Hello, dear sister. I just want to remind you today that you are greatly loved and accepted, that the Father delights in you and is experiencing with you every emotion and hurt in your life right now. You are not alone, and He is working all of this pain into a beautiful tapestry of grace. All of the ugliness will be hidden in His masterpiece, and all of the world will see that everything meant for evil in your life has been used for your good.

The topic of the week is anger. I told you as we studied the grieving process last week that I was going to camp out here for a few days because getting angry — but not stuck — in our grieving is so vital to experiencing healing.

There are many ways people express anger. I’ll list some of the most common here.

Passive Aggressive– I call this under-cover anger. On the outside, you look okay and compliant, but because you don’t feel safe or permitted to express anger openly, your anger presents itself in subtle ways—i.e. “accidentally” burning your husband’s food, being consistently late (especially if it bugs him), saying you will do something and then never following through.

Sarcasm – Speech designed to cut and hurt. This is another way we express anger indirectly.

Verbal Abuse – Name calling, belittling, and saying intentionally cruel things to wound another—i.e. “Can’t you do anything right?” or “You stupid idiot!”

Blaming – Everyone but you is to blame for your problems. Blaming anger says, “You make me so angry!”

Guerrilla Humor – Attacking someone verbally then smiling and saying something like, “Can’t you take a joke?” or “I was only kidding.”

Retaliatory Anger – Acting in a way to get even with someone who has hurt you — i.e. having an affair after your husband has been unfaithful or going out on a shopping spree at your husband’s expense.

Blind Rage – Intense anger that is usually acted on in some physical way—i.e. hitting someone, smashing an object.

Isolation – Anger permeates your heart and clouds your perception. You withdraw from others altogether.

Depression – Anger turned inward. It is blind rage acted out towards yourself.

Anger as an Excuse – Secretly you want to leave or act in a particular way, so you find a way to provoke a fight in order to leave or justify a wrong behavior.

–Melissa Haas, The Journey: Book One

You might be thinking something like this right now: “Melissa, it would be different if I were grieving the death of my spouse. There is no shame in mourning a death. This is different, though. It is too embarrassing and humiliating to let others know I’m sad because my husband struggles with sexual addiction.”

I know. There is so much shame involved in sexual sin—whether you are the sinner or the one wounded by the sin. I would say to you that you don’t have to tell all the details of why you are grieving in order to be real with people. Pretending like nothing’s wrong, slapping on a fake smile and a plastic face is so offensive to the Father. Why participate in the same dishonesty that allowed your husband to slide deeper and deeper into sexual sin?

With safe people, you can be totally honest. “I’m really hurting today. I’m having trouble just getting out of bed in the mornings. My husband’s unfaithfulness has pierced my heart to the core. Will you help me walk through this?”

With unsafe people you can be totally honest. “I’m really hurting today. There are incredibly painful circumstances in my life that I’m not free to talk about. Thanks for asking why I look so sad. Would you just pray for me?”

The point is this: Walking through despair involves letting yourself feel the pain and being honest about it with others.

I do want to talk a little bit about depression for a moment. We can get stuck in despair, and when that happens, our bodies respond physiologically to the emotional pain we are experiencing. In many cases it then becomes necessary to involve a medical professional in our healing process.

–Melissa Haas, The Journey: Book One

One good thing about despair is that is doesn’t last forever. In the moment that you are feeling the worst emotional pain you have ever experienced, you wonder if you will ever be okay again, much less happy. But sooner or later, the despair will lift, and you will begin to live again inside. Let me make a few comments about feelings of despair as it relates to your grieving process.

First, it is important that you allow yourself to feel the overwhelming sorrow in your heart. I know that feelings of hopelessness and despair are scary, but if you prevent your heart from experiencing this deepest grief, you are putting yourself at risk for both a physical and emotional meltdown. My sister, your heart will not be denied forever. It will eventually grieve those very real losses with or without your cooperation. If you will embrace the mourning, inviting God and others to grieve with you, your heart will be able to empty itself of the despair. If you refuse to allow those feelings to overtake you, your heart will over-ride your mind, and you will find yourself in an incredibly deep depression, disconnected from others and alone.

In days long gone by, grieving was a very public affair. One who had experienced a deep loss was not only accepted as she mourned, she was expected to feel sorrow and despair. Any other reaction was viewed as abnormal and offensive. In our Christian culture, however, we have somehow come to believe that grieving is “unspiritual.” We buy into this idea that if we love God and trust Him, our circumstances—even grievous ones—shouldn’t upset us. This belief is entirely unfounded and unscriptural. We learned yesterday that Jesus Himself taught we would be blessed and comforted when we mourn.

–Melissa Haas, The Journey: Book One

Ah, despair. That’s the part of grieving that we’ve been avoiding all along. Here’s the pain, up close and personal. At this point we can’t run or hide. All we can do is feel. The tears come. Our heart feels like it is breaking. Fatigue captures our bodies, and it is difficult to even face a new day. This is the valley of the shadows—the dark night of the heart.

Despair comes to us when we let ourselves feel the full weight of the losses and we realize that there is nothing we can do to change our situation. I remember despair well. At times it would catch me off guard and I would find myself with tears streaming down my face and stifling sobs in the grocery store or as I sat in church. Then other times I could feel despair slowly descending over my heart like a huge black sheet of pain. Those were the scariest days when I went to bed feeling overwhelmed by grief and woke up feeling the same way. I wondered then if my heart would ever be the same again.

–Melissa Haas, The Journey: Book One

Today we are going to talk about the bargaining aspect of grieving. When I first learned about the grieving process, I couldn’t understand why bargaining was included in the grief cycle. What do you think of when you think of bargaining?

I think of trying to get the best deal for my money, open-air markets in Kenya where nothing has a “fixed” price, and giving a little here in order to get a little there. When we move into bargaining as part of our grieving process, however, the deal is already done. We’ve gotten the bad end of the bargain, and we are trying our best to make it a better deal somehow.

If we are grieving the loss of a terminally ill loved-one, for instance, we might ask God to give them a few more years in exchange for an equal amount of our fully devoted service. Perhaps we’ve been fired or laid off from a job we enjoyed. We might try to talk to our supervisor or employer in an effort to get our job back—making promises of renewed effort or taking a cut in pay or vacation time. Maybe we’ve just been diagnosed with a disease like diabetes, so we start exercising fiendishly and eating right in an effort to prove the doctor wrong. All of these are examples of bargaining with grief. We realize that something painful has happened that we cannot ignore or deny, so we try to find a way to minimize the pain.

–Melissa Haas, The Journey: Book One

I promised you that we would talk about walking out of denial’s darkness into the light of truth. It’s kind of a paradox, really. We think looking at the truth will bring incredible darkness to our lives, so we avoid the truth. The problem is that the comfort denial brings is an illusion—a fantasy world where true relationships cannot exist. If we stay in denial we will ultimately shut out healthy interdependent relationships with others and we will then become ghostlike, living somewhere on the other side of reality and love, unable to connect with others. Denial for all its seeming comfort is really a very, very lonely place.

So, how do we begin to walk out of denial and into truth and healing? The first thing we must do is to admit our situation is as bad as it is…

Wherever you are on the journey, I want you to be encouraged. If you are aware of the areas of denial in your heart and are actively walking towards truth, you may be hurting, but you are also healing. If you are just beginning to be aware of the denial in your life and are scared to death to walk into the light, know that you are not alone. All of us have experienced that fear to some degree, and we know how difficult it is to be real. We promise to keep encouraging you on the journey.

–Melissa Haas, The Journey: Book One