“Forgiveness
is an act of the will, and the will can function regardless of the temperature
of the heart.”
— Corrie
ten Boom (1892–1983)
Withholding forgiveness, even to the point of a delay, to entertain bitterness
on the patio of sullenness, is to take a poison of choice. That poison is
anger. The antidote for anger is forgiveness.
Unforgiveness is the act of the will to
engage in and journey with anger.
To
hold to anger, notwithstanding how passive it is, is a bad and poisonous
choice. We may know this by the adverse consequences that play out because of
our anger. Anger is the choice to surrender control and to allow the
possibilities for undesirable consequences. Anger tricks us into believing we
have control when actually we don’t.
Anger
is self-indulgence; it’s the choice taken to become self-righteous.
Utilising Old-Fashioned Transactional Analysis
Understanding
the archetypal ego states of transactional analysis (child, adult, and parent)
helps us resist anger – to know its limited usefulness in the mode of what
would otherwise be loving, communicative relationships.
When
we react emotionally in our child states and we parent the other person’s child
and they parent our child and so on and so forth anger is propagated.
The
only solution is to revert back to our adult state every single time, and this
is done by simply doing it time after time, even when to respond in anger seems
the only just response. If we believe by faith that anger only leads to evil,
and that a patient response is a better bet, we have much better chances of
getting our relational transactions right.
Resolving to Not Get Angry
If
we are able to work on ourselves, in the mode of learning from our relational
transactions with others, we will quickly deduce that resolving to not get
angry is a wise character development investment.
If
we have restrained our anger and we are able to reason with ourselves the
paucity of good things that come from anger, we can see that everyone benefits
– not least us, ourselves – when we keep our cool.
No
matter how much we think anger is out of our control it is still a choice. When
we commit to deal with our anger – both instinctive and latent anger – we are
on a journey toward the most intrinsic blessing.
***
Unforgiveness
is the act of the will to engage in and journey with anger. The antidote for
anger is forgiveness. To forgive is to maximise our real control over our
destiny.
© 2014 S. J.
Wickham.
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