Anger, Guilt and the Work of Forgiveness

Gili explains that anger gets treated as a problem mainly out of a fear that showing it will push away the people around us. On top of that our culture gives it no legitimacy, especially in spiritual circles, where "good energies" are always expected. So people suppress the anger instead of giving it a healthy outlet.

Healthy anger is a tool for setting a boundary while holding on to your self-respect, and the focus stays on you. Aggression and rage come out of anger that never got expressed, and there the focus shifts to the other person, to making them smaller or hurting them. Gili calls that a matter of ego, unlike the anger itself.

Resentment is anger that never got expressed and dropped another level down, and it's one of the most destructive emotions there is, one that's linked, among other things, to cancer. Gili quotes A Course in Miracles, which says that every illness comes out of a state of unforgiveness, and that when someone is sick it's worth looking at who it is they need to forgive.

Gili says that she told the truth about what she was feeling instead of staying quiet, and the response she got surprised her in the best way.

Gili explains that she wanted to tell her relative who works in medicine that she understands it was the harder emotions, the ones she still has work to do on, that brought the inflammation back, after several difficult events she had been through, and not the fact that she stopped taking medication. She believes there's no single medical truth, and that she can heal herself completely.

Forgiving doesn't mean justifying what was done. It means letting go of the whole thing and freeing yourself. You can say, for example, that you forgive the person for not having been who you wanted them to be. That one statement frees both sides, and it lets you reach the deeper anger underneath, which is usually aimed at yourself.