Yesterday my good friend (and colleague up in New England) Ben left a really thoughtful and honest comment on my post from two days ago about anger:

I do this in ministry especially, trying to follow all the rules and do the right "InterVarsity" things so that I earn my right to be angry when things don't happen the way I want them to....

It's an odd thing to learn about myself, that I spend so much active energy putting myself in a position be angry.

Ben's struck on something here that I want to riff off of. There are few places in our lives where I think we are more self-deceived than in our own willingness to become healthy and whole people.

We are, in fact, wounded people. From that place of woundedness we can set out on the precarious journey of seeking healing. But most of us instead expend a tremendous amount of time and emotional energy excusing and/or justifying our woundedness. Or to use Ben's image here, we actively put ourselves in a place where we might then be justified in acting out of our woundedness, anger, or hurt.

Most of the conversations that you and I have in our heads with other people are about justifying and defending our anger, pride, brokenness...our un-health.

We are regularly offered lifelines out of this sickly place that we flatly refuse. For most of us, the cost associated with giving up my "right" to be angry or respected or appreciated or thought well of or noticed or whatever is too high. We have become addicted to feeling angry or hurt.

Jesus, of course, knows about our addictions to our wounds and is singularly ruthless in calling us to real health. Is your eye causing your to sin? Gauge it out! Not to prove how holy or "religious" you are, but so that you might be a whole and healthy human being...and one day enter into fullness of joy that you were created for.

"Do you want to get well?" Jesus asks the lame man beside the pool in John 5. It seems like the answer is obvious...except that the man can't answer him and in fact never does answer him.

He, like the rest of us, has expended an enormous amount of energy getting comfortable with his pain and in fact has learned to leverage it for his perceived benefit...just like we find ways to leverage our pain, anger, woundedness to try to get more of what we want out of life. To what end? Death. Always death. Even if there's inklings of pleasure in the process.

For the most glorious and easy-to-read unpacking of this that I've come across, check out C.S. Lewis' The Great Divorce.

Anger EqualsYou Owe Me

Last week I was listening to Andy Stanley's sermon series "It Came from Within." I like Stanley because he does a great job talking to southerners (his church is in Atlanta) who are considering coming back to a faith they have put on the shelf for a while.

He was talking about anger. He proposed that the basic premise behind anger is that someone (in our mind) owes us something: your dad owed it to be in your life, your professor owed you a fair test, your friend owed it to you to be loyal, etc.

This has been rolling around in my head for the past couple of days and I find it to be really helpful in deflating my anger. If I'm angry, who do I think owes me? What do I think that they owe me? Often what I find is that my anger is really just my over-inflated sense of entitlement. Sometimes it's legit: there's promises that have been broken, reasonable expectations that have not been met, etc.

Stanley argues that it doesn't matter whether your anger is justifiable or not. To carry anger with you from one stage or area of your life into the next is poisonous to our souls. We then mis-place our anger onto our dog or friends or family when the real source is work or a parent issue that we never dealt with.

This "open account" of anger, this sense that we were owed something, will ruin all of our relationships if we let it. This is particularly true if we carry it over from one life stage to another (from adolescence into adulthood, or from one marriage to the next, for example). And the trick is that the debt in most cases can never be fully paid. Even the one who hurt you can't make it up to you. Nothing can be done by anyone to make up the debt.

So the work that we must do, of course, is the same gift-work done for us. We must forgive. We must forgive the full debt. That's not letting anyone off the hook, it's freeing us from the hooks that anger has in our soul. It's freeing us from being a freight train of anger, destroying all the things that we really value most.

Stanley poses the question: "No matter what's been done to you, and I know there's some of you with awful stories, the question remains: how long are you going to give this thing power?"

Test drive that for a while, see if it doesn't ring true for you.

Angry Threads

So I've been in a lot of places where the subject of anger has come up. I'm not sure what to do with the disparate meditations, thoughts and conversations, so I thought I'd put the various threads here and see if some sort of bigger picture develops.

1. Anger seems to be an appropriate response to world that is full of wrong. God is angry in Amos--the people of Israel are exploiting the poor. Some of my students get angry at injustice. Anger is the right response to not-right-ness. It is a good and useful tool that moves us beyond our usual self-protective shell to engage in the fight where it is good, right, and necessary.

2. Usually, however, anger does not seem to be used or experienced in this redemptive way. Most often we get angry when we are overlooked, taken for granted, feel snubbed or overworked. In other words, anger seems to play out most consistently in regards to the need to be propped up, applauded, approved of, respected, and having our own needs met.

In some cases, our anger in regards to something that has happened to us is justified and right under condition number one: we have personally experienced a wrong that needs to be righted somehow. But often in our culture, anger is self-serving rather than making-things-right-serving.

3. Anger is a serious impediment to the spiritual life. The conversations we have in our heads, the ways we self-justify and work up our self-righteous diatribes, the ways that anger most often compels us to act impulsively, hastily, in over-reaction rather than in right measure all impede a life of the fruit of the Spirit: love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness and self-control.

Henri Nouwen talks about this in his book The Genessee Diary. That his anger and the resulting stew-pot of internal-world churning is often grossly disproportionate to the actual offense. What this reveals, he proposes, is that we are such insecure and deeply needy creatures that even the most insignficant slight raises the specter that we are unimportant, not loved, and alone. In other words, that all our worst fears about our lives and circumstances might actually be true.

Scripture talks plenty about anger--I mentioned Amos already, but perhaps most famously in the New Testament: "in your anger, do not sin." This resonates with me. It leaves room for a Jesus-clearing-the-temple kind of anger that is rightly prompted by something that is wrong...but it doesn't let me off the hook to love the Lord and my neighbor, even in the midst of my anger.