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Hi guys,

I struggle a lot with allowing myself to feel anger. But I did have an experience a few years ago where I cut loose and got some anger out, and it was really clear how doing this affected my projections. I wrote it up and thought I'd post it here in the hope it might be of benefit.

Background - At the time, I was living on a farm where we had interns. Tommy was an intern, and Peter is my ex husband.

Patricia

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Breakfast, a few days ago. Me, sleep-deprived & not holding up my facade very well. And the day before, I had just touched some old stuff: how I felt growing up, I know those are the feelings I’m going to have to get to. I’m primed.

The trigger: pepper shaker.



Looks innocent, doesn’t it?

Tommy’s shaking it as hard as he can over his plate. Shake shake shake shake shake shake shake. Not getting anything. Shake some more. It’s almost empty, just big grains in there, they’re not coming out the holes. And they won’t. EVER. NO MATTER HOW HARD YOU SHAKE.

Seeing red – but calmly (I hoped) – I say, “Tommy, give that to me.” I take it in the kitchen, grind pepper in the spice grinder, fill the shaker … this takes FIVE SECONDS WHY HAS NO ONE DONE THIS IN THE THREE DAYS THE SHAKER HAS BEEN ALMOST EMPTY WHY DO I HAVE TO DO THESE THINGS WITH SEVEN OF US IN THE HOUSE??? I give it back to Tommy: “I’d be happy to show you how to do it sometime.” A little sarcasm there – I did try, I really did.

But that’s IT, all I can do. Time for an experiment, see what happens when you just let it fly.

So I leave my barely touched breakfast on the table and stalk up to my cabin and it’s coming out even before I get there – I kick the doorstep – forgetting I was wearing sandals! ow! – and then slam the door a few times and half scream a few times before I even get in the door. All this involuntary – maybe the first time I’ve ever let anger just take over my body!

Some more banging around inside, a few deep tears and sobs, then it’s over. Clean myself up, walk back down to the house, sit down and eat my breakfast. Everyone is very quiet. My food is still warm … I couldn’t have been away more than ten minutes.

Someone says, “I heard a lot of noise up there.”

I say, “I made a lot of noise.”

A little later Peter says I ought to have just asked Tommy to fill the shaker, not filled it myself, and then I wouldn’t have had to get so upset. This is the difference between the natural love approach and God’s Way: Peter thinks it was just the pepper shaker. And that that’s the best you can do.

But through the day my spirit lifts. I feel lighter and lighter as I realize what is happening, feel how my world is changing. Then I get words for what happened: When people leave things undone I feel like I have to do them – like they NEED me to do them (overwhelmed by others’ needs). They can’t even fill the pepper shaker without me, no I have to do that and a million other things they can’t seem to handle. They don’t care about me, they only need me (unlovedness) and they don’t care about what I would like to be doing instead of care-taking them (un-cared for, I don’t count). Some of that has released! And now …

Now I can walk into the house and not automatically feel defensive about, what’s somebody going to need from me now? Not constantly on guard for the anger that used to rise up whenever anybody asked me for anything. Between breakfast and supper, I began to feel the people I live with actually like me, not just faking it. Suddenly I’m laughing with them, at ease.

This morning I picked up the pepper shaker (everyone at the table caught their breath …) but now it was only a pepper shaker. I said to Peter, do you think you could make the holes bigger? He said, sure, I can do that.

I don’t know why we didn’t do it years ago.

Hi Patricia,

Isn’t it interesting how such small and simple events in life can incite so much rage within. We have that much defence, resistance and investment in denial of our past hurt and pains. I can relate to this personally, could I offer you some thoughts about what you have shared? I haven’t worked out how (been willing) to feel and truly own my anger in a loving way yet, but there are some things I am coming to see through my own experience with anger.

My sense is that you are overlooking some things here. The angry feelings you describe in words are all about what you wanted other people to do that they didn’t do, things you believed were quite reasonable and that others should have done. This is really a demand and expectation of others. At the time though we often don’t see it as such, it just feels like the truth to us and the treatment we are entitled to. But if we examine that in terms of what might be God’s Truth, even when we don’t really know much for sure about God, we can use logic based on the Divine Truth principles we have heard and see that anytime there’s a demand or expectation of others there is an addiction we have which is unloving on our behalf. And the fact that I cannot demonstrate love in this scenario shows me that a personal issue in me must be the cause of this. Initially we often want to point the finger at others rather than look within. Sometimes others actually are damaging us and sometimes they are not and it’s just our perception that they are being unloving. Either way, our emotional reaction will tell us that God is trying to share some truth with us through this event.

So then you went away and felt your anger about your expectation/demand/addiction not being met. I’m not sure this can get us very far, it’s really just projecting a whole lot of anger towards those who didn’t do what we wanted. The fact that they could hear you feels off to me too, like if we were lovingly feeling our anger we would need to have a lot of consideration about how we are impacting on others. If others can hear us I tend to question whether we are involving them in our process. I’ve been in that situation with a person feeling their anger nearby while I was just going about my own business and I didn’t enjoy it. So even from an ethical point of view I would be aware not to do the same to others.

Then you described the shifts that happened during feeling your anger, with the feeling changing into some crying and then you felt a shift which left you much lighter. Again, I have experienced this personally, but what I noticed was that while I felt a bit different at the time, the same anger would keep arising for me another time in similar situations. So I had to really question what was actually going on here and was it a real process? And as I became more sensitive I started to feel that often when I’m crying it’s actually a feeling of anger inside me, not grief as I initially assumed from the presence of tears. If we look at the Divine Truth teachings, Jesus has explained many times that there are feelings above other feelings which must be deconstructed in order to access deeper feelings (Addictions > Anger > Fear > Grief). So if we are skipping from what we believe is anger into what we believe is grief without an experience of fear, we’d have to question that.

And with the shift that we can then feel happen when we ‘process our rage’, I have started to have this sense there’s something going on with a spirit (or spirits) projecting something at me that makes me different and better. I have felt the change in me from anger to this new lighter state and assumed I’ve been through an emotional process. This was also touched on in a recent blog post Mary wrote about Spirit Influence (towards the end of her message).

I think we have to be really careful here that we haven’t just used our anger to manipulate people back into complying with our addiction, using the threat of our rage (and others terror of it) to get people to do what we want, expect, believe is the right thing and feel we are entitled to. At the time we can feel this is actually a good thing, they are now more in alignment with what we want them to do and our personal pain is not being triggered for the time being. Of course this is unloving and not what God wants at all; God’s Laws are all operating to expose our addictions and pain and help us become loving. So this is only ever going to be a temporary state of contentment that we are in until the next event God brings to us regarding the same issue. And the anger is really an effect of a deeper cause, so we can keep dealing with the effect on and on repeatedly while the cause remains. Or we can shift our focus to addressing the true cause.

That feels like enough to leave you with for now. Hope it gives you something helpful for consideration and reflection.

Kate

Hi Kate,

I believe we're actually in a codependent interaction here, so I'm just going to step back from it. I feel it probably isn't necessary for me to tell you what I'm feeling, but I am happy to talk with you about it if you like.

With love,
Patricia

Hi Patricia & Kate,

Patricia, I love your writing. I found your description of being angry honest and because it was so relate-able I found myself laughing.

Kate, some things I noticed in your response to Patricia.

1. You were offering her assistance when she hadn't asked for it.
2 Instead of sharing your personal experiences with anger you felt that what you had observed about yourself applies to Patricia's experience.

You mentioned:

"So then you went away and felt your anger about your expectation/demand/addiction not being met. I’m not sure this can get us very far, it’s really just projecting a whole lot of anger towards those who didn’t do what we wanted."

Anger does arise when our addictions are not being met. While expressing that anger is not releasing a causal emotion, part of letting go of addictions is recognising that from God's perspective our expectations are errors within us. In my experience, there are times when experiencing my rage has helped me to feel what my unloving expectation is and begin to feel why I have that expectation and what fear and grief it is covering.

As I have said to you in personal conversations recently, you do have a lot of anger in you about doing things God's Way. Your anger covers many fears that you have but because you desperately avoid even acknowledging and experiencing your anger openly, you feel very stuck and get quite down about your progression. You are constantly attempting to 'do the right thing' instead of just feeling that you 'bl**dy well don't want to'!

I would encourage you to experiment not with 'processing rage' per se because you intellectually can deduce that you have anger or fear. But to begin to pray to become sensitive to your anger, to recognise it emotionally as a feeling you have in your soul that directs a lot of your behaviour. Until you let go of your facade's messages to yourself that are constantly judging your rage you won't be able to find what you are really angry about, or to let that anger go.

That is why, so far, you have found anger processing to not be of benefit to yourself.

I wrote more to you about this here:

http://forum.divinetruthhub.com/viewtop ... p=919#p919

Love,
Mary

Hi Patricia,

I'm sorry for my response, I arrogently and condescendingly believed I know better. It's becoming clear to me that I don't understand this topic at all and am greatly resistive, whereas you are engaging the process.

Kate

Hi again Patricia & Kate,

I just wanted to be clear that while I enjoyed reading Patricia's post about her experiencing her anger, I was not meaning to imply that she had released a causal emotion through that process.

In order to release our causal emotions we must be willing to let go of our false beliefs and to feel the underlying 'locked up' childhood emotion.

My issue has often been that I judged my false beliefs. Upon hearing Divine Truth again I just wanted to skip straight from denial into having God's viewpoint on everything immediately. I wanted to do this rather than feeling through what I truly believed because feeling my false beliefs connected me to feeling very alone, frightened, unlovable and/or sad.

I judged my fear as weak, I was frightened by the intensity of my grief and I was quite addicted to just feeling 'good' (in addictions) all of the time. I also desperately wanted everyone to like me and I believed that any fearful, innocent or unhappy expression of emotion I might display would lead people to reject me. And that 'getting it wrong' meant I was 'bad'. I was pretty harsh on myself about mistakes and I wanted people's approval and to appear 'good' more than I wanted any sincere change within my soul.

So, I tried to just 'get it' and be (or at least appear to be) in harmony with God's Truth about matters without first feeling and acknowledging the errors, and the pain those errors were creating, inside of myself. I used a lot of techniques to keep all of my emotions under 'control' - these were things like self judgement, self punishment, distractions, eating, and trying to create things that would help me get approval from others.

Of course, since I was denying and suppressing all of my pain, fear and false beliefs this left me in a state of anger - which I also then wanted to control, so I judged it and tried to maintain a facade of being a 'good girl' when it came to God's Way.

Wow, it was tiring and I became really unhappy.

Since I was suppressing and denying so much, part of unraveling all of my addiction and freeing myself up emotionally was to acknowledge how angry I was and to begin to work through all of the things I was angry about and to let that process expose all my false beliefs to me.

Kate, I mention all this to you because I see you in a similar cycle of suppressing almost all of your true feelings and being really hard on yourself about 'getting it right'.

I want to point out though that as we grow our humility we are less likely to try to suppress everything with anger and control. We are more likely to simply be willing to feel our false beliefs and release them without having to work through any anger first. So processing anger is not an essential part of God's Way.

Also, if we live in our anger, without any sincere desire to break down our facade, let go of false beliefs or to seek God's Truth then 'processing anger' will get you no where. Your anger will become circular and anger will arise again and again until we are willing to change at a soul level.

Working through my very suppressed state I have found that acknowledging my rage and what it was really about helped me a lot. This quickly connected me to angry tears which brought my false beliefs into sharp focus. But that was just the first step. I am now beginning to work through fears and feel my false beliefs (without first getting angry) and it will only be through the process of letting these go, and longing to God for Love and Truth that I will begin to release causal emotions and truly begin to regain my state in love.

And Kate, while I point out that I see you in a similar cycle to the one I was in, I want to say that it is not just you that I see in that cycle. There are lots of others I know feeling stuck in the place that you are. And there are still more others who I see in complete facade when it comes to God - believing that they are praying and changing when in fact they are still just able to control all of their true painful emotions and false beliefs through their addictive lifestyles and through relationships that exploit other people's hurt selves. Often they tell themselves they are 'processing' emotions and maybe even receiving Divine Love when in fact they are just crying addictively and receiving approving emotions from spirits.

That might sound like a pretty grim statement but I can see that, just like me, until a person is willing to see where they are really at in relation to God's Truth and Love, then zerochange is possible for that person. I want to be straight about what I see because someone being consistently straight with me helped me immeasurably.

I cannot emphasize enough how important I feel it is to work through addictions and facade. Without this work it is impossible to have a personal relationship with God. And while doing this work feels challenging, in doing it we are taking the first steps in truly beginning to live God's Way.

Lots of love,
Mary

if we live in our anger, without any sincere desire to break down our facade, let go of false beliefs or to seek God's Truth then 'processing anger' will get you no where. Your anger will become circular and anger will arise again and again until we are willing to change at a soul level.

Thanks all for posting Patricia, Kate and Mary for your feedback, there are so many lessons of love for me all that threat. I am very much in this circular case as well of judging and condemning me for blaming others "hurting me"
(and whether there are loving or not is not even relevant for my own progress).

"A sincere desire to break down our facade, TO LET (feel) FALSE BELIEF and seek God truth on the matter."

Oh your comments are so precious Mary...

I just wanted to skip straight from denial into having God's viewpoint on everything immediately. I wanted to do this rather than feeling through what I truly believed because feeling my false beliefs connected me to feeling very alone, frightened, unlovable and/or sad.

So, I tried to just 'get it' and be (or at least appear to be) in harmony with God's Truth about matters without first feeling and acknowledging the errors, and the pain those errors were creating, inside of myself. I used a lot of techniques to keep all of my emotions under 'control' - these were things like self judgement, self punishment, distractions, eating, and trying to create things that would help me get approval from others.

Of course, since I was denying and suppressing all of my pain, fear and false beliefs this left me in a state of anger - which I also then wanted to control, so I judged it and tried to maintain a facade of being a 'good girl' (good boy)when it came to God's Way.

...I love quotes because I see how it emphasizes the power of the words so well and helps me to get it, even sometimes to look at my own sayings (laughter).

Well, if It very much come down to our true desire to break down our facade. this desire must be greater than our fear to do it : to go into feeling our anger and feeling our false belief (addiction) and then our fear and causal grief.

For me, anger is not allowed, anger is not an option. I am scared to death of anger, mine and others too and judge it very much. I repressed it then and project/express it in a passive aggressive way. It is very tiring and exhausting and literally suck the joy of life out of me. Until not very long ago, I even did not know what was really going on, what was my emotion? I realize I have to break through this too and I am scared to death. And God shows me it often. When someone gets angry around me or on me - it happened today again - I often go in a childlike freezing terror mode - or alternatively in a suppressed passive aggressive rage/blame of others. And I just desire to escape this place and be a good person that gets it all and does it all well (like Kate) and I am too scared to revisit it to feel my false belief. Wow, there is just a terrorized little boy here inside...

When i think about it, my facade of control of my anger is just yuk when I am just burning inside, I feel terrible inside (all OK outside facade) and everybody around does too and is affected.

What give you the courage, the desire to break through this vicious circle? Is it just about praying to grow our desire to feel our terror? Mary, how did you manage to break it through it if I can ask you about what you relate here?

Well, I share my case here because I feel it is very well related to this post and topic and there are probably many others in a similar case. And I am certainly not in a position to help anybody on that issue (laughter). Anger is just taboo...

Thank you again for your honesty that inspires me,
Pierre