Anger's Relation to Grief

Many are familiar with Elizabeth Kubler Ross and her Five Stages of Grief: Denial; Anger; Bargaining; Depression; and Acceptance. These are often associated with specific traumatic events like a death. Working as closely as I do with those who are navigating the grieving process, this formula makes for a helpful model as we all journey toward health and wholeness. The process isn't as clean and well-defined as it appears on paper as we often take two steps forward then one back. Sometimes we move quickly through one stage to another, then stay at that stage for a prolonged period of time. Sometimes we skip a stage only to go back to it at some other time. Sometimes we move forward two stages, then back three. So, as clean as it appears on paper, it's pretty unpredictable in reality.

One thing I encounter often is what, merely for sake of convenience, I'll call "unresolved grief." I use that phrase for the sake of convenience because there's another way to look at it that's more helpful that I'll discuss at a later time.

By "unresolved grief" I mean grief that, to date, we've been unable to move past. It might be associated with childhood trauma, the death of a spouse (especially an untimely death), or a host of other events that seem to linger in our psyche. Often, the grief is unconscious.

When we're unable to resolve, make peace with, move beyond or forgive (let go of) the trauma there is a predictable and unmistakable anger, even rage, that simmers just below the surface. This anger, or rage, can explode over even relatively insignificant incidents, go back into hiding, then resurface with the next event. This type of behavior is called "displaced aggression." The anger is displaced onto an object or person that has little or nothing with the unresolved, and often unconscious, grief. We're not upset for the reason we think. The grief is projected outward in the form of anger or rage onto a relatively innocent party.

Until we have made peace with the traumatic event(s), we're doomed to play this scenario out time-and-time-again, hurting both ourselves and those around us (especially those closest to us).