Anger that Wounds
The following conversation between, Matt Massingale, and Dr. Neil Anderson picks up where they left off on their discussion of anger:
Neil Anderson: One of the major issues for angry people is what I call “anger wounds.”
Matt Massingale: Unforgiveness is a big part of this. I was talking to a young lady several years ago who had been date-raped. She simply could not get over it, couldn’t forgive, couldn’t move on with her life. She tried to control everyone that she dated. She decided I am never going to be taken advantage of again. I will be the one who will be in control of situations. And it just ruined her life. It reeked havoc on everybody that she was around—including herself. But she was able to forgive! And went on to get married and is now living a very normal life. It changed from night to day when she forgave.
NA: You know, we have a training video that we use where a gal comes in clinically depressed and leaves free—actually happy. The anger that is there can just be dissipated by simply forgiving. It is such a huge issue. In all of our ministries throughout the world, everybody keeps reporting back that the big issue is “unforgiveness.” It’s been repeated again and again and again. It’s important to realize that we don’t forgive someone for their sake—you do it for your sake; it’s really an issue between you and God.
Let me clarify that as we think about this. A lot of people come to this issue of forgiveness and think that they have to go see that person physically. If you have been hurt, go to God. It’s really an issue between you and God. That has to happen because, the truth of the matter is, some of these people that have offended you could have died or whatever else. So if the anger is still an ongoing battle in your life, that’s why it’s an issue between you and God. That’s why I can sit down with someone in my office with somebody and help them forgive people of their past, watching them walk out free without ever interacting directly with the person who hurt them. You can’t make your freedom and your life dependent on someone else that you cannot control. It just won’t work.
MM: Is there ever a time that it is appropriate to go in person to forgive someone?
NA: The only time I can think of, to be honest, if they actually came and asked you for it.
MM: I’ve seen people go to someone to forgive them and that person doesn’t even know that they’ve offended the person. This creates an even bigger problem!
NA: Yeah, you’ve got to be careful about that! Don’t walk up to somebody and tell them, “I just wanted to let you know that I’ve forgiven you.” Especially if they don’t even know there has been an issue. But if they ask you about it, then you have an obligation to respond to them, and I hope that your answer is, “Yes, I forgive you.”
Let me share a couple of stories along this line. When I first moved here to Franklin, TN, I went to a prayer group in downtown Nashville, and two guys came up to me and said, “There’s a lady who’s just dying to meet you!” And I said, “I’m married.”
[Laughter].
Then they said, “No, no, it’s not that!” So I told them, “Well sure, that’d be fine with me!” Then nothing happened for about 3 months. Then I got a call from this guy saying that this lady was flying into town and would love to get to gather if I was available. She was introduced to me in this way: Hitler was her godfather. Hitler, the Hitler. Obviously, I was very curious how this came about. Her dad was a top military general in Hitler’s army back in the late 30s, and he was also a strong Lutheran believer. When he saw anti-semitism begin to rise, he started to speak out against it. The Gestapo came to his house and offered him a pill. If he took the pill, officially he died of a heart attack. If he didn’t, he’d be shot, and his family would be disgraced. So for the sake of his family, he took the pill. She never knew about this initially, and because of his prominent position, they were taken care of throughout the remainder of the second World War. But that wasn’t actually her trauma.
The thing she struggled with was the Russians who came in and pillaged and plundered and raped. Her family was able to flee to Sweden to get away from the persecution, but she developed a terrible bitterness and hatred toward the Russians. But while in Sweden she came to Christ, and now she’s struggling with this issue to forgive.
But the real reason she wanted to meet with me wasn’t for me to help her, she came to tell me that she has been using Freedom in Christ material for 10 years in Ukraine. If that isn’t the power of God! The people she had hated before, she has now been called to minister to.
Everybody has been abused, and this results in what I call “anger wounds.” Wounds that aren’t healed are transferred; we bounce off each other’s wounds. It can disrupt ministries and families, and it can go on for generations.
So this one particular class, a professor friend of mine had a lesson that went like this: He was trying to bring out the idea of how we should dal with anger. He had a sheet posted upon a wall, and he told his students to get rid of their anger. He instructed them to throw a dart, think of the person who wronged them, and just throw it at them. So one by one they all did it and said the person’s name and threw the darts, and when everyone was done, the professor went up to the wall to unpin the sheet and behind it was the image of Christ that was paired with the caption, “The things you have done to the least of my brethren you have done to me.” That would be a tough lesson to work though!
So where are we going with this?
MM: In light of that, let’s look at Matthew 18 about the unforgiving servant.
NA: Yeah, Peter comes to Jesus and says, “Lord how many times should I forgive? Up to seven times?” And Jesus says, “Up to seventy times seven.” He’s not suggesting you keep a pocket calculator; the idea is that you continue to forgive. It’s an ongoing process in our life.
Patience is forgiving at the moment. But we don’t always do that which allows anger to persist. To illustrate that, the Lord gave a parable: there was a man who owed his master 10,000 talents. Now that is way beyond a lifetime wage.
MM: Millions.
NA: Right; it’s un-payable. Repayment is not an option. What we’re referring to here is our personal relationship with God: There is no way that we can work for our salvation to pay off our debt that we owe God. There is no way that we can live a righteous life to accomplish that. It’s impossible. So the man cried for mercy. He couldn’t repay the debt so that’s all he could ask for.
This brings up three very important issues: justice, mercy, and grace. Justice is rightness, fairness. In all of us, there is always a cry for justice—which is legitimate. But I always have to tell people, “Can we settle something for your sake: You may want justice now, but you must know that you will never have perfect justice in this lifetime.” That’s why the Lord says Revenge is mine; I will repay safety the Lord. Justice will come. This is a trust that we have to give to God. He will make this right in the end.
MM: A key thing on that is that we often want justice for other people but mercy for ourselves.
NA: Justice is rightness and fairness, and if God gave us what we deserved, we would all get hell. Settle that right now! That’s where this parable is coming from.
Now mercy—you throw yourself upon mercy of the court, you’re basically saying, “I did it… but please don’t give me what I deserve!” And that’s really what mercy is. We are saved not by deeds done in righteousness but according to His mercy. Mercy is not giving people what they deserve.
Grace is a little different—grace is giving people what they don’t deserve. Everything we have in terms of our relationship with God is what we are to live out—don’t give people what they deserve is the first step. Give them what they don’t deserve is the next step; love one another. This is a powerful thing that has everything to do with the cross. Freely I have received; freely I give. We need to see the disproportionate nature of that. We have received infinite amounts of grace, more than we could ever give away. We love because He first loved us. The love of God is what we are learning to do to others. We are to forgive others as God has forgiven us.
In 2 Corinthians 2 it says, “We are not ignorant of Satan’s schemes.” The whole context there is an encouragement for that church to forgive somebody who had embarrassed them or whatever else. Those schemes, that tormenting, is what you are experiencing at night when the injustice of things hits you, and you wake up with anger in the night thinking about somebody in your past—or perhaps you’re just thinking about them all day long. That’s a disciplinary thing; don’t think of this as God punishing you. Discipline is super-intending future choices. It’s proof of God’s love for us. He doesn’t want us to live in bitterness. And nor does anybody else, for that matter.
MM: He’s bringing it up for us to deal with it. You have to re-process things that have happened to you in these areas of pain. If you can process it as a believer who has a new identity in Christ, you can look at the situation differently—not as a victim—but as somebody that says I can leave this up to God, and He will make it right in the end.
NA: Yeah. When we discuss emotions, I’ve said, “How are we freed from our past?” We have all these past experiences—we’ve been wounded, we’ve been hurt. And then something comes along that triggers it, and outcomes what I call a primary emotion. And you have almost no control over that either. The only control you have is choosing not to go a certain location if a certain person is there or not watching a movie if it brings up certain thoughts or not discussing certain issues. Your life can shut down if you’ve had a lot of abuse in your past. So how do we set ourselves free from that? Well, you can’t by yourself. But you, dear believer, are not a product of your past; you are a product of the work of christ on the cross. You are not in bondage to your past trauma; you are in bondage to the lies you believe because of the trauma.
MM: That’s an important, important part.
NA: It’s really key because you feel the wounded-ness of the trauma; you’ve been hurt; the injustice of it stings; you’re a victim.
MM: And the vow that you make that [this type of trauma] will never happen to you again, that’s not made with God.
NA: No, it’s not; that’s a false vow. We’re a new creation in Christ; you can process [your trauma] now, not as a victim anymore. I can’t promise you that you won’t ever be victimized again; I can promise you that you don’t have to remain a victim. That’s so embedded into the gospel and what it means to really be a child of God.
MM: I’ve seen when I ask people to through forgiveness when going through The Steps that they can say, “I forgive my mom… I forgive my dad…” But when I ask them to really feel the pain of what happened, it’s a totally different thing. You’ve got to acknowledge the pain and hurt to truly forgive.
NA: We encourage people to pray and ask God Who is it that I need to forgive? The obvious ones will come out instantly, but there will probably be a few others that will surprise you if you really trust God’s leading. Then, with each one talk to God saying, “Lord I forgive…” It’s a crisis of the will: Don’t say “I want to”—that’s bypassing it. Don’t say “God, help me”—God will help you, I promise you. It needs to be you saying, “I forgive..” and what for. It’s in the what for. We find it very helpful to people to add a little tagline: It made me feel…. rejected, unloved, shameful, etc.
MM: That’s when the emotion usually happens.
NA: And we’re not just trying to make people cry. Temperaments are different. I remember this one lady who had quite a list of people she needed to forgive. She just toughed her way all the way through it, and I never really saw a tear. But, boy, it was very, very hard for her. But that was her nature. You can tell if someone is getting to the core of the issue or not.
On your list of people to forgive, you better include yourself. Only God can forgive you in terms of your relationship to Him. But in forgiving yourself, I find it incredible helpful because it forces you to look at all this self-talk—where you’ve been beating yourself up for years—and let yourself off the hook.
What is forgiveness? If you’re going to forgive as Christ has forgiven you, know what He did. He took our sin upon Himself. So essentially, we agree to live with the consequences of others’ sin when we forgive them. This isn’t fair, but we’re called to do it anyhow. There isn’t one person living right now who isn’t living with the consequences of somebody else’s sin. You can either do that in the bondage of bitterness or in the freedom of forgiveness.
MM: A lot of people think they haven’t forgiven because they haven’t forgotten. That’s not true though.
NA: It’s very important to make that distinction because God doesn’t fail. The Bible says, “I will remember your sins no more.” That is true, but that word is the same word in Greek that we get the word amnesia from. Do you know what that actually means? It means that God will not use the past against us.
MM: Another point on that before we move on: Forgiveness not necessarily reconciliation. They are two very different things.
NA: “As far as it depends on you, be at peace with all men” (Romans 12:18). But it doesn’t always depend upon you! It is not always possible. If that person doesn’t want to be reconciled with you, you are not going to be reconciled.
MM: Or if someone has abused you, you’re not going to be reconciled with that person.
NA: But if you have forgiven that person, that’s all God requires of you. They may not reciprocate it, but get on with your life. Let God deal with that person. You have no other choice. If you sit there the rest of your life and say, “I screwed up somehow or another, and we’re not reconciled.” There are people who are not going to cooperate with you in that regard. And you are not going to let that person determine who you are. Are you?!
This is the beautiful part of our message: I am free to be the person God created to be, and I’m not going to let another person determine who I am. When you have enough maturity to say that, you really are a liberated person.
MM: Unforgiveness tuns into bitterness, and it just rots your soul.
NA: For a lot of people, the injustice of situations just reeks. People often feel obligated in keeping the wound fresh in hopes that someone will come back and say they’re sorry, but listen—what if they never do? Are you going to keep that wound open and let it trouble all of your life? Jesus came to heal the wounds of the broken hearted. I’ve seen people work through this painfully—sometimes in a flood of tears. But as they work through it, there is something in me that says I am so sorry that that happened to you; you did not deserve that. I am so sorry. Your trauma is painful. And for your sake, let it go. I know you want justice now, but you may not get it now. But what you can have right now is mercy, grace, and peace. God wants to give that to you. Let Him wrap His arms around you.
This is not something we can do ourselves. I think we have to be enabled by God Himself. The Spirit of God will help you work through this process. Take it to the cross, it’s God alone who will set you free.
Neil T. Anderson is the founder of Freedom in Christ Ministries. He began the ministry in 1989 and continues to spread the message of freedom to this day.