Years ago I had someone come to me for pastoral care and counseling who was in a great deal of pain. She told me that she had been the victim of a predator, someone who found her in a time and situation of crisis or trauma and, in the guise of offering care, took advantage of her. When she finally found the strength to end the predatorial and abusive relationship, the predator sought revenge by turning others she cared about against her. Because the predator was a charming and likeable person, no one even asked for her side of the story. It seems people mistakenly believed that the one doing the talking must be the one telling the truth, when instead, he was doing the talking because he was trying to preemptively spread his lies before the truth could come out. She became a pariah as the people around her chose to believe the person they preferred without ever asking her side or seeking her truth in what had occurred. She was thereby victimized twice by the predator: first by the initial relationship, and second by the damage to her other relationships. She told me that she had come to see the predator as evil, and she hated him with a white hot hate that did not seem to fade with time. She told me she had never known hate before this event, but now it seemed to consume her and she did not know what to do.
She came to me seeking help. As a pastor, couldn't I tell her how to let go of the anger? The hate? Couldn't I help her to figure out how to forgive so that the rage and abhorrence would no longer wrack her body and spirit in a way that seemed to poison everything in her life?
I passed along the tools that I had: Pray for the ones with whom you are angry the same good things you would want for yourself. Talk to God. Journal. Distract from your anger by focusing on the beautiful things in this life. Keep a gratitude journal. Surround yourself with people who will care enough to talk to you when they have questions or are hearing gossip about you. Choose friends who will be open with you and will believe what you say to them. Surround yourself with people who understand about predatory relationships, the deep damage they do, the abuse they infict, and the ways they manifest. Meditate. Exercise. Eat healthy foods. Practice self-affirmations. Reframe your experiences as growing and learning experiences.
I don't know if any of those tools helped her in the long run. In the short run I believe they were inadequate. She was truly consumed by her anger and hatred, and those feelings were damaging her to a greater degree even than the original predatorial damage. What she had experienced as harm was real. But the daily re-living of that damage did more to hurt her. And while she knew this intellectually, she could not let go of that anger. She knew she was allowing the predator to continue to victimize her through her feelings, but she could not let them go.
As I look back, I realize that I had missed an important step with her. I've said before that I am a firm believer that we have to go through our grief and pain to come out on the other side. Stuffing feelings down means they usually manifest in unhelpful ways and they don't resolve. What I had failed to name was that anger is a secondary emotion. Hate is often a further step removed and is a tertiary emotion that follows anger. Both ultimately mask grief and fear. It feels more powerful to be angry or to hate, so we often move to those feelings when we don't want (or don't have the strength) to feel those more genuine but more vulnerable feelings of sadness and fear. Until we deal, truly and honestly, with those deeper feelings, we will stay stuck in the anger.
Personally, I don't want to be an angry or hateful person. So I write this as a reminder to myself, as I reflect back on my parishioner's experience, that letting these feelings pass through us is essential for our own well-being and wholeness. Not always easy, especially when you've been deeply harmed, but necessary. When someone hurts us, it is often our own feelings that do more damage than the other person could ever do. And while working through those feelings is not easy, it is life-giving to do so.
