At the core of much of our unhappiness is loss. Something crucial to our well-being is missing. I missed out. I don’t have. I lost. I’m not accepted. I’m rejected. I expected but didn’t receive. I was passed over. I’ve been stolen from. They took what was mine. There’s no reward. I’m not appreciated. I’m taken for granted. My dream has been shattered. I’m not worthy. I’m a loser. I’m not qualified or equipped enough. I always blow it. I failed. So that makes me a failure.
Let’s add, “I feel guilty because—” to the statements above, and they’d ring just as true. “I feel guilty because I missed out.” “I feel guilty because I don’t have.” Loss is one of the tentacles of guilt.
Look at what’s missing in your life, something that’s important to you. If you don’t recognize it and name it, you could become victimized by it. And that victimization includes shards of emotional pain and anger.
How many times are we furious over an injustice or insult and we politely stuff our anger, trying to explain it away by calling it “hurt”? How many times do we depress ourselves because we’ve turned our anger inside instead of calling it what it is?
Hurt translates into anger. Here’s where we need to call on our integrity and spiritual insight to see things clearly for what they are and deal with them in the glare of truth. Anger must be recognized for what it is if we’re to move forward toward wholeness and happiness.
A counseling client who was scammed in business by someone he trusted masks his anger with, “I must forgive them. I know God wants me to forgive them.”
“Forgiveness given in anger isn’t forgiveness. It’s getting back at someone,” I tell him.
It was important for my client to admit and face his anger toward the people who stole his money, causing him to shut down his business and lose everything he’d built. “I should have seen it coming,” he tells me, at last anger rising in his voice. “I was so blind!”
In this book, we’re finding God’s goodness in all things even when they aren’t what we want. This is a process. Falling down in an airport is not the same as losing one’s business through betrayal. This is why it’s crucial we develop happiness skills in the little things so we can handle the big blows that are flung our way and not allow them to bruise and scar our vulnerable hearts.
The Effects of Anger
Psychological research and statistics illustrate without a shadow of a doubt that anger cannot be successfully denied and buried. Anger will always find expression, and if the expression is not handled with the power of the Holy Spirit, it can be devastating. Look, for example, at the number of teen shootings on high school campuses by angry, alienated teen killers. These have been intelligent students who did well and got good grades but were rejected by peers, bullied, picked on. Their rage and repressed anger built in them until they acted out in violence and murder.
Or consider the true-life crime story of Betty Broderick, the San Diego socialite whose husband divorced her and married another woman. Betty up and murdered them both with a gun. The amazing thing is that, fifteen years later while she was locked in a prison cell, Broderick’s anger still wasn’t quelled. “He deserved it!” she hotly exclaimed to the parole board from behind bars.
Anger and acts of aggression walk arm in arm. Dr. Leonard Berkowitz of the University of Wisconsin has studied the social causes of aggression and said, “When we tell someone off, we stimulate ourselves to continue aggression.”1 We’ll do it again, and in time we’ll form a habit of telling people off, and we’ll excuse ourselves with the lie, “It’s just the way I am,” followed by, “I can’t help it. I’m just being honest with how I feel.” Telling someone off, insulting someone, arguing angrily, or allowing a fiery temper to rip is not being honest. It’s sin.
Make no mistake. Anger is a killer, and it kills in many ways, not only with murder weapons but also with self-sabotaging behaviors that destroy lives every bit as efficiently as guns. Anger bottled up will eventually erupt in self-denigrating behaviors. Any negative emotion that you keep bottled up is like a poisonous gas gurgling inside you. It will spew out in leaks, which you can recognize by sleep disturbances, eating problems, temper tantrums, lying, pushing too hard for approval, overwork or no work, sexual promiscuity, lethargy, drinking, antisocial behavior, discordant fears, returning to bad habits such as smoking and drugs, verbal abuse, an increase in using bad language, swearing, aggressive behavior, and a desire to hurt someone.
Dealing with Anger
A woman I’ll call Sally told me she felt nothing but “understanding and compassion” for a co-worker who, by lying and conniving, landed the promotion that rightfully should have gone to her. She had worked for the company for ten years, worked overtime, never missed a day, took management and leadership courses, got along with everyone, and always went the extra mile, and then someone came along who through underhanded maneuvering nabbed the promotion that should have been hers.
Understanding and compassion? I don’t think so. Sally was angry. Anger is not bad in itself, but Sally would lose more than the promotion if she didn’t face her feelings square in the eye.
Anger needs to be recognized and handled wisely. In truth, Sally had absolutely no understanding or compassion for the situation, but after facing and replacing her nonproductive anger, she began to respect her not-so-pleasant feelings rather than run from them. She learned to say, “It’s okay. I’m okay. I let go.”
God wants you whole. He wants you to be a healthy, vibrant, beautiful human being. He wants to show you how to step aside and respond to injustice and the cares of life with peace in your heart. You have a right to your feelings. By denying anger, you rob yourself of being a complete human being. Anger can be painful, but these feelings won’t kill you.
The old-school ideas of dealing with anger by getting alone and screaming or punching something do not work. Screaming and punching don’t eliminate angry feelings. Such activities just teach you to scream and punch things.
You may also have heard it said that any angry arousal will eventually diminish if you just wait long enough. It’ll eventually go away on its own. Not true. In a world filled with unhappiness, cruelty, violence, poverty, war, and terrorism, anger does not diminish by itself. It multiplies. Anger is fuel for the fire of hate. Anger and hatred live inside a person and inside the heart of a nation.
Most theories now point to the fact that anger and its expression are a result of choice. To change, we must face our emotions and make new choices when handling them. The first choice is to stop denying the feeling.
When we realize it’s our perceptions, our attitudes, and our self-talk that control our emotions and not people, situations, or events, we can begin the journey to inner freedom.
Let me give you an example: “I was fired for something I didn’t do. That’s rotten, terrible, and unforgivable, and I’m furious!” You can almost feel the person’s body tense up, the eyes water, the fingers knot into fists.
Observe the running inner dialogue: “That’s rotten, terrible, and unforgivable, and I’m furious.”
Examine the words of that sentence without judgment. This brings clarity.
Respond with mercy and clarity. “Okay. It’s not fair that I was fired for something I didn’t do. My world won’t end because of it. Remaining furious will destroy me.”
Replace the self-talk. “I’m choosing to turn this around and hold to the truth that God is working all things together for my good. I declare as Joseph did to his brothers, ‘What you meant for evil, God has turned to good.’ I will allow myself the right to feel angry, but I’m in control, not my feelings, and I choose to have faith in God’s justice through this experience.”
There was no denial of anger but instead intelligent and holy management of a challenge.
Here are four simple anger-management tools.
Frustration is a first cousin of anger, and they work in tandem. Here are exercises to help you deal with frustration.
Loss and Betrayal
We need to erase from our minds that happiness is situational. We’re glad and grateful for every beautiful thing and person in our lives, and our gratitude feeds our sense of well-being. This is good! But when the things and people we’re grateful for are no longer there, what happens? If you’re like most of us, you become disillusioned, hurt, lost, unhappy. The emotional degree of your reaction, of course, depends on the circumstances of the loss. If you’re a wife and your husband of twenty-five years suddenly leaves you for another woman and demands a divorce, you’re going to suffer the loss differently than the woman whose husband left her through an untimely death.
Through the loss of a precious love and the hope of a future togetherness, I had to teach myself lessons learned only in sorrow. Through the loss of both my parents and mourning pitifully, I had to teach myself how to live again, honoring life and a purpose for being here.
Then came betrayal. Betrayal is a terrible kind of loss. It’s the loss of dignity. It’s the rape of the soul. When we’re betrayed, especially by someone we trusted, something in us dies. And we grieve our own death. In time, we become wiser, no longer so naïve, no longer so filled with faith in people. Our beautiful, open-minded, wide-eyed, trusting hearts are muddied. Betrayal is a terrible kind of loss, and we must rush to grab hold of the words Joseph spoke to his brothers and make them ours: “You meant evil against me; but God meant it for good” (Gen. 50:20). Grab those words, hug them tightly, and love them! Shout out, “Death, where is your sting?” (1 Cor. 15:55). “Not here! I am whole and complete in Christ!” (see Col. 2:10).
Some people never recover from betrayal. They become bitter, guarded, angry people. They shrink from life’s wondrous challenges and hide out in the shadows of their wounded egos. By the same token, some people never recover from loss, whatever it might be. They live in a well of self-pity, never reaching their full potential or experiencing life in all its miraculous fullness because grief has them by the neck and won’t let go. The apostle Paul wrote how they were persecuted, betrayed, murdered, and ground to dust, yet they rejoiced. They weren’t destroyed or defeated (see 2 Cor. 4:8–9).
The widow or widower is faced with a challenge—that of carrying on through the loss of a loved one and the loss of a lifestyle shared with another person. How can they be happy when they have lost their love? Almost everyone has experienced a breakup of a close relationship, which is painful enough, but death is world-jolting and numbing to the one left behind.
The arms of God open wide to enfold us in our grief. He soothes us, kisses our tears, and builds us up to see a world completely new and all ours to inhabit and make beautiful. It’s time to look up and see the glory of the stars in the sky and thank God.
Praise and Happiness
One of your best happiness skills is making the decision to praise the Lord no matter what’s going on in your life, no matter what you have lost. Gratitude chases away negative emotions like nothing else. Thanking God for the good in your life is a balm, an elixir, a healing tool that is better than any human remedy on earth.
I’ve been in Nigeria as part of an evangelistic team, and on Sunday mornings we worshiped with the local church outside in the blinding African heat. The people praised the Lord by the hour! The people sang—no, they shouted—glorious songs of worship, repeating the words over and over again. Instruments of all kinds played in the heat, and on and on we praised, voices swelling and crescendoing beyond our mortal selves. Here in this Third World environment, sweltering in oppressive heat and poverty, hundreds of believers gathered to praise God.
My role on the ministry team was teaching the women’s classes and leading prayer meetings. I know many of their personal stories. I know how one woman’s husband beat her senseless on a regular basis, how another woman gave her milk for other women’s babies for money in order to live. I know about their sicknesses, the multiple-wife situations, the tribal fighting, the wars, the political upheavals, the drug and alcohol issues. Yet there they were, praising God and worshiping Him with all their energy and all their might on broiling hot Sunday mornings. They worshiped and praised God in spite of and through their hardships.
In our lives and our losses, if we stop praising God, we lose sight of our true selves. We praise Him in various ways, whether shouting and dancing or quietly worshiping Him or sitting with Him in Quiet Prayer. Praise is our release from all suffering. When you feel weighted down, pull out Psalm 150 and begin to praise the Lord. Praise Him with Psalm 103 (my favorite): “Bless the LORD, O my soul; and all that is within me, bless His holy name!” (v. 1).
Anger doesn’t exist in your feet or your earlobes. It is inside you, inside your heart. You also have love in your heart, but it can get pushed out. You also have joy, peace, and forgiveness in your heart. Take part in a five-minute Quiet Prayer. Allow what’s beautiful in you to overtake that which is ugly and deadly. Allow the beautiful One in you to overtake your entire being.
Every aspect of God’s presence is accessible to you. As you draw aside to be alone with God, the nearness of His presence will become blinding in its glory over time, and then slowly the truth will capture your heart. When the truth that sets you free permeates your mind and becomes a part of you, you’re saturated consciously and unconsciously. You and the truth become one. It’s then that you are made free. The arms of happiness wrap around you, and there are no more words. The sense of loss loses its grip and its sting.
Quiet Prayer
For this Quiet Prayer, select a word, phrase, or Bible passage that will be your sacred word. Speak your word silently to yourself, then set your timer and close your eyes. Take some nice, deep breaths and focus on being alone with God. Every time your mind wanders or the chatter in your mind begins, simply acknowledge the thought and return to your sacred word.
After the five minutes are up, take a deep breath, open your eyes, and say your word out loud. If you like, make a note in your happiness journal about what you experienced in the silence before going on to the next chapter.
As you return to your normal activities, try to continue the quieting of your mind. Be aware of the chatter that constantly goes on inside, and be aware that the secret place of the Most High is always waiting for you to return.