Keeping Your Cool…When Your Anger Is Hot!: Practical Steps to Temper Fiery Emotions (17 page)

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Authors: June Hunt

BOOK: Keeping Your Cool…When Your Anger Is Hot!: Practical Steps to Temper Fiery Emotions
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TOO HOT TO HANDLE
How Being Defensive Heats Up Past Anger
“A hottempered person starts fights;
a cool-tempered person stops them”
(PROVERBS 15:18 NLT).

 

IF HUMAN BEINGS WERE PLANTS, many of them would belong to the hot pepper family.
You know the kind of people I mean: those who defend their every action with hot, breathing fire, ready to strike at the slightest question. Everything about them says, “Don’t get near—or else!” For them, their defensiveness is not just a response to a specific situation, it’s a perpetual state of being. Even a simple hello can sound like a stern warning to not cross “the dividing line.”
Why is it so easy to get stuck in unhealthy anger patterns? For those who are “pepper people,” the answer is clear: Getting caught in habitual, hair-trigger defensiveness is the result of
hanging on to hurts
rather than
handing them over to God
. They nurse their wounds, feed their grudges, and cultivate a victim mentality that walls off their pain from God’s healing touch.
Somewhere along the way they were deeply hurt, afraid, frustrated, or offended. Maybe the injury is decades old, dating back to childhood. And maybe something happened just this morning that irritated the wound. In any case, they get angry—a typical response to anything they perceive as threatening.
Processing the “Pepper People” in Our Lives
Just as hot pepper seeds can burn for hours after eating them, the problem develops when pepper people
stay
angry. By refusing to forgive, they remain trapped in a destructive cycle of chronic defensiveness, perpetually poised for “fight or flight.”
Several years ago, such a person unexpectedly entered my life. As the newness of the relationship began to wear off, I noticed the quick-to-please behavior also turned into quick-to-anger defensiveness.
After bearing the brunt of several explosions, I became aware of my hypervigilance. Never knowing when an eruption might occur, I began to maintain an almost constant state of expectation. Rather than being able to relax and enjoy an activity together, I was always on high alert.
I felt like a bank guard who stands vigilant, continually looking in all directions for any signs of danger. Never letting your guard down is emotionally draining!
From that experience, I gained some insight and some empathy for pepper people. They never allow themselves to completely trust, to completely relax, to completely be themselves. They falsely think that to let go of their pain is to invite even more pain—or worse, to suffer total defeat. They treat everyone as a potential threat. What a lonely and exhausting way to live!
If we have this defensive anger, we set up a firewall around our lives, and we create a forbidding no-man’s-land where chronic anger scorches everyone who enters. Others quickly get the idea it isn’t safe—steer clear!
Who wants a relationship with someone surrounded by emotional barbed wire, guard dogs, and searchlights—someone who “lets ’em have it” first and asks questions later? Is our ironclad defense really worth the price we pay in lost intimacy and love? Most people would answer no; yet many of us continue to fall prey to our own disastrous hair-trigger defensiveness.
Diffuse Defensive Anger
If you are trapped in constant defensive anger, chances are you feel you have no choice. It’s as if every challenge or insult is a do-or-die fight for survival. All it takes is a harsh tone of voice, a critical comment, getting cut off by another driver, or any one of a thousand other perceived “violations” of your personal rights. Under these conditions, the often-quoted saying “The best defense is a good offense” becomes “The best defense is to decimate your enemies.”
That’s hardly God’s way of looking at things. Jesus said, “In everything, do to others what you would have them do to you, for this sums up the Law and the Prophets.”
1
He did not say, “Smash others first before they have a chance to smash you.”
If you want to escape the anger snares holding you captive, start by assessing your personal state of alertness. Are you ready—at a moment’s notice—to demonstrate God’s love and forgiveness for others, lay down your “rights,” and declare peace? Or are you prone to reach deep into your anger bowl and retrieve a bitter memory, only to vow you’ll never forgive
that
incident? The difference between these two responses is what Jesus had in mind when He said,
“You have heard that it was said, ‘Eye for eye, and tooth for tooth.’
But I tell you, Do not resist an evil person. If someone strikes you on
the right cheek, turn to him the other also. And if someone wants to s
ue you and take your tunic, let him have your cloak as well.
If someone forces you to go one mile, go with him two miles”
(MATTHEW 5:38-41).
Here’s the point: Being excessively defensive is as hazardous as building your house in a minefield. If the constant stress doesn’t get you, sooner or later an explosion will. And chances are, your explosions will do the greatest harm to those nearest and dearest to you.
Never a Story More Full of Woe
It seems the legendary playwright William Shakespeare understood the high cost of defensive anger. For proof we need look no further than his tragic tale of Romeo and Juliet.
At the beginning of the play, we learn that two wealthy families in Verona, Italy—the Montagues and the Capulets—are embroiled in an angry feud. Some long-ago offense sparked their fiery emotions, and neither side is in the mood to forgive or forget. The slightest insult is all it takes to bring out the clubs and swords. Both sides say they
must
fight to defend the honor of their name; thus a wall of contention continually divides the two families. By the time the curtain falls at the end of Act V, it is clear just how costly that anger turns out to be.
Romeo (Montague’s son) and Juliet (Capulet’s daughter) have grown up in this toxic atmosphere of warfare between their families. But like most young people, deep down they are more interested in the joys of love and romance than the sorrows of fighting and feuds. One night they meet by chance at a celebration and fall in love. In this moment, nothing else matters to them but the power of their feelings for each other.
The lovers decide to marry in secret. The day after the wedding, as proof of his new commitment to peace between the families, Romeo refuses to fight a young Capulet named Tybalt (Juliet’s cousin). Love has already begun to alter the war-torn landscape of Romeo’s life. But defensive anger often has a life of its own. In a tragic turn of events, Romeo’s best friend later picks a fight with Tybalt and is mortally wounded, and dies in Romeo’s arms. Enraged, Romeo slays Tybalt and is banished for life from Verona—cut off from his family and, worst of all, from Juliet.
The friar who married the lovers then concocts a way to reunite them by faking Juliet’s death. The plan goes horribly awry when Romeo believes her death to be genuine—he kills himself rather than face life without her. Upon waking, she discovers his dead body and, in turn, ends her own life.
All Are Punished: The True Cost of Rage
The two families lived a long time with defensive anger—with a seething mentality, with an “eye for an eye” endless repetition of violence. With the loss of their children, they now have to count the true cost of their rage. The prince of Verona says to them: “See what a scourge is laid upon your hate…All are punish’d.”
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That about sums it up:
All are punished
by unbridled anger that bursts forth from deeply entrenched defensiveness. All are at risk, the angry ones and the innocent bystanders alike. As Proverbs 29:22 reminds us, “An angry man stirs up dissension, and a hottempered one commits many sins.”
The longer we don’t allow God to pry our fingers off our anger bowls, the less opportunity there will be for Him to use our hands for good.
There’s no way around it: defensiveness—focusing only on what we want to
protect
—just compounds whatever painful and possibly legitimate reason we had for being angry. Becoming defensive makes matters far worse by searing our relationships and blocking our ability to grow through adversity. And the longer we don’t allow God to pry our fingers off our anger bowls, the less opportunity there will be for Him to use our hands for good, to reach out and help those in need.
Something’s Got to Give
When Jimmy called me at
Hope in the Night,
he reluctantly—almost apologetically—described himself as shell-shocked in his marriage to Diana. He explained that, by most measurements, he had little to complain about in the relationship. Diana was a brilliant and successful professor at a prominent university. She was a good mom and a reliable partner in family affairs. After ten years of marriage, Jimmy and Diana were still “deeply attracted to each other” and often joked about having had the world’s longest honeymoon.
“So what’s the problem?” I asked.
“Maybe I am just an overly demanding person, but I honestly don’t think so,” he said. “Diana has always been sensitive to criticism, but lately it has come to the point where she reacts like she is under full-scale attack over the smallest things. She raises the drawbridge and goes into siege mode. Then there’s no way to go near her without getting an arrow through my chest.”
Jimmy’s vivid choice of words is a perfect description of life with a defensively angry person. In response to any perceived threat, the person withdraws behind formidable fortifications erected around his heart—and fires flaming arrows at anyone within range. Diana had simply become “too hot to handle.”
“It’s like she’s got to prove to the whole world that she is smarter, stronger, and better than everyone else,” Jimmy said sadly. “It breaks my heart to think about what may have caused her to feel so insecure in who she really is. But it’s also sapping the life out of our relationship. Now
I
am starting to feel like I’m on the defensive all the time. Something’s got to give.”
Jimmy rightly recognized Diana’s struggle with defensive anger as the result of some past wound that caused her to feel afraid and insecure. When people are angry, there is a reason. Jimmy also discovered he was more than just an innocent bystander—he had become a regular target of Diana’s unresolved anger, or the bull’s-eye, if you will.
The truth is, defensively angry people are often hardest on those who love them the most. Their dearest relationships frequently come under intense stress and strain. Why? Let’s take a look.
The Downsides of Defensive Anger
1. Defensiveness Stifles Communication
It is hard work to talk through the many thorny issues arising in the normal course of any intimate relationship, even when both people are open and willing to listen. A delicate balance of give and take, advance and retreat is required. But when one or both consider any “give” to be tantamount to treason, conversation can quickly turn combative, and vital compromise grows vastly more difficult.
Chances are, someone will have to surrender unconditionally before peace can return to the household. And guess which person usually waves the white flag? Right—not the defensive one with the angry red face.
Over time our family and friends grow tired of constant capitulation and simply stop talking to us about sensitive matters. This much is certain: When communication starts to break down, divisions develop and relationships are in trouble.
The antidote for defensive division is letting God’s healing love bring reconciliation, and then passing that love on to others. The Bible sums up love’s restorative power:
“Love is patient, love is kind. It does not envy,
it does not boast, it is not proud. It is not rude, it is not self-seeking,
it is not easily angered, it keeps no record of wrongs.
Love does not delight in evil but rejoices with the truth.
It always protects, always trusts, always hopes, always perseveres”
(1 CORINTHIANS 13:4-7).
When we give up defensiveness as a way of relating to others, communication flows more freely and loving relationships grow stronger and healthier.

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