Anger: A Catalyst for Positive Change
Anger is a difficult emotion to sit with, yet it often moves us toward action. When something in our lives has grown too painful to keep tolerating, that heat can push us to change what needs changing. There's nothing broken or shameful about feeling it. Sometimes it's the first sign that growth is overdue.
A neighbor of mine stopped by my house recently. She's usually calm, almost childlike in her gentleness, but that day her fists were clenched and trembling while she talked. Her words came out in short bursts, stammered, and you could see the hurt behind them before she finished a single sentence. All I could really offer was to listen, so I did. She told me she was raising two toddler boys and was tangled up in a relationship that had turned unhealthy.
She worked hard. She lived in an apartment nearby with her fiancé and the kids, and she ran her days with a kind of precision, cooking on a set schedule and wearing a watch so everything got done on time. Focused, driven, the sort of person who holds a lot together without complaint. Her fiancé, by contrast, freelanced, so his money came in unevenly and unpredictably. That left him leaning on her, this steady and kind woman, to keep things afloat.
The more he depended on her, the more he seemed to hurt her. What made it so hard was that she loved him. He drank, though. He'd stay out and wander back in the late hours of the morning, and when they argued about it nothing shifted. She was climbing in her career while he appeared to be sliding the other way. That particular morning she couldn't even find the words for what had happened. She packed up, took the boys, and walked out.
Her leaving gave him the quiet to sit with himself. He had taken her for granted plenty of times, but gone is gone, and now he had to feel it. For her, the separation opened up room she hadn't had in a long time. She started doing the small things she'd always loved, watching her favorite movies, laughing again, settling back into her own skin.
Somewhere in there she came to see adversity as just part of being alive. You can be lucky and content one minute and heartbroken the next. Faith helps, and so does the reminder that "This too shall pass," because it steadies you when life knocks you sideways. But some relationships, the abusive and toxic ones, have to end, and she ended hers.
Family stood by her, and a circle of friends encouraged her in small increments, and together they helped ease some of the pain she carried inside. In time, she and her former fiancé forgave one another. They live in separate apartments now, on good terms, and they've actually become friends. They've even taken to naming the things they're grateful for, friendship and health and whatever else they have.
It turned out alright in the end. Thinking back on the day she came through my door shaking with rage, I keep landing on the same thought: the anger was pointing at a deeper pain, and the only thing that touched it was changing the terms of the relationship and moving toward something better.