What’s our inner child saying when we’re angry?

No matter who we are, no matter how long we live, we will always, all of us, have seasons, or days or even moments when we are beside ourselves with anger.  There is the ordinary anger that we experience having been pushed past the point of frustration.  There is the extraordinary anger that a person has when they are enraged.  Then there is the more insidious anger that creeps up within the façade of cynicism.

Whichever way we look at it, we can assume that undealt with anger is destructive to ourselves and to others.  Anger that is the output of resentment that builds up, honesty that finds no expression, frustration that is not allowed, boils over usually at the most inopportune time.

What is going on within us when we are angry, whether we want to be angry or not?  Anger is always a secondary emotion, meaning that is a cover for something more authentic, something more preferred, something more ideal.  But for a range of reasons we don’t feel we can express ourselves in the more primary emotions.

Our inner child will feel the fullness of what we will feel, and if it is sadness we feel, and we can’t bear to feel that, the inner child is shamed, and what comes out is anger.  If our inner child is fearful, and even as adults we can be fearful, but our adult in us shouts down at our inner child by saying, “No!  You’re not allowed to be scared!” our inner child has no choice but to be angry.

In learning how to feel our feelings, we inevitably must sit with the ugliness of scary and sorrowful feelings.  These feelings always feel as if they are not right, and that life should be better than that.  But what is an unfortunate reality is also our opportunity at healing and freedom, if only we can sit in our feeling state and feel the primary feeling — what we’re really feeling.

When we feel what we are really feeling, and we allow that to occur, we are at one with our inner child, and we show our inner child the respect he or she deserves.  It is tough, however, and it is good to accept that we will know and relate with ourselves all the better when we can just sit in our feelings, because in that we have self-acceptance.  With self-acceptance we have peace with ourselves, which relates with hope and joy, the more intrinsic path to the inner child.