Anger has many faces: for example, someone attacks you and you react with anger. This anger is necessary to defend yourself from the attack. This is a good and meaningful emotion and will be released immediately after the attack is over through shaking, crying, or heavy breathing.
And then there is anger against yourself when you make a ‘wrong’ decision, this anger is self-destructive and a substitute of letting go of the past and acknowledging what is. This emotion is sticky and will attach itself to you for a long time, maybe all your life, until you’ll be able to let it go by understanding your way and destiny, sometimes also called ‘the spiritual journey to yourself’.
Anger is ‘love-hold-back’ in disguise.
And then there is anger against someone else whom you have hurt, because you cannot admit that your action has caused their suffering, so you’re camouflaging the feeling of guild with anger. This emotion will also stick around for a long time until you see the emotion of guild and what is truely needed: taking over responsibility of your own actions and the result of it.
Also there is the case when you’re angry towards the one who loves you, who have given you all their affection and attention, and you can’t receive this love and can’t give anything back. The feeling of helplessness, of being unable to receive, turns into anger against the giver. This dynamic is often perceived in children. Instead of being grateful of what they received from a parent they feel anger and turn away from the one they love. This anger is a substitute for love which has been hold back and takes the form of accusation and can also last a lifetime if it is not seen and expressed.
And then there is the anger that is not originated in your own actions or covering up your own feelings. This anger is coming from someone else, from someone in your family. You are representing this person in our family system. Why? Because he or she wasn’t able within their lifetime to overcome the anger and to go to the source of it, which is unexpressed love. So the strong emotion of anger is still present in the morphogenetic field and one of the descendent, the one with the greatest love for the family system, becomes entangled with this person. And now he feels the anger as if it was his own, unaware that he has not caused it with his own actions, neither against himself nor someone else.
In a family constellation we can observe the presence of the emotion of anger in very subtle movements or gestures of a representative: an experienced facilitator can see it in their eyes, the tension in the body, the clenched fist. How do we release this anger? If it is an entanglement, by finding the 2 members of the family system that have caused the feeling of anger by their own actions, and allowing them to express the underlying emotion of love-hold-back. This can either be a child-parent relationship, a victim-perpetrator or a past couple relationship, or any other of the dynamics found in the ‘Orders of Love’ as discovered and taught by Bert Hellinger.
And herein lays the magic of healing with family constellation: the emotion of anger which would’ve cause the suffering for the client will be released for good, the family wound is healed, and the love that has been hold back for generations can flow again…
Happy Holidays!
Maia