Turn Back The Tirade

By D. Dean Benton

Anger is a gift, Violence is not permissible, Hostility can kill you.
This book is from a seminar series called "Stop Being So Damned Mad!" presented in dozens of venues. It has been our most requested and best attended seminar. It is also the most fun.
There is a "Cure for the Common Mad." We talk to seminar participants who find the phrase "positive anger" a misnomer. "Anger as a gift" feels like a contradiction of everything we learned in Sunday school. Few of us guys have a father who said, "Let me show you how to do that right."
A twelve-year-old boy asked me what I was teaching in the seminar. His eyebrows went up when I said "Anger." He said, "I wish I had your book. My dad and I need to learn about that!" This is that book.
Negative anger is part of my family heritage. Frustration, disappointment and rejection are my three big anger triggers. My personal angering style is self-punishment. All of the violence was turned inward. I drew a line and said to family, "It stops here. It's not working."
This book is partially biographical. Intriguing that Jesus could anger and never have to apologize to family or friends for "losing it." He focused his anger energy on solving problems rather than diminishing or bruising people. I think I discovered how the Apostle Paul made anger work. He said, "Anger and sin not..."
I'm learning to anger in style and to turn back the tirade.

• Language: English
• Publisher: D. Dean Benton
• Release date: Mar 21, 2015
• ISBN: 9781311983534

D. Dean Benton

A native Iowan, husband of one, father of two and grandfather of three. A pastor, seminar leader, author of 27 print books and 15 ebooks, singer, songwriter. After 14 years in the pastorate, Dean and his wife Carole, with family, worked in concerts, seminars and conferences for three decades before returning to the pastorate. The Bentons worked in forty states in about 3000 venues.

Book preview

Preface

Sacagawea was a twelve-year-old Shoshone Indian living in the Idaho Bitterroot Mountains when a Hidasta raiding party kidnapped her. She was sold into slavery to the Mandan tribe in North Dakota. Apparently, a French-Canadian fur trader, Toussaint Charbonneau, won her in a bet from the warriors. He married her.

He spoke no English, she spoke no French. Their only common language was that of her former captors. When Lewis and Clark met them, Sacagawea and Charbonneau filled the expedition’s desperate need for translators.

At the age of fifteen, she was six months pregnant, Sacagawea joined The Lewis and Clark Corps of Discovery Expedition en route to the Pacific.

Lewis was alone when he first contacted the Shoshone. The plan was for Clark, along with Sacagawea and her husband, to rendezvous with Lewis at an appointed place and time. Lewis spoke no Shoshone and miraculously convinced Chief Cameahwait and representatives to go with him to meet the other half of the expedition. Lewis knew Sacagawea’s translation skills were crucial if the Expedition was to make friends, barter for food and hire guides.

When Sacagawea arrived at the appointed meeting place, one of the Shoshone women recognized her. The friend, thought lost forever, had been found. The reunion of teenage girls and women was celebrated with dancing, crying and laughter.

That afternoon Lewis called a conference. Sacagawea was the center of this interaction and the key to conversation. Translation was laborious. From Shoshone, to Hidasta, to French to English. The Shoshone chief spoke, Sacagawea listened and translated.

Meriwether Lewis observed that the Indian girl never showed the slightest emotion during the weeks he had known her. But Lewis records in his journal an awesome encounter in that afternoon circle.

Sacagawea began to stare at Chief Cameahwait, Lewis wrote. Suddenly, recognizing him as her brother, she jumped up, ran & embraced him & threw her blanket over him and cried profusely. When she recovered herself, the council began—although it was frequently interrupted by her tears.

Research shows that depression, anxiety, stress overload and hostility/negative anger kidnap us from the dream God has for us. Unresolved anger and hostility steal our health, our abilities, and friendships and remove us from God’s unique favor.

When you discover what or who you thought had been lost forever, an expedition to wholeness begins. You are reunited to God, to yourself and to the available healing and cleansing from depression, anxiety, stress overload, and hostility.

Rick Bragg, author of All Over But The Shoutin’¹ says that if you are going to write about life and death issues you probably shouldn’t do it while in the cheap seats. I started studying and talking about depression, anxiety, stress and hostility when I personally faced these four strength sappers. I looked for resources and ways to apply God’s healing and strength and here I share what is working. To do that, I have used personal pronouns and talked about personal journeys.

This is my expedition to wholeness. The research sources are listed. I have attempted to be academically accurate in description. I have also attempted not to intrude upon privacy, betray confidences or expand stories of the hundreds of seminar participants who shared experiences, wounds and wisdom.

Each journey described in this book has one common element. It takes time to stop being mad. But not as long as you might suspect.

Buy a Sacagawea Dollar. It is the United States minted dollar coin. Carry the coin in your pocket or purse during the days you read, practice, find healing, stumble, and begin again. Use it as a fidget stone. There is nothing magic about this, but as you rub it between your thumb and index finger, the engraving of Sacagawea on the coin will remind you that restoration is happening.

Turn Back The Tirade

Convergence happened. It all came together. Critical mass was reached. Right in our garage. For twenty-seven years, my wife’s mother, Doris, was the Calling and Caring Pastor of her church. Therefore, people gave things to her. Here. Someone you know needs this. They gave her their dead dog’s flea collar, which she put into the backseat of her car. Stuff accumulated until it overflowed into the driver’s compartment. The stuff then was emptied from the car onto a skid in the garage. Those give this to someone you know things were just nuisances unless they were perishable or half-perished food items. They too were placed on the skids.

Someone asked me what I do. I told them I’m in the trucking business. We seldom go anywhere that we don’t haul something. When we are headed back to the garage, we carry items being collected for garage sales. These items are piled on my garage desk until they reach the ceiling or collapse onto the skids in a pile resembling the dump.

When my mother moved out of her apartment, we used Rubbermaid containers for stack-ables on the skids. We used steel-enforced garbage sacks for clothes to be sorted for resale, Goodwill, the trash, and to give to Doris for someone she knew. Along with several pieces of furniture, it all was piled in the garage. Doris was able to get her car in with a very large shoehorn.

We had half-a-dozen garbage cans in the garage for overflow trash, multiple containers of recycle boxes, newspapers, shredded paper, plastic containers and aluminum cans. That is stuff we used to call trash, before we began washing and calling it recycle-ables which I hauled every other Friday to the curb.

My reaction to Dump East has always been a curled lip and total disgust. My wife Carole is a neat-nik and Ms. Organizer. She isn’t into curled lips primarily because it is her junk. She pushed my stuff into places from which it shall never be retrieved to make more room for her junk.

When we couldn’t get the garage door open, Carole set a day aside for sorting and organizing. Critical mass had been reached. Since we had packed away keys that had to be found, we were under pressure to hunt and find rather than hide and seek. The method was simple. Bring boxes into the kitchen, go through them, re-organize and re-stack on the skids.

I didn’t mention Doris’ cat. The beast was a hunter. She would bring rabbit remains, bird bodies and rodent body parts to hide in the garage—always the side of the garage where ministry inventory, files, equipment and holy things were stored. When we were carrying the garbage sacks of clothes into the house to be sorted, an odor became increasingly intense. Carole knew the cat had buried a carcass in one of those clothing sacks. I assumed we would find a decaying bird behind or under something.

Methodology for steel-enforced garbage sacks now changed. Instead of reaching into the container, the container was dumped on the kitchen floor. Carole didn’t want to reach into a clothes sack to grasp the furry rear section of something with a long tail. The odor trailed the sacks into the kitchen. About four sacks into the project, Carole dumped a huge black steel-enforced garbage sack onto the kitchen carpet. It was, in fact, a garbage sack full of garbage which someone had inadvertently stacked on a skid. Coffee grounds, empty containers, and multi-colored, oddly textured, plastic-wrapped stuff which I never figured out what life form it began as, steadily oozed secretions into the carpet and…you just don’t want to know.

We found the source of the odor. There is something low-life about dumping garbage on your kitchen floor. Out-of-control emotions are not any prettier nor do they add beautiful fragrance to the neighborhood. They can smell up your life. It is the odor of decay.

It is my goal that you will learn how to Turn Back the Tirade as you trek toward wholeness. You are on an adventure, an expedition not unlike the Lewis & Clark Corps of Discovery with all the dangers and possibilities. You may discover a new life as you chart new territories and confront the elements that have sought to destroy you. It is worth the risk.

Thanks for allowing me to be one of your pilgrimage interpreters.

Turn Back The Tirade

Section One

GOOD AND ANGRY

During one of the more than 200 Stop Being So Damned Mad! seminars, a fidgety, let’s get to it Type A-type became weary of the stories and explanations. He said, Do you suppose we could just cut to the chase? What do I do to manage my anger?

Okay! Let’s cut to the chase. Uh, before we do that, just in case you haven’t read Mosquito Park Secrets, been in our seminars, or heard the Stop Being So Mad! audio book let me lay some groundwork.

ANGER IS GOOD, VIOLENCE IS UNACCEPTABLE, HOSTILITY WILL KILL.

In your anger do not sin. Do not let the sun go down while you are still angry, and do not give the devil a foothold (Ephesians 4:26).

ANGER IS GOOD

Of the 455 times the word anger is used in the Old Testament, 375 speak of God’s anger. The Gospels speak often of Jesus angering. Jesus becomes our model for angering.¹ He never had to apologize to His family or friends for losing it. His purpose was always to solve a problem, motivate people to return to God or defend a fractured principle.

God’s design for anger is quite clear. Anger is, according to the Minirth-Meier people, a desperate attempt of self-preservation. It signals that something needs our attention—like the warning light on your car’s dashboard.

God’s Old Testament behavior is difficult to understand in light of Jesus’ expression of anger. Those who knew Him best had a saying about Yahweh that captures his mood and usual behavior.

The Lord, The Lord, the compassionate and gracious God, slow to anger, abounding in love and faithfulness, maintaining love to thousands, and forgiving wickedness, rebellion and sin. Yet he does not leave the guilty unpunished…(Exodus 34:6).

Those words became God’s logo and reputation and were repeated by almost every Old Testament prophet and preacher.

A lady told me her grandson had recently been killed in a truck wreck. She and her husband grieved as they spoke. I asked her if she was angry with God. She didn’t answer me until after the concert and seminar.

You asked me if I am angry at God. No. I always assumed my grandson was killed because God was angry with me.

God doesn’t operate that way! He is not vindictive, petulant or thin skinned. He doesn’t retaliate just because He can.

Empathic anger, a term used by John Stuart Mill, is foundational to moral judgment and action. Mill describes it as the natural feeling of retaliation…rendered by intellect and sympathy applicable to…those hurts which wound us through wounding others. He called it the guardian of justice as we are moved to intervene on behalf of a victim.

Chapter One

YOU’RE GOING TO BE GOOD AND ANGRY…

When Your Worth Is Devalued or Diminished ²

We heard a convenience store clerk say, My ex-husband used to say, ‘I knew I could count on you being faithful to me. I always knew no one would be hard up enough to take you out.’

I asked the clerk what or how that made her feel. She said, I believed him. Her self-worth had been ground into dust and blown away. She didn’t get mad. She just stuffed the feelings.

Obviously you’ve changed your mind, I said, What happened? She said, Two things. First, friends took me to a church where they prayed for my healing. That healing began immediately, but was not complete. The second thing, a bout with mental illness and a hospital stay.

When you do not handle legitimate anger properly, it will find ways to express itself. It will herniate your body, your spirit, your mind. You have a legitimate right to feel angry when someone puts you down or you feel put down.

So, what have you been doing all day? will set off an emotional tsunami in a woman whose husband has not noticed the rug rat bites on her ankles. Our daughter says every husband should experience a day with a one-year old.

To not brush your teeth until noon. To wear sweat pants with an elastic waistband so you can peel them down with one hand while holding the kid when you’ve waited as long as you dare to go to the bathroom. And then, to have your child nurse on your outer thigh while you try to explain your current personal toilet needs. And, he asks, ‘What did you do all day?’ The underwear hanging on the fan does not indicate there has been a party going on here!

Just because you feel put down does not necessarily mean the speaker intended that. If your worth seems to be under attack from every quarter, you may want to talk to someone you trust to see if you’ve become defensive or unable to measure accurately. Remember, just because you feel anger does not dictate that you should do something to retaliate. Appropriate anger is felt and a problem is targeted to solve. A Problem.

When your worth is devalued or diminished you will