Counseling Blog
Emotional & Relational Health from a Christian Perspective
As I listen to people, I hear stories of not being good enough, not able to live up to parental or spousal expectations, feeling like frauds who have to hide their true selves. We get angry when we’re judged, or we become filled with despair and give up or start avoiding situations where we are faced with possible failure. This is a terrible feeling. There has to be another way.
Ending in the same place no matter what you try to do is the thing that leads to a sense of futility, hopelessness, and negative feelings about yourself or your relationship. If it’s always going to go the same way, why bother? This is where anger escalates, as does desire to get out of the marriage. No one wants to be a hamster on the treadmill, getting nowhere and doing the same things all the time.
We can’t control everything in this life, but we can control ourselves and the choices we make. The moment we hand over our agency is the moment we are lying to ourselves, just like Adam and Eve did in the Garden of Eden. This lie cost Antonio Brown millions of dollars and the chance to continue playing in the NFL. I’ve seen it cost more ordinary people their jobs, their marriages, and their hope that life could ever be different.
Does it feel like every time you try to engage your partner about something that is on your mind, he disappears, withdraws, or pulls away? It feels like you never talk to each other and you never connect about things that are important to you. When you do bring things up, you are often left feeling invalidated and misunderstood. You want to know what he’s thinking, feeling, and going through, but you’re often just left guessing. You want to enjoy his company and know that he enjoys you! You know he is a strong, resilient, and hardworking man who would do anything for you and your family, but when things get difficult it feels like you can’t reach him. He might get quiet, angry, defensive, or go into fix-it mode, but the result is the same no matter what: you feel alone and like your spouse is unavailable to you.
Telling someone that anything is going to be slow usually means they’ve already moved on and will find someone who can do it faster. But the longer I’ve done this work, the more clear it’s become- change is generally a slow process. And it’s not just that change in therapy is slow, many other aspects of life also seem to be slow. Why is this?
Many people enter counseling feeling truly hopeless about their circumstances and the loops that they are in, and I have a lot of empathy for that. It’s a terrible feeling. But we need to know that the remedy to hopelessness is not a quick solution to our suffering or simply finding ways to make it go away. The first step is to feel the suffering, to listen to it, to make good choices within it, and to allow it to create a new character in us. God’s love is pouring into us as we do this. This is how we find hope.
When dealing with anger, it is important to remember that you always have a choice in how you respond when you feel angry. Some choices are more beneficial than others. You can choose between suppression, open aggression, passive aggression, assertiveness, and dropping it. If you can slow down enough to evaluate what is causing your anger and what you hope to accomplish by expressing the anger, you will find the choice to be far more manageable.
We live in a society defined by anger and outrage, but most of us do not have a good understanding of anger or how it manifests itself in our daily lives. It is this hidden force, bubbling under the surface, and it has much more influence over us than we would like to admit. For the most part we are unaware of how anger is playing out in our lives. When things are outside of our awareness, they hold far more power and control over us.
