Say Goodbye to the Anger (Ghost · Indigo Girls)

     "You can accept or reject the way you are treated by other people.  But until you heal the wounds of your past, you will continue to bleed.  You can bandage the bleeding with food, with alcohol, with drugs, with work, with cigarettes, with sex, but eventually, it will ooze through and stain your life.  You must find the strength to open the wounds, stick your hands inside, pull out the core of the pain that is holding you in your past, the memories, and make peace with them." Iyanla Vanzant

     I watched perhaps the most powerful hour of anything I have ever watched.  It was about anger...the definition, the hold it has over us and the ways we can disperse it.  Of course there was talk about the child that is injured initially and how we are held captive by that child.  There was also talk about the energy it takes to hold the anger.  What I guess I DID learn was that anger was a cover for fear and hurt which was on top of the love that was under it all.  Does this mean that the more angry someone is the more hurt and scared they are?  I never really thought of it that way...not fully anyway.  I know some pretty angry people and this might've made me a little bit more sensitive.  To know better is to do better though, right?
     First we have to accept the pain and anger and deal with it.  In that we make the choice to let it go or hang on dearly with both hands until it kills us.  Eats us up.  Anger comes from the fear of rejection, the fear of loss and the fear of control.  It is all making so much more sense now.  We have to see that the thing we seem angry at NOW is actually from a wound so, so, so long ago.  It will keep surfacing until we finally put it to rest.  Lessons will keep coming until we get it...fully. 
      A man was asking about anger and he realized that he used it as a safety net for his own failure.  Iyanla told him that he didn't do anything wrong (as a child) that caused people to demonstrate poor behavior.  He didn't do anything wrong.  Sometimes people just do the best that they can at the time.  She went on to say that "the best students get the hardest tests and when God has something for you to do he will test you to make sure you are ready...so don't punk out."   When people choose to stay angry instead of healing and moving on it's an excuse to stay out of their brilliance...out of their power...out of their purpose in the world.
     Going back to the quote that starts this post...there is a talk of the stain of life.  When you have a stain on your clothes it keeps pulling you back to look at it.  It is there pulling at you.  It's like this in life.  We need to find the stains or they keep finding us.  Find them...and clean them...for you, for your loved ones and for the life you could be living.