Grief’s Dance of Anger

If we sit with our anger long enough, we discover it is grief. That grief has often built up over time, and is made up of the small disappointments and larger losses we experience over our life span—what in Buddhist psychology are often referred to as "little deaths." Post-modern psychology might characterize this same experience as a sort of demure complex trauma—water dripping on the rock of our resilience, wearing down what was once an elastic temerity and assurance.

Grief Does Not Come in Stages

In 1969, Elisabeth Kübler-Ross, a Swiss-American psychiatrist, in her seminal monograph On Death and Dying, introduced us to what she codified as the five stages of grief. Since that introduction, Kübler-Ross’ model has become so deeply ingrained in the cultural lexicon as to become ubiquitous to the point of tyranny. The problem with this modeling of loss, based on only 200 interviews with the family members of individuals dying of terminal illness, is that it is anecdotal. For an observer of behavioral research, this rouses the spirit of neither credibility nor science.

Grief is, in point of fact, not linear. It occurs in more of a spiral—and an often-repetitive cycle, at that. Much like Maslow’s hierarchy of needs and self-actualization, Kübler-Ross’ conceptualization, which, as the first attempt to codify the experience of grief, has been misunderstood, misappropriated, and misapplied by myriad pundits and prophets over the ensuing decades. In post-modern psychology’s zeal to qualify, quantify, and categorize, the spirit of the notion—which is an experience, more than a traverse from Point A to Point B (much like Maslow’s hierarchy, which is a matrix, not a pyramid)—has been lost.

Harkening back to the Buddhist notion of life as a series of "little deaths" necessarily integrated into a never-ending fabric of change, we find our response to loss is, in fact, not linear, but nonetheless progressive—with anger, more often than not, running point. In speaking to grief’s dance of anger, we find ourselves better able to get our hearts around our sense of grief as a spiral tied, not just to a specific death, but to loss as a larger whole.

Grief Feeds on Itself

Life is nothing if not loss. That’s not a bad thing; it is simply a reality. We age and begin to miss a step. We change jobs and find our new position bleeding us, rather than feeding us. We have children and find ourselves sacrificing our personal freedom. We are frustrated with not being able to recover as quickly as we did in the past. We resent our boss and our co-workers. We are resigned to giving up yet another Saturday for a soccer practice in which we have no real investment.

In other words, we’re pissed at our perceived plight. We may qualify, justify, or resign ourselves, but, in the small of the night, this coping is, again, water dripping on the rock of our resilience, wearing down what was once our elastic temerity and assurance—but, now, it hurts. Our frustration morphs into grief—which morphs into an abiding anger—as we find ourselves at the sufferance of those "little deaths" defining the fabric of our experience, with no discernable outlet.

Anger Undefined

This is a scintillating characterization—cast through the all-seeing eye of a psychologist and spiritualist who “knows something”—is it not? It’s also a load of crap.

We throw a tantrum because our car won’t start and we’re going to be late for that job we so dislike. We manhandle our dog because she’s perfectly content where she is on the couch, but "she needs to go out." We yell at our kid because, once again, they didn’t put their dishes in the sink.

This is not true, discernable anger. It is existential anger misplaced because we hurt, we don’t feel in control, we don’t know why, and, more to the point, we are imposing ourselves. Enter ego. Enter grief.

Releasing our ego investment, and identifying grief as anger, is no mean feat because it means we are beholden to unpacking the emotions plaguing us. This takes a level of introspection and self-reflection, which, without conscious effort, eludes most of us. Ultimately, it means taking back the sense of control we feel we’ve lost, simultaneously acknowledging we honestly have no control, while wrapping our arms around our hurt, our pain, and our loss.

More poignantly, it means feeling our feelings and, in doing so, not just randomly acting them out but allowing our authentic self to be revealed by asking ourselves, “What’s really going on here?” It means managing, and possibly even getting a genuine sense of, not simply the situation or the circumstance, but both our Selves, as well as our selves.

Grief Essential Reads

When Children Lose a Loved One

What I Learned From a Week Contemplating My Death

Releasing our reactions leaves us confronting the genuine emotions we have been working so hard to deny. This is something many Eastern teachers, both yogic and Buddhist, refer to as “sitting in our sh-t.” Western commentators, on the other hand, may more decorously characterize it as “confronting our emotions.”

In either case, we return to the imperative—hopefully dropping our veil of denial and calling it what it is. Our losses—big, small, or simply incidental—have us lost, and we are, in some cases, not just angry, but mad—out of our minds, and not in a good way—about it.

Paradoxically, that’s exactly where we want to be. The Zen interpreter and scholar Alan Watts often quipped, “I’m out of my mind, and it’s taken me a lifetime to get here.” Ram Dass, beloved yogi, Harvard psychologist, contemporary of Timothy Leary, and disciple of Neem Karoli Baba, often said something similar. Both were, remarkably, paraphrasing Marcus Aurelius.

In any case, being mad—out of our minds—eschews pedestrian anger and embraces release. The engine of that release is accepting and allowing, which is not, by any means, resignation. It is, quite to the contrary, engagement. Life is loss, loss is change, and change is the only constant by which we can measure the progress and process of our experience. This is allowing.

Acceptance comes with the notion that our experience of loss—big, small, or incidental—and its attendant grief are inevitable, and the best thing we can do for ourselves is to sit with it, rather than react to it, and act out around it.

The Only Way Out Is Through

When we react and act out around loss, whether immediate or over time, we do so from fear, ego, and a sense of lacking control. We are not yet mad—out of our minds—just angry. Allowing for change, and accepting its inevitability, diffuses our immediate anger and drops the veil of denial, letting us feel our feelings and getting us out of our own headspace.

This is no simple task. It is, quite literally, a dance. With that in mind, until we learn to lead in that dance, we are at its mercy, as are those around us. Tango, salsa, waltz—it doesn’t matter. Learning to listen to our hearts and be with our experience brings us closer to it and, by association, closer to our own truth and true Selves.

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