Love, Anger And Forgiveness: Healing Anger, #1

By William G. DeFoore Ph.D.

Discover and learn to make the powerful journey from anger through forgiveness and back to love. Love is who you are at the core of your being, and there is always a deep yearning within you to return to your true nature. While you probably have good reasons for your anger, if you stay there too long, it will be a departure from your good, loving heart.

 

Life and who you really are is all about love. Forgiveness represents your journey back home to yourself. Learn about healthy and unhealthy anger, and also how forgiveness can sometimes be unhealthy as well. Most important, learn how to be emotionally healthy no matter what is happening in your life and relationships.

 

Do yourself the kindness of self-forgiveness, while also learning about how to let go of anger and resentment and set yourself free to be emotionally well and emotionally intelligent.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Halcyon Life Enterprises, LLP
• Release date: Apr 8, 2023
• ISBN: 9798223946939

William G. DeFoore Ph.D.

William G. DeFoore, Ph.D. has been a counselor for over 50 years, and is author of multiple books. His emphasis on the deep inherent value of each individual has pervaded all of his work, bringing his orientation into alignment with a positive psychology approach to well-being.

Book preview

Introduction  

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To understand love, anger, and forgiveness we must also understand emotion and emotional intelligence. Your emotions are a guidance system designed to bring you to wellness, designed to guide you to wholeness, completeness, happiness, and health. That they are not something just to be controlled and managed as most of us have learned throughout our lives.

Obviously, love is where we'd like to spend the most time, choosing between love, anger and forgiveness. Feels better, right? We'd also like for other people to be there with us. Anger on the other hand, is not a nice place to live, but occasionally you need to visit it because it's part of life. It's part of our humanness.

Forgiveness can be seen as a doorway from anger to love. And we'll also talk about the other emotions like pain and fear that tie into anger. So, looking at our journey ahead, I want to share a brief story. This is a news item I got from a free positive news source. A woman named Patty Quigley and a woman named Susan Reddick were both pregnant. They didn't know each other at the time. They were pregnant when their husbands boarded separate airplanes, and neither airplane landed. They crashed into the Twin Towers.  

Now, obviously these women loved their husbands, and I'm sure they went through some anger over what happened that took their husbands and the fathers of their children. It must have been devastating for them. Now to point to the particular route of forgiveness that these two women chose, I want to tell you what they did. They heard about the women in Afghanistan and the oppression they were experiencing, and they were particularly interested in the widows. Their empathy for widows got very, very strong.

They received a lot of money from our government as compensation for their loss, more than they needed, and they were doing pretty well financially before that. So, they said, well, what can we do with this money? They went to Afghanistan, and they started helping the widows there who had lost their spouses because of conflict.

I've never talked to these women. I don't know if they even think about forgiveness, but if that isn't forgiveness, I don't know what is.  

So, one thing to consider is that forgiveness is action, not just something we say in our heads. I heard about a Vietnam vet who took a similar action for forgiveness. I met this man at a class I was doing at Cooper Aerobics Center. He said he had been in Vietnam and had tremendous bitterness towards the Vietnamese. He specifically went back to Vietnam to heal that bitterness because he did not want to live with that in his heart. He developed some great friendships with some North Vietnamese people, and they experienced healing together.

So, here's where we're going in this book. We're going to talk about holding on and letting go, and the origin and nature of love, anger, and forgiveness. And we're going to look at healthy and unhealthy anger, healthy and unhealthy forgiveness, the role of empathy, the role of grief, and then we'll look at a kind of a thought, action, feeling overview, so we can look at this from different perspectives. And then we'll take a look at intimacy, because I’m sure you’ve found that there's occasionally a little love, anger and forgiveness in intimate relationships. Then we’ll wrap it up by discussing self-forgiveness, faith and optimism.

Chapter One: Holding On And Letting Go

So, what does it mean to hold on? Just imagine right now that you're holding on to a grievance, and it's really strong. What's your body doing? You’re tensing up, your gut’s tightening, and maybe your breathing gets shallow.

The physical symbol for holding on is the fist, and the symbol for letting go is the open hand. Ironically, love kind of makes us want to hold on. Isn’t this how we fall into being too controlling, or becoming jealous? Isn't this one of the challenges of parenting? It’s so easy to love your child so much you want to hold on to them, but the only way they can thrive and grow is for you to let go. Hold too tight, and the love is gone. Over-controlling and overprotective parents can literally cripple their children.

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Anger and fear make us want to hold on, while love and forgiveness are about letting go. This is an