Ep #319: When Your Grief Includes Anger

Welcome to The Widowed Mom Podcast, Episode 319: When Your Grief Includes Anger.

Welcome to The Widowed Mom Podcast, the only podcast that offers a proven process to help you work through your grief, to grow, evolve, and create a future you can truly look forward to. Here’s your host, Master Certified life coach, grief expert, widow, and mom, Krista St-Germain.

Hey there, welcome to another episode of the podcast. Quick little life update for me, which you’ll see will segue nicely into today’s topic. In fact, it’s kind of the reason for today’s topic. So, I’ve been bringing you along in this story of how I have been working to list the house, to get it sold, all the things, going through this breakup since spring. And good news on the house front, which is that we had pictures taken last week. The videos turned out amazing and sent them to the neighborhood. 

My real estate agent reached out to her contacts and then that was Sunday. By Monday, we had people who wanted showings, did a couple of showings Monday and Tuesday. By Wednesday, had two offers and I accepted an offer on Wednesday. Also, Tuesday night, at the same time someone was checking out my house, another house popped on the market. I went and checked it out, I made an offer on Wednesday, I had accepted an offer and my offer had been accepted. So all good things in terms of quick progress. It is the right decision for me to move.

And shortly thereafter, I got a text message from the real estate agent and she said, “The buyers of your house are so excited and they want to come over and show some family the house. Can they do that?” Which means, of course, you know, I would need to leave the house and give them some space so they can check it out. And of course, I am really excited that someone loves my house. 

And also, the anger I noticed I felt in that moment because a huge part of me doesn’t want to leave this house. I know it’s the right decision for me. It makes the most financial sense. And I am feeling anger over leaving. I am feeling anger that all of this has happened.

So, that’s what I want to talk about in the podcast today. I have done podcasts before on anger. There’s one called The Problem with Anger. So you can go and check that one out. And it’s really more about how women are socialized to relate to anger and why we experience it as a problem instead of just letting ourselves feel it. So you might go check that one out. 

But this episode, I really want to talk about what I am noticing from the very messy middle that I am in. So this might not be the polished episode. This is not me on the other side of something looking back and teaching you. This is me sharing with you as it is happening. But it’s me noticing the difference.

So what I want to talk about is where I think anger comes from, when it shows up, why it can be so different for each widow and from grief to grief. And then what we can do to let it flow through without resisting it, reacting to it, avoiding it, et cetera. So, here’s what’s striking me. When Hugo died, I didn’t feel much anger. The man who caused the accident made horrible choices, right? He had meth in his system, alcohol in his system, he got behind the wheel of a car. But I didn’t mean that he meant to hurt anyone. It felt like a tragedy to me. It didn’t feel like a betrayal. It felt like a tragedy. 

And people kept asking me if I was angry or assuming that I was angry. And I just didn’t feel that much anger. I don’t even remember experiencing that much anger in the hospital with the doctors who made mistakes while they were trying to save him. Other people in my family were very angry. I just wasn’t. Was it right? Was it wrong? Not saying either. That was just my experience. I didn’t experience that much anger.

With the ex-boyfriend though, whole different story. I have noticed wave after wave of white hot anger. And it comes on, sometimes with very minimal or no warning, and sometimes at times that catch me off guard or surprise me. And thankfully, I have already done a lot of work on learning how to process emotions. I have a vast toolbelt. I have muscle memory in the tools that I use. 

So I don’t have to really think to myself about how to feel whatever it is I’m feeling and let it flow through. I just know how to do it. It’s just a muscle that I’ve developed. Now, do I love it? No. Is it always pretty? No. But I’m good at it. I’m good at taking care of myself. I’m good at letting it run its course. So I tap, I go for a walk, I cry. Whatever I need to do, I do it and I let it move through.

And I’m not telling myself that it shouldn’t be there, but I’m also not letting it fuel my behavior. That’s what I think is the sweet spot. We’ll talk more about that. Trust me when I say there have been many angry texts and emails that I have imagined myself sending, some that I have even typed and not sent. 

That’s not who I want to be in this. I want to let the anger flow through without driving my choices. So I allow it, I let it flow through, and then later something else happens and I notice it again, right? It comes in waves. It comes up, I deal with it and let it flow through, it dissipates, it goes away, and then later I notice it again.

And so I’ve just been noticing how different these grief experiences have been. And I have a whole lot more empathy for widows who I have coached who have or are experiencing a lot of anger. And it’s just got me thinking about how anger can show up in grief and how it can be so different from one grief to another. And not just for me, but for so many of us.

So, let’s talk about where anger actually comes from and what creates it and why we don’t always experience it the same way. And I will say to you, if you tend to judge yourself for feeling angry, if you tend to have fear around anger, you might go back and listen to that other episode that I mentioned, The Problem with Anger. 

But anger is a feeling, an emotion, right? And just like every other feeling, it’s caused by how we interpret something that happened. By the story that our brain and the story that our body creates to make sense of the experience. And we want to remind ourselves that our nervous systems are wired for survival.

And sometimes the brain interprets a loss as tragic, but not dangerous. Other times, it interprets the same event or even a slightly different one, as threatening. And I think that’s when we notice anger. So if it seemed like someone meant to hurt us or should have known better or made repeated choices that put us in harm’s way, that can feel dangerous. It’s like a violation. And our threat systems respond accordingly. 

So from that lens, as I have thought about it, it makes total sense that anger would show up for me now, even though it didn’t show up after Hugo died. For me. Now, you might be different. You could have gone through the same exact situations and experienced more anger with the first one and less with the second.

So, if you feel angry, even if it surprises you, even if it seems out of proportion to what happened, I just want you to hear that you’re not doing anything wrong. I just want you to hear that it is all an individual interpretation. And our interpretations are different because we are different. 

Our lived experience is different. And that doesn’t make one of us right and it doesn’t make one of us wrong. It just means that we’re humans with different lived experiences. Anger is our nervous system and our body’s way of trying to protect us from something that it has perceived as unsafe. And we all have different perceptions of safety, but the same general motivation, right, which is to keep ourselves safe and alive.

And sometimes anger shows up right away after loss. Sometimes it doesn’t come until much later. And sometimes it never comes. And it might look like anger at people who say things that seem threatening or invalidating or insensitive. It might look like anger at the partner who didn’t take better care of themselves or who wouldn’t go see the doctor. 

It might look like anger at the friend that you thought would understand when you wanted to date again, but then doesn’t have your back about it. I just coached someone on that recently. Or maybe it’s like years after your person died, and now one of your children is struggling with something, maybe they’re struggling with their mental health, and you just feel this rage at the other parent for leaving you to deal with this on your own. Maybe it’s years later.

And it’s not always obvious. Sometimes it’s very subtle. Sometimes it comes out as irritability, impatience, snapping at the kids, resenting people who have something that you lost. Maybe it comes out as angry at yourself for what you did, or maybe for what you didn’t do. Maybe for the way that you’re living since it all happened. 

So I think it’s important that we normalize all these things. That it’s different for everyone, that sometimes it’s very present in grief early, sometimes it’s very present later, sometimes it’s never present. None of it is right, none of it is wrong. There’s no one size fits all. Your experience can vary wildly, as mine is, from one loss to another.

Okay, let’s talk about allowing it to flow through. First, we want to remember we are not our emotions. We are not our feelings. We are humans who experience emotions. Emotions move through us if we let them. And when I talk about allowing, what I don’t mean is acting from. 

I was just having a conversation with someone in my family not too long ago about they were telling me how they have a lot of anger about a certain thing and that they just didn’t really want to deal with that anger because they didn’t want to deal with the cause of it. Because I could tell that they were associating allowing themselves to feel the anger with needing to do something about it. And that’s not what it is. When we allow ourselves to feel something, that has nothing to do with whether or not we address the situation that our anger is about. It’s not it at all. It has nothing to do with acting from that emotion, right? 

If we’re allowing anger, that doesn’t mean we’re yelling or lashing out. Or it doesn’t mean we’re hiding it or pretending that we’re fine. It doesn’t mean that we’re having conversations with someone that we’re angry with or forgiving them for the perceived injustice. It’s none of those things.

It simply means letting the energy move through. Breathing, tapping, crying, letting the energy shift in your body without judging it or without judging yourself for experiencing it. There’s so many ways to do it: walking, shaking, scribbling, rage rooms. We want to make room for the energy of the anger to flow through so that it doesn’t get stuck. Right? When we don’t let it move, it doesn’t disappear. We’re just kind of shoving it down and it festers and it simmers. And over time, it can end up in places we didn’t mean for it to go. So we want to let it move through.

And there are many ways to do it, but first we have to know anger is not us. None of our emotions are. We are humans who experience anger. We are not wrong for experiencing it. There is no amount of anger that we should or shouldn’t be experiencing it. If you’ve heard the five stages of grief and you understand that the first stage is to feel angry and you’re telling yourself that you have to feel a certain amount of anger or you’re doing grief wrong, please disregard that. Not accurate.

So maybe anger is a part of your grief right now. Maybe it is very loud. Maybe it is white hot and seething, like mine sometimes is. Maybe it feels more like a slow little quiet simmer underneath the surface, or maybe it’s nonexistent and it comes later, or maybe it never comes. 

Regardless, I hope you feel a little less alone with it. I hope you know that you’re not alone. This is not something I am on the other side of and looking back at. It’s something I am actively living right now, waves. I am surfing them. And if that’s where you are too, I hope this helped you feel less alone. You’re not ever wrong for the way that you feel, and you’re definitely not alone.

All right. If what you’re hearing on the podcast is helping you, imagine what we can do together in one of my programs. You can visit CoachingWithKrista.com and you can learn all about how I can help you. That’s what I have for you this week. Remember, I love you. You’ve got this. Take care and I’ll see you next week. Bye-bye.

If you like what you’ve been hearing on this podcast and want to create a future you can truly get excited about even after the loss of your spouse, I invite you to join my Mom Goes On coaching program. It’s small group coaching just for widowed moms like you where I’ll help you figure out what’s holding you back and give you the tools and support you need so you can move forward with confidence. 

Please don’t settle for a new normal that’s less than what you deserve. Go to coachingwithkrista.com and click Work With Me for details and next steps. I can’t wait to meet you.