frustration, resentment, anger, loss Book excerpt: BLESSED: Eight Steps to Emotional, Relational, Spiritual Wholeness: The Healing Power of the Beatitudes

BLESSED:

 Eight Steps to Emotional, Relational, Spiritual Wholeness: 

The Healing Power of the Beatitudes 

Chapter 2

“Blessed are those who mourn for they shall be comforted.” Matthew 5:4

Frustration, resentment, anger, loss

In order to deal with mourning issues, each of us must face our frustration, resentment, anger, loss. It is issues such as these that form the blockage that keeps us from getting ahead, from working through to some healthy form of completion. You must ask yourself do you want to get ahead or do you want the blockage that keeps you from finding rescue and healing emotionally, relationally, and spiritually? To find wholeness you must admit the frustration, the resentment, anger, loss. Embrace it. In the embracing of it, release it.

Forget making the perfect decision here, make the wise decision. Making the wise decision is not only better for your health, it is also biblical. The word translated “perfect” in the Bible is a sociological concept. It means maturity, wholeness. It does not mean the scientific concept of “perfect” that implies without defect. We are often stopped from progressing because we are waiting to be scientifically perfect in our response. This is NEVER going to happen. We will never have a perfect response. We need to strive for “successive approximations” of wise decisions. That means we accept less than perfect but closer to the ideal each time we come against the need for a response. It means being human.

Frustration is a daily occurrence. Things in this world do not progress as we wish or we think the ideal is. I don’t mean occasionally they don’t progress this way, I mean they NEVER progress this way. Life is usually moving through moment by moment frustration. This is true for all of us. If we tense, respond negatively, blow up every time that we encounter frustration, there is little emotional/spiritual time left to move on. Part of mourning is letting the many frustrations of life just wash over us, don’t respond negatively, and move on. With the big frustrations of life, it is facing it squarely, accepting it thoroughly, and then moving on.

Face your resentment: “if they had only let me” “if I had only done this instead”. To dwell on the bitterness within, again, only keeps us in the cage of our own emotions. We can all look back and see how other choices on our part or on the part of those around us would have produced a different life scenario. However, do we have faith in the overriding sovereignty of God? Does God intend good for us? Does he provide for the vagaries of our decisions as well as those around us? Does he “bless our blunders” to “bring about good to those who trust him” (Romans 8:28)? If we believe this, the resentments we feel towards those around us and against our own decisions have to be released and set aside. Yes, we need to admit them, examine them, but then we need to let them go.

There are many forms of anger, from annoyance to rage. Each of the forms must be dealt with. In releasing your anger, open your clenched fist, your clenched jaw, your clenched eyes, your clenched heart. At the beginning, you may need to do this several times every day.  It does finally recede into the background and no longer rules our emotions and life.

Dealing with loss, of course, is the original meaning of mourning. Loss has many forms, such as loss of our loved ones, either through death or distance. But it also involves our loss of options, loss of innocence, loss of comfort. Denial of the existence of these losses just pushes them down into the id to be mulled over: as Gollum would say, “My precious”. They will rear up at times of frustration, anger, bitterness. When we are not actively able to monitor the emergence of the id, suddenly, there it is. And we suffer. If we don’t bring these losses out into the open. Look at them, admit them, lament them, even embrace them as a vital part of our life story and …let them go. Only then are they meaningful memories.