The Gift of Anger

Jamie Grant Heather Parker In this second episode with counselors Jamie Grant and Heather Parker, they talk about the gift of anger, how it is a gift to us as we learn to notice what's going on within our hearts when it arises. In this conversation they explain where anger comes from, inward and outward anger and the possibility that anger is masking other losses. Connect to Episode 1: Does My Anger Matter to God? if you missed it. Recommended resources The Voice of a Heart: A Call to Full Living by Chip Dodd Tim Keller's sermon, The Healing of Anger The Faces of Rage by David Damico (out of publication but used books available online) Heather Parker at waterstonecounseling.org Jamie Grant at MetanoiaDallas.com This episode is available on video as well. Timestamps: 00:22 Introductions 01:10 Summary of Episode 1 03:33 Understanding where anger comes from 09:10 Outward and inward anger 16:15 Which is worse---outward or inner anger? 21:06 Losses can underlie anger. 24:38 Anger can be a gift. 35:47 Resources TranscriptKay >> Hi. I'm Kay Daigle of Beyond Ordinary Women Ministries. Welcome to our podcast and video episode. We have today guests who have returned. Two weeks ago in our podcast we welcomed Jamie Grant and Heather Parker, who are both licensed professional counselors. We have been talking about anger. We've been talking about all sorts of things, and we're extending that today to a second session because there was so much information that they gave us that we want to dig a little bit deeper into anger, particularly as Christians. So, Heather, tell us a little bit summarize a little bit of what we've already heard and talked about before we go into a new area of anger. Heather >> Sure. So in the last one, we talked about the perception. Well, first we talked about anger—how do we see that in the image of God and really highlighting that God is slow to anger. There’s a real there's a lot of restraint and it's not long lasting. That is the truth of how we see anger in God. That's not always how we're taught. Sometimes we're taught that he is a rageful God but Scripture tells us otherwise. So we kind of hit a little highlight on that. We spoke of the perception of anger in the church—that oftentimes anger can be viewed as sin or it's bad. And if it's sinful and it's bad, then we're bad. Yeah. Jamie, you can jump in at any time too. Yeah. We talked a little bit about just the perception of it really highlighting the difference between God-given anger that shows us something's not okay. It exposes what we're passionate about and shows us something's not okay. It's not sitting well with me and can eventually inform how we want to approach that. And really highlight the difference between that and a rage or acting out or the quick-tempered what we often see in families and society. And even often in our churches. We talked about, yeah, just how anger—sometimes people in leadership will want to make sure that people stay away from their anger. And that comes out in an element of control and that can look a lot of different ways. But overall, the messaging around anger as being bad or negative starts really young and is often widespread, especially in Christian circles. Yeah, anything I leave out, Jamie? Jamie >> I think that was a great recap. I think what made it a nice kind of segue into what we talk about today is you know, if there's, as you were saying, like these beliefs around anger as being bad or if I'm taught anger is bad and therefore I internalize this message that I'm bad because I'm experiencing this emotion of anger. There's also some other messages that we get as children because we're you know, this isn't going to be a parent finger-pointing episode or session. But we are—we’re sinful people raised by sinful parents in a sinful world. So we're going to get messages around our emotions based on how we're brought up.