IIC 105: How You Hide From Your Anger at God

In this episode, we explore: 1) How anger at God is far more common and intense that you realize; 2) Why you need to work through your anger at God; 3) Your hidden reasons for your anger at God; 4) Why your anger at God is so frequently banished to your unconscious; 5) 16 defense mechanisms that drive your anger at God outside of your awareness; 6) How your anger at God is so often overpowered by your fear of God; and 7) The signs and symptoms of your unacknowledged anger at God.

[00:00:00] Father Henri Nouwen wrote, “The question ‘May I hate God’ touches the very center of our spiritual struggle. I would not be surprised if hostility, anger, resentment and hatred proved to be the greatest stumbling blocks to our spiritual growth. Especially when we strongly desire to experience God’s presence in our lives and to taste love, joy, and peace as its fruits, the awareness of hateful feelings often startles and confuses us so much that we hide ourselves from him whom we are seeking.” Father Henri Nouwen wrote this as an introduction to Pierre Wolff’s book May I Hate God, published by Paulist Press in 1979.

[00:01:05] I believe that the vast majority of Catholics are really angry at God. Really angry. I estimate that more than 98% of Catholics harbor deep, deep anger at God. Deep anger. And some of us Catholics are aware of our anger at God – some of us are in touch with our anger at God, but not all of that anger. And so many, many Catholics are so out of touch with their anger at God, totally oblivious, so disconnected from their anger at God. I see this all the time, not just in my own clinical practice, but in many, many other ways that I connect with people in other relationships and are privileged to be able to connect, to enter into their internal worlds. So often there is no connection with a deep anger at God. Anger at God is a serious issue, both in spiritual formation and in human formation. Father Henri Nouwen, he went on to say, “We can do real harm to ourselves when we approach God selectively and reveal to Him only those parts of ourselves that we think he can handle.”

[00:02:53] I am Dr. Peter Malinoski, also known as Dr. Peter, clinical psychologist, trauma therapist, podcaster, blogger, cofounder and president of Souls and Hearts – but most of all, I am a beloved little son of God, a Catholic, a passionate Catholic who wants to help you to taste and see the height and depth and breadth and warmth and the light of the love of God, especially God your Father, and especially Mary, your Mother, your spiritual parents, your primary parents. I am here to help you embrace your identity as a beloved little child of God, a beloved little child of Mary. That is what this podcast is all about – I want you to enter much more deeply into an intimate, personal, loving relationship with the three persons of the Trinity and with our Lady. That is what this Interior Integration for Catholics podcast is all about, that is what Souls and Hearts is all about – all about shoring up the natural foundation for the spiritual life of intimacy with God, all about overcoming the natural human formation, deficits and obstacles to contemplative union with God, our Father, and this deep, intimate connection with our Lady, our Mother. That is what this podcast is all about.

[00:04:14] We are on an adventure of love together. And one thing, one major, big, huge thing that gets in the way of being loved by God, that gets in the way of accepting love from God, and loving Him in return is our anger toward him. And that is what this podcast episode is all about. This is episode 105 of the Interior Integration for Catholics podcast. It’s released on February 6, 2023, and it’s titled’How You Hide from Your Anger at God. Interior Integration for Catholics is part of Souls and Hearts, our online outreach. Check us out at soulsandhearts.com. And I’m going to bring you today the best of what is out there about anger at God, the best resources I can find that bring human formation and spiritual formation together. I’m going to primarily discuss two important books today. The first book is titled Angry with God. It’s by psychologist Michele Novotni and Randy Petersen, put out by Pinion Press in 2001. The second book is Pierre Wolff’s book May I Hate God, put out in 1979 by the Paulist Press. The introduction to Pierre Wolff’s book May I Hate God was written by Father Henri Nouwen. Pierre Wolff was a French Jesuit priest, wrote a lot about the spiritual exercises, did a lot of retreat work. In his sixties, he left the Catholic Church to marry. He eventually became an Episcopalian priest. He died in 2018.

[00:05:56] These are the best resources I could find on anger at God that took into account psychological perspectives. They’ve been the two books that have been the most helpful to me in my work on anger at God. These books are more than 20 years old. I’ve not found anything more recent that’s been more helpful. I would love to hear if you found other things that have been really helpful to you in terms of working through anger with God. So today we are going to cover seven critical areas. 1) The theme of how anger at God is far more common and intense than you realize. 2) Why you need to work through your anger at God. 3) Your hidden reasons for your anger at God. 4) Why your anger at God is so frequently banished to your unconscious. 5) 16 defense mechanisms that drive your anger at God outside of your awareness. 6) How your anger at God is so often overpowered by your fear of God. And 7) Signs and symptoms of your unacknowledged anger at God.

[00:07:26] Alright, so we’re going to start with number one: anger at God is far more common than you realize. Now Michele Novotni and Randy Petersen in their book, stated, “William Gaultiere encountered an interesting dilemma in conducting therapy with a number of Christian clients. He discovered that they are angry at God, yet feel as if anger is a sin and anger at God is an even bigger sin – in fact, some considered it blasphemy.” So often, anger at God is not allowed into conscious awareness. It’s buried deep within us in our unconscious, inaccessible. I believe that most of the anger we hold toward God is in our unconscious. Novotni And Petersen, they write, “Some people don’t realize how angry they are. In many corners of our civilized culture, people are not to show their anger and certainly not to admit being angry, especially when God is the object of their anger. ‘The taboos against our feeling and expressing anger are so powerful that even knowing when we are angry is not a simple matter,’ writes Harriet Lerner, ‘because the very possibility that we are angry often meets with rejection and disapproval from others, it is no wonder that it is hard for us to know, let alone admit that we are angry.”

[00:09:00] Novotni and Petersen write what I have seen clinically over the last two decades. They say, “…many devout people won’t let themselves express their anger at God. They won’t even admit that anger is what they are feeling. They hit that wall and they’re mystified by it – like some force field on Star Trek. Why can’t they get any closer to God? In some cases, they redirect their anger toward other people, toward the institutional church or toward themselves.” So many people, so many Catholics insist that they have no anger toward God. No anger toward God! Well, there’s two options that might explain that – two possibilities that might explain their statement, ‘they have no anger at God’. The first is that actually they don’t have any anger toward God. Actually, they are free from anger toward God. I’m skeptical. Why? Because this would require an extraordinary level of human formation and spiritual formation. Very, very high levels of integration on the natural level. It would also require essentially union with God. We’re talking sixth and seventh mansions here in St. Teresa of Avila’s formulation union with God. These would be individuals who have an extraordinary level of holiness. And frankly, I don’t think I’ve ever encountered anyone like this where I’ve been able to get to know them. So that’s the first possibility. Second possibility is their anger toward God is simply outside of their conscious awareness. This is very common. Over the years, I’ve gotten to know hundreds of people well enough to help them discover their anger, their anger toward God that they never knew they had.

[00:10:59] There are many defense mechanisms that keep our anger toward God outside of our conscious awareness. We are going to discuss sixteen of these defenses or these defense mechanisms. Some people call them coping strategies. We’re going to discuss sixteen of them in just a little bit. Misunderstanding God is part of our fallen human condition. Now in the first place, we have trouble understanding and grasping who God is. This is the problem of a finite being, trying to understand the infinite. So there’s a problem already there. But secondly, we have this issue of the blindness of sin, this distorting effect of our fallen human condition. Well, let’s go on to the second major theme, and that is why you need to work through your anger at God. And within this section, we’re going to cover six subthemes first. God commands you to love him with your whole heart. Your whole heart – we’ll get into that. Second, you’ve been shown how to bring your anger to God in the Scriptures. Third, God can make great good come from your anger at him. Fourth, you are much more likely to sin if you banish your anger at God into your unconscious. Fifth, your anger at God is fuel for your agency, your capacity to do good. And sixth, trying to hide your anger at God doesn’t work anyway.

[00:12:44] Let’s take these one at a time. First one, the need to love God with your whole heart. This comes straight from Matthew 22:37, the great commandment, “You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul and with all your mind.” All of your heart, whole heartedly, with all of you – every fiber of your being. And Jesus leads with the heart; he doesn’t start by saying you need to love the Lord your God with your whole soul. He doesn’t start with that, the soul’s in the third place, heart is in the first place. And why is that? The Catechism of the Catholic Church, paragraph 2562 says, “Where does prayer come from? Whether prayer is expressed in words or gestures, it is the whole man who prays. But in naming the source of the prayer, scripture speaks sometimes of the soul or the spirit, but most often of the heart (more than a thousand times). According to scripture, it is the heart that prays. If our heart is far from God, the words of prayer are in vain.” If we are harboring unconscious anger, that’s going to impact us. We are not going to be able to pray with the whole man, with all of us, with every fiber of our being; there are going to be sectors of us that are closed off. The Catechism, paragraph 2563 says “The heart is the dwelling-place where I am, where I live; according to the semitic or biblical expression, the heart is the place ‘to which I withdraw’. The heart is our hidden center beyond the grasp of reason and of others; only the Spirit of God can fathom the human heart and know it fully. The heart is the place of decision deeper than our psychic drives. It is the place of truth where we choose life or death. It is the place of encounter, because as image of God we live in relation: it is the place of covenant.” The human heart. It’s the place of encounter – it’s where we encounter God. It’s a good thing that it’s deeper than our psychic drives. It can be deeper than our anger, but if we are harboring unconscious anger toward God, that’s going to impact us. That’s going to impact our hearts, just like it would impact us in any other relationship.

[00:15:22] Our model is to bring our anger to the Lord. Novotni And Petersen, they write on page 90, “While the Bible upholds the concept of respect for God, remember again that it has many examples of faithful people duking it out with the Almighty. Sarah and Samuel, Jacob and David, Peter and Paul – these people weren’t shy about telling the Lord how they really felt. Of the 150 Psalms, 33 are known as imprecatory, or cursing psalms.” Let’s go to Jonah. This is the end of chapter three and chapter four. And it reads as follows, “When God saw what they did,” that’s the Ninevites repenting, “…how they turned from their evil way, God repented of the evil which he had said he would do to them; and he did not do it. But it displeased Jonah exceedingly, and he was angry. And he prayed to the Lord and said, ‘I pray thee, Lord, is this not what I said when I was yet in my country? That is why I made haste to flee to Tarshish, for I knew that thou art a gracious God and merciful, slow to anger and abounding in steadfast love and repentance of evil. Therefore now, Oh Lord, take my life from me, I beseech thee, for it is better for me to die than to live.” Jonah is pretty upset that God’s not going to smite the Ninevites. “And the Lord said, ‘Do you well to be angry?’ Then Jonah went out of the city and set to the east of the city and made a booth for himself there. He sat under it in the shade till he should see what would become of the city.” He’s still waiting to see if it’s going to be smiting. “And the Lord appointed a plant, and made it come up over Jonah that it might be a shade over his head, to save him from his discomfort. So Jonah was exceedingly glad because of the plant. But when dawn came up the next day, God appointed a worm which attacked the plant so that it withered. And when the sun rose, God appointed a sultry east wind and the sun beat upon the head of Jonah so that he was faint; and he asked that he might die and said, ‘It is better for me to die than to live.’ But God said to Jonah, ‘Do you do well to be angry for the plant?’ And he said, ‘I do well to be angry, angry enough to die.’ And the Lord said, ‘You pity the plant, for which you did not labor, nor did you make it grow, which came into being in a night, and perished in a night. And should not I pity Nineveh, that great city, in which there are more than 120,000 persons who do not know their right hand from their left, and also much cattle?”

[00:18:03] Jeremiah the prophet, also brought his lamentations to the Lord. Jeremiah 5:17-18, “I did not sit in the company of merrymakers, nor did I rejoice; I sat alone, because thy hand was upon me, for thou hast filled me with indignation. Why is my pain unceasing, my wounding curable, refusing to be healed? Wilt thou be to me like a deceitful brook, like waters that fail?” In Lamentations 5:20, the author writes, “Why do you always forget us? Why do you forsake us so long?” And the Prophet Habakkuk – this is how he opens his book, this is Habakkuk, the first four verses of chapter one, “How long Lord, must I call for help, but you do not listen? Or cry out to you ‘violence!’ but you do not save. Why do you make me look at injustice? Why do you tolerate wrongdoing? Destruction and violence are before me; there is strife and conflict abounds. Therefore, the law is paralyzed and justice never prevails. The wicked hem in the righteous so that justice is perverted.”

[00:19:16] Protestant Pastor John Starke in his online article, ‘No, It Is Not a Sin to Be Angry with God’, he writes, “The psalmists did not hide their anger toward God in their heart, but poured it out toward God. They brought their frustrations, anger and complaints to God. Why? Because he knows what to do with them!” Psalm 13:1-2, “How long, Lord? Will you forget me forever? How long will you hide your face from me? How long must I wrestle with my thoughts and day after day have sorrow in my heart? How long will my enemy triumph over me?” So in 10:1-2, “Why, Lord, do you stand far off? Why do you hide yourself in times of trouble? In his arrogance, the wicked man hunts down the weak, who are caught in the schemes he devises.” And finally, Psalm 44:24, “Awake, Lord! Why do you sleep? Rouse yourself! Do not reject us forever. Why do you hide your face and forget our misery and oppression?” These are prayers that are challenging God. You can hear the anger behind the statements. This is not something that one would say simply in a flat monotone, just kind of devoid of anger, devoid of emotion. You certainly wouldn’t say it in a happy tone.

[00:20:38] And then, of course, there is Job. And there’s lots of passages potentially from Job – I’ve just picked out four of them. The first one from Job, 10:3, this is where Job addresses God, “Does it seem good to thee, to oppress, to despise the work of your hands, and favor the designs of the wicked?” Job 7:18-19, “Will you never look away from me or let me alone even for an instant? If I have sinned, what have I done to you, you who see everything we do? Why have you made me your target? Have I become a burden to you? Why do you not pardon my offenses and forgive my sins? For I will soon lie down in the dust; you will search for me, but I will be no more.” Job 19:6-7, “Know then that God has put me in the wrong has closed his net about me. Behold I cry out ‘violence!’ but I am not answered; I call aloud, but there is no justice.” Job 30:19-20, “God has cast me in the mire, I have become like dust and ashes. I cry to thee and thou does not answer me; I stand in the dust, not heed me.” We could go on and on with lots of examples in the scripture. I just offer these to show you over and over again that we are given this example to bring our anger, our intensity, our resentment, our bitterness to God.

[00:22:16] We are given that example. Pierre Wolff goes so far as to say, “Our weakness gives us the right to follow Job and to go even farther than he did to express everything, absolutely everything. Job went to the limit of the violence possible for a just man. We can express the violence of an imperfect people.” Pierre Wolff goes on to say, “If we cannot tell everything to our best friend – Abba, our Father in heaven – to whom can we tell it? Absolutely nobody. We would be totally lost in our feelings. But our Father loves us so much that he never wants us to be lost.” So that is our second point. That is why you need to work through your anger at God. Now, we’re going to go on to the third question here, and that is that God can make great good come from your anger at him. My favorite verse in all of scripture, you’ve probably heard it before, Romans 8:28, “We know that all things work together for good for those who love God, who are called according to his purpose.” There aren’t any exceptions to that. It doesn’t say we know that all things work together for good, except for your anger. ‘Except for your anger at God – there’s an exception there. If you’ve got anger at God, well, buddy, that’s just too bad. There’s nothing for you. Then you’re just doomed.’ No, it doesn’t say that.

[00:23:46] And Pierre Wolff said, “The Father’s reaction, then, the reaction to your anger can be pictured as, ‘What can I do with this anger of yours? What can I create or recreate with it? What life can I extract from it for my Son, for all my sons and daughters?'” Father Henri Nouwen, in the preface or the introduction to Pierre Wolff’s book, says, “The anger and hatred which separate us from God can become the doorway to greater intimacy with him. We have been so victimized by religious and secular taboos against anger and hatred that these emotions usually evoke only shame and guilt. Seldom, if ever, are they expressed in a creative way. But scripture presents us with a real alternative. In both the Old and New Testaments, it is clear that only by expressing our anger and hatred directly to God will we come to know the fullness of both his love and our freedom.” God can make good come from your anger. I have seen so many times in marriages, for example, that when anger can be expressed constructively, it can actually bring people closer together. And that’s the same thing that can happen in your relationship with God. So that’s the third point.

[00:25:10] This is a big one, the fourth one; you are much more likely to sin if you banish your anger at God to your unconscious. Now Christian mental health professional William Galtier wrote an article called ‘A Biblical Perspective on the Therapeutic Treatment of Client Anger at God.’ This was in the Journal of Psychology and Christianity back in 1989, and he said, “…they banish their anger into their subconscious and try to hide their terrible secret from themselves, others, and even God. Once their anger at God is hidden, it festers into a sort of resentment and bitterness which infects their emotional and spiritual lives; their emotions get clogged up inside in the relationship with God becomes sterile and void of intimacy. Often, to just mention to such people that they may be angry at God causes them to rush to God’s defense and piously proclaim his innocence.” Now, sometimes when you challenge these folks, I would say they get angry in their protestations and denials of their anger toward God. ‘I’m not angry at God, I don’t know why you’re saying that’ – they can go on and on. And sometimes I think to myself, ‘Yeah, methinks thou does protest too much.’ Your anger at God buried in the unconscious is an internal poison. Bert Ghezzi in ‘The Angry Christian’ wrote, “Resentment is like a poison we carry around inside us with the hope that when we get the chance we can deposit it where it will harm another who is injured us. The fact is that we carry this poison at extreme risk to ourselves.” And Tommy Tighe, in ‘St. Dymphna’s Playbook’ said, “The resentments we hold, either in the silence of our hearts or that we say out loud in moments of frustration, have the potential to rot our relationships from the inside out.” And Edward Bulwer-Lytton said, “Anger ventilated often hurries toward forgiveness; and concealed often hardens into revenge.” And then there was this great little pithy quote from James Russell Lowell in The Bigelow Papers who said, “Folks never understand the folks they hate.”

[00:27:35] You will experience greater impulses to act out if parts of you holding anger at God are silenced and given no voice. Novotni and Petersen say that, “Devout people who won’t let themselves express their anger at God often sabotage their own relationship with God because somewhere down deep they feel wounded by him – but they may not even realize that’s the problem.” We call this the revenge of the repressed. And Sheila Carney, in a 1983 Biblical Theology Bulletin article, said, “Denying feelings of anger doesn’t eliminate them. It simply pushes them into our unconscious where they are alive, active and seeking expression. Because we lose control over the things we suppress, we are no longer able to understand or evaluate them.” If your anger at God is unconscious, you cannot engage your intellect and your will effectively anymore. This makes you not only more prone to acting out on unconscious impulses, but it also makes it much harder for you to love God.

[00:28:43] Another point here in this section is that your anger at God is fuel for your agency. Your anger can fuel your capacity to do good. In banishing your anger to your unconscious, you lose all the energy that the anger can provide, and in addition, you lose all the energy that it takes to keep your anger outside of awareness. There’s a whole lot of energy that goes into trying to keep anger in the unconscious. You lose not only the energy that your anger could provide, but you also lose all that energy that’s expended in trying to keep it outside of your awareness.

[00:29:23] Finally, trying to hide your anger at God doesn’t work anyway. Novotni and Petersen said, “Since God already knows your heart, trying to fool him by hiding your true feelings won’t work.” You’re not going to fool God. St. Augustine, in his Confessions, said, “you were more inward to me than my most inward part and higher than my highest.” And this this just evokes for me Psalm 39:1-2, “O Lord, you have searched me and known me! You know when I sit and when I stand; you discern my thoughts from afar.” Verse 13, “For you formed my inward parts; you knitted me together in my mother’s womb.” And verses 15-16, “My frame was not hidden from you, when I was being made in secret, intricately woven in the depths of the earth. Your eyes saw my unformed substance.” God knows us through and through – far better than we know ourselves. We’re not going to be able to hide our anger from him.

[00:30:33] Alright, so let’s go on to the third major theme, your hidden reasons for anger at God. Now, Novotni and Petersen identify six primary reasons why people get angry at God, and they believe the six primary reasons are: first, personal misfortune, second, the pain and suffering of a loved one, third, general injustice in the world, fourth, bad representatives of God, fifth, burnout, and sixth, unanswered prayers. Let’s go through these first. Personal misfortune, they say, “Probably the leading cause of anger at God is a personal misfortune such as an accident, an illness or disability; perhaps the loss of a job, house loved one, or marriage.” And that makes sense, right? We suffer something in our lives, it seems terrible, seems horrible, seems like there’s no explanation for why that could be good. Personal misfortune. The pain of a loved one, somebody that’s dear to us is suffering in a way where we cannot sort through the meaning of that. We don’t understand how that could possibly be good. Third, general injustice in the world. Here’s where we get war, famine, economic disparities, we get all kinds of things that go on, on this grand scale that just make it hard to understand how God could be working through that in a positive way. The fourth is bad representatives of God. And this is where Novotni and Petersen write, “Another major reason for God is…bad representatives of God. For many, these can be their parents. Or perhaps they are church leaders from their childhood. Or even TV preachers. The idea is this – if those are the people who speak for God and they have treated me badly in his name, God must be as bad as they are.” If this is God’s team, if this is his people, if these are his representatives, and they are misbehaving, if they’re treating me badly or treating others badly, then God must somehow approve of them. They go on to say, “In other words, we grow up assuming that the God we can’t see is just like the people who teach us about him. If we get angry at those people, we can easily transfer that anger or disappointment to God, since they appear to be on the same team.” Bad representatives of God. The fifth is burnout, and this is primarily like for people that are in ministry or who really are spending a lot of energy to try to love God, and it doesn’t work out – they don’t get what they hope to get in return and they burn out and they become angry at God. And then the sixth is unanswered prayers.

[00:33:23] Alright, I think there’s a lot more to anger at God than Novotni and Petersen talk about. Their discussion was, I think, a good start, but let’s get into some other things. Pierre Wolff discusses anger as a treasure. And when I was reading him, describing anger as a treasure, I kept thinking about Gollum and the ring. “Anger is my precious…my precious”. Pierre Wolff describes anger as a treasure, as, “strong feelings of anger and hatred make me more conscious of my own reality, even of my own identity. And when I really detest someone, when I am deeply possessed by hatred, my identity is this: ‘Pierre-who-hates’. I am therefore afraid that if I give up my hatred, I will lose ‘Pierre’ while losing ‘the-one-who-hates’. People who have been through this say, ‘I was afraid of being lost, of being totally empty, of being no longer myself.'” Alright, let’s unpack this a little. Sometimes we become so closely identified with what we’re experiencing that if we give up that experience, we won’t know who we are. We’ll lose our identity. So this anger as my precious, as a treasure, is deeply connected to a sense of identity. There also can be this anger as a source of power or agency. Remember, the third primary integrity need is to have agency – to be able to be an active agent in the world. Frederick Buechner said, “Of the seven deadly sins, anger is possibly the most fun. To lick your wounds, to smack your lips over grievances long past…to savor the last toothsome morsel both of the pain you are given and the pain you are giving back – in many ways, it is a feast fit for a king. The chief drawback is that what you are wolfing down is yourself. The skeleton of the feast is you.” But that anger can be invigorating. It can tell you that you’re alive. Some people know that they’re alive because of their anger, and that first primary condition for integrity, is to exist – to know that you’re alive. So to give that up may feel like you’re sinking into an abyss of nothingness. The anger at God may feel like what keeps somebody alive or keeps somebody going because it’s the only thing they can feel. They’re concerned that they are at risk of disappearing, of no longer existing.

[00:36:17] Unless you have a perfectly accurate image of God in your bones, you are going to experience anger toward God. Let’s go back to God images. Your God images are your emotional and subjective experiences of God, who you feel God to be in the moment. They may or may not correspond to who God really is. What you feel about God in your bones – that’s your God image. Your God images are your experiential sense, how your feelings and how your heart interprets God. God images are often unconscious, they’re initially shaped by the relationship you have with your parents. Your God images are heavily influenced by psychological and developmental factors, and different God images can be activated in your life at different times, depending on your emotional states, and what psychological mode you happen to be in at a given time. In IFS – in Internal Family Systems lingo, we would talk about they’re determined by the part that you’re blended with. God images are always formed experientially. Your God images flow from your relational experiences and also how you construe and make sense of those images, including when you’re very young. And we all have heretical God images – your God images can be radically different from your God concept. So that’s totally different. God concept – that’s what you profess to believe about God. The beliefs about God that you deliberately choose, that you hold to be true in the core of your being, that’s your God concept. It’s different from your God images. God concept – what you choose to believe. God image – what you feel about God in the moment. So your God concept, that’s your intellectual understanding of God based on what you’ve been taught, but also based on what you’ve explored through reading, study, reflection. Your God concept: what you decide to believe about God. And if you’re an Orthodox Catholic, your God concept is going to be reflected in the Creed, it’s going to be expanded in the Catechism and in the formal teachings of the Church. And I spent a lot of time talking about God images in episodes 23-29 of this podcast. Anger at God makes so much more sense if you understand your God images.

[00:38:38] In episodes 23-29, I covered fourteen God images from William and Kristi Gaultiere’s 1989 book called Mistaken Identity. These are the God images – I’m just going to run through them quickly. First, the preoccupied managing director God. This God’s very busy – no time or energy to relate with you, no time to connect with your problems. He cares about you, but he’s got other people he needs to attend to first. Second, the statue God. This God’s remote, distant, unfeeling, stony, cold, indifferent, disengaged. God leaves you to your own devices. He just doesn’t care. It corresponds to the heresy of deism. The third is the robber God. This God robs you of good things and prevents you from having good fortune. God’s like a thief, and he takes away your cherished possessions, takes away your cherished relationships, deprives you of things you need. Fourth one, the vain Pharisee God. God is so absorbed in his own might, in his own power, his own goodness, his own beauty, his own knowledge, his own strength, he takes credit for everything. Only goodness comes from him, all the badness comes from me. The vain Pharisee God image. Fifth, the elitist aristocrat God. This God considers himself so lofty, too good, too perfect to connect with the likes of someone like you. The superior attitude – he doesn’t seem to need you, care about you, operates in an entirely different plane from you up in the sky. Apart from mere mortals like you. God just isn’t there for you. Sixth one, the pushy salesman God. This one is ill mannered. He’s demanding, he wants to force you to do things his way, wants to shape you into the mold he has made for you. He doesn’t respect your limits and boundaries, he’s going to try to subtly trick you with his glittering, dazzling smile and veneer of friendliness, and if that doesn’t work, he’s willing to force you to do what he wants. There’s no collaboration and cooperation with this God image. It’s his way or the highway, and he demands conformity. That’s the pushy salesman God. The seventh God image is the magic genie God. And this is the God image where God gives you what you want if you do what he wants you to do, it’s a ‘quid pro quo’ type of God. You make deals with God – if you follow the right steps, the right formula, you’re going to get what you want from God. God is like a divine vending machine – you provide the right inputs, you insert your spiritual quarters and you get the spiritual and material merchandise that you want. This is very transactional. The eighth God is the demanding drill Sergeant God, who always wants more and more from you. He’s never satisfied, you never perform correctly. He’s punitive, he’s got no tolerance for your errors. Little mercy, little compassion. The ninth one is the outtagetcha police detective God, This God is caught up in demanding perfection from you. God definitely sees you, he’s watching you – this is no statue God, that’s just miles away. He’s looking at you, he’s watching when you make mistakes, he holds your errors up against you, he’s legalistic, and his vigilance never ceases. He doesn’t miss the smallest error or imperfection that you do. He tallies all of them up great and small, and he’s stingy with forgiveness. Your offenses aren’t blotted out, he focuses on exacting justice, carefully measured out. That’s the outtagetcha police detective God. The tenth one is the unjust dictator God. And this God is very powerful, but he’s also unjust, he’s unfair, he seems arbitrary in the way that he blesses and punishes, he even seems to shower good things on those that are evil. He doesn’t seem to punish those who hurt you, those who persecute you, he doesn’t defend you. The eleventh one is the marshmallow God. Now this God is nice, he’s nice to you, but he’s either weak or incompetent. God is kind of soft, passive, when others harm you, when they persecute you, he doesn’t safeguard you, he doesn’t advocate for you, he isn’t defend you. He just wants you to take it, he wants you to turn the other cheek. God doesn’t want conflict, he wants to be liked, and he’s likely to follow those who dominate him, who sort of can take him by force. That leads us to number twelve, the critical Scrooge God. This God doesn’t extend himself to help you. Instead, this guy is highly critical, he cuts you down with disparaging remarks. He’s got this condescending tone, tells you you’re not going to make it, you’re not going to succeed, you’re not going to be able to rise to the challenge or be minimally acceptable to him. Then there’s the party-pooper God, that’s the thirteenth one where God is depressing, downbeat, pessimistic, disapproving. He’s unhelpful, keeps giving you the message that your efforts aren’t going to work, you’re not going to succeed, you’re not going to make it no matter how hard you try. This God tells you that your hopes and dreams, they’re foolish, right? Fools errands. You’re dust and ashes. You’re not going to amount to anything. And he also seems really unconcerned about the impact of those messages on you. And then the final one is the heartbreaker God. This God breaks promises that he makes to you. He raises your hopes high, and then he dashes them back down to the earth. He draws you in to trust him, you know? And then when you need him, when you seek him, he’s nowhere to be found. You put your fragile self in his hands and he treats you casually, carelessly, thoughtlessly, and you get hurt, wounded. Kind of like Lucy with the football in Charlie Brown – yanks that football away, you wind up on your back looking up at the sky.

[00:44:37] All of those God images are idols. They’re false gods. None of those idols is worth loving with your whole heart, with your whole soul, with your whole mind, with all your strength. No, none of them are worth it. All those are idols – they’re not worth worshipping at all. And I discussed this at length in my weekly reflection from September 14, 2022. ‘Are you a heretic? Distorted God Images Catholics Hold.’ You can go to soulsandhearts.com/blog and scroll down and you’ll find that. I get into that a lot in a lot more detail. I’m going to argue that there is no such thing as an irrational anger at God. There are always reasons inside for anger at God. If you understand the assumptions, the perceptions the God images that parts of you hold, there is no irrational anger at God. This is one of the gripes I have with cognitive behavioral therapy – that we’re supposed to root out these irrational cognitions. The cognitions are rational if you understand the assumptions that generate them, they’re logical, they follow from the assumptions. The problem is in the assumptions, it’s not in the cognitions. Now, anger at God is never irrational, in my opinion, but it’s always disordered. Anger at God is never irrational, but it’s always disordered. Why? Because God never perpetrates injustice upon us. Anger is disordered, but it’s not sinful unless it’s acted upon in some way that is wrong. To feel anger at God is not sinful, to act out against God, fueled by that anger is where the sin comes in.

[00:46:33] We misunderstand God because of these God images and because of things like transference. Now, what’s a transference? Well, the American Psychological Association dictionary definition of a transference is “a person’s displacement or projection onto another person of those unconscious feelings and wishes originally directed toward important individuals such as parents in the person’s childhood. It is posited that this process brings repressed material to the surface where it can be reexperienced, studied and work through to discover the sources of the person’s current neurotic difficulties and to alleviate their harmful effects.” What’s happening is that we transfer what we’ve experienced and how we’ve made sense of those experiences from early relationships with authority figures, primarily our mother and father onto God. And William Gaultier in his 1989 article, said, “Psychologically, anger at God can be explained as unresolved anger from previous hurtful relationships which is projected onto God.” He went on to say, “People commonly transfer onto God the characteristics of parents and significant others, because a relationship with the invisible God is by faith and its development duly preceded by relationships with parents and significant others.” So that is the whole section on your reasons for your anger at God. And that concludes the third section. Now we’re going to move on to why your anger at God is so frequently banished to your unconscious. We’ve covered some things about this already, but let’s just get into this a little more deeply. We’re going to basically deal with four subsections here. First one, is it okay for you to be angry at God? The second one, your attachment needs, the third one, your integrity needs, and the fourth one is that anger at God causes you to have internal conflicts.

[00:48:45] Is it okay to be angry at God? We still have people – we still have Catholics that basically say, “No, it’s not okay to be angry at God.” This is from Catholic-Daily-Reflections.com from June 10, 2021, an article titled ‘The Burden of Anger’, and it reads, “The first level of sin is simply to be ‘angry’ interiorly. The sin of anger is an interior attitude of disgust toward another. Jesus says that the consequence of having anger toward another is that you will be ‘liable to judgment’. Reflect today upon the sin of anger. As you do, try to see your disordered anger as the real enemy, not the person with whom you are angry.” Okay, a lot of problems here. First of all, anger is not disgust. I don’t know where they got that from, but that’s really psychologically misinformed. Anger and disgust are both primary emotions. And when you combine them, you get contempt. So the author doesn’t seem to have a very clear understanding of basic emotions here. Secondly, anger is not the real enemy. Anger is an emotion. And so to demonize anger or to invalidate anger is just going to cause you further problems. Jesus himself was angry, angry at the Pharisees, angry at the money changers in the temple, angry at his disciples at different points. This is not sinful. So we need to be a lot clearer about that kind of thing, ad it troubles me that in 2021, those kinds of things are still being put out on reputable Catholic websites. Another example is from William Bloomfield on onepeterfive.com in an article titled ‘Overcoming the Deadly Sin of Anger’, where he argues that anger is incompatible with the fruits of the Holy Spirit. He writes, “Reviewing the nine fruits of the Spirit should also make it obvious that anger is incompatible with them. By incompatible, I mean that you can’t have both anger and these fruits of the Spirit at the same time. That is, you can’t be joyfully angry or peacefully angry or gently angry.” He goes on to say, “Our anger and corresponding lack of the fruits of the Spirit mean that we need the Spirit. We need prayer. We need to cultivate the interior life through good habits of prayer. We need to spend time in daily mental prayer before the Eucharist, if possible – and lectio divina, we need to frequently confess our sins and be nourished by the Eucharist. We need to give alms and discipline our flesh through fasting. We need to turn to Mary in the Rosary, and we likely need a good silent retreat to help us get started.” Those are all good things, but that’s his approach to dealing with anger – is to cultivate the interior life through good habits of prayer, etc., etc.. That doesn’t actually address what the person’s angry about, though. That’s basically just a way of trying to eliminate anger as though it had no meaning. Is though it had no purpose. And this idea that you can’t have anger and the fruits of the Spirit is again disproved by the example of our Lord when he was angry. Are we going to say that he was deprived of the fruits of the Spirit? That’s nonsense. These kind of writings assume that you have a single homogeneous personality and that you can only experience one thing at a time. It doesn’t appreciate the multiplicity of the self. Nevertheless, they get published and it can cause a lot of problems for people who say, “Oh, I can’t ever experience anger” –  reinforce that myth. This is particularly problematic because of how threatening anger at God can feel. The stakes can’t be higher. We have this need to exist. That’s the first integrity need. We have this need for safety and protection. That’s the first attachment need. We also have this fourth integrity need – a need to be good, to have ontological goodness. And if we’re angry at God, how could we possibly have that? Because when we’ve been angry at other people before, it didn’t go very well. And we’re generalizing from those experiences. We don’t understand that at bones level, at a felt level, that God is actually much better adjusted than the people in our lives who couldn’t tolerate our anger in the past. We’ve learned from previous experience that people can’t tolerate our anger. We assume that’s the way it’s going to be with God. And God is also really powerful – he could smite us. God has been wrathful. You can look at the scripture, you see some fire and brimstone coming down on Sodom and Gomorrah. If he doesn’t like us, if we don’t make ourselves acceptable to him, we’re doomed. So the stakes seem really, really high, and it can also be hard to experience God when we can’t see him, we can’t touch him in the same way that we can the people who formed our God images in us.

[00:53:33] Attachment needs. These are from Brown and Elliott. You know I bring these up a lot – the felt sense of safety and protection. We really need to have that. If there’s something that seems to threaten that in a relationship with God, we’re going to react to that. And one of the critical things that we need to learn at an experiential level is that we can be angry with God and still have a sense of safety and protection. That we can still be seen, heard, known and understood, that we can still be comforted, soothed and reassured by God when we are angry, we need to feel cherished and treasured and delighted in, even when we feel angry. We need to know that God has our best interests at heart when we are angry with him. And the same thing with our integrity needs. We need to be able to be angry with God and be convinced that we can still exist and survive, that he’s not going to wipe us out of existence. We need to matter to God even when we’re angry. We need to have a sense of agency, we need to have a sense of being good even when we’re angry. We need to have a sense of mission and purpose in life, even when we’re angry.

[00:54:43] Anger at God causes these internal conflicts. And this is where Novotni and Petersen were able to to really convey something important. They said, “People who are angry at God feel betrayed and abandoned. They feel as if no one cares about them. They become sad, cynical and weary. And the whole time they keep paying lip service to God, they assert that God is good and loving; they just feel a bit distant from him. In fact, this on admitted anger often causes a serious dissonance in their thinking, which goes something like this.” So they lay out kind of a series of statements, and if you kind of buy into the multiplicity of self, if you’re into Internal Family Systems approaches to understanding our parts, you can actually hear the parts here. They don’t talk about parts. Novotni And Petersen, I think, pretty much assume a monolithic, homogeneous single personality, but they get the conflict inside. So let’s read through their list. Let’s read through their internal dialogue for a person who’s struggling with anger at God.

[00:55:44] God is good and loving; but something terrible has happened to me that I don’t deserve; therefore God is not good and loving; but he must be; so I must have deserved this terrible event; but I know I didn’t; so I’m angry about this injustice; but I can’t be angry at God because he must be good and loving; so I must be wicked to feel this way; but I’m not wicked; so I must not feel angry at God, but I really am angry; so maybe I am wicked; which might explain why the terrible thing happened to begin with. You could unpack that and see a number of different parts – all this tension, how do I make it work out? And Pierre Wolff, he wrote, “…and if God has been presented to us as the Supreme Judge as well, where can we go, to whom can we turn? We cannot help from feeling anger and hatred; the fact that we feel them makes us feel guilty: we condemn ourselves, other people, and God condemns us! We reach a dead-end and turn ceaselessly around in circles, caught between the feelings that are consuming us and the guilt that is crushing us.” And there was a a Reddit quote that just seems to capture this. One person posted, “I have a complex relationship with God. Sometimes I pray and attend church gladly, and other times I’d gladly wring his neck if only I were able.” And R.C. Sproul, the American reformed theologian and ordained pastor in the Presbyterian Church in America, said, “The first thing to understand about anger is that it isn’t always a bad thing. Many people, especially Christians, have the mistaken notion that anger is intrinsically evil. As a result, they feel needless guilt. The idea that a Christian is never allowed to be angry is a demonic myth that tends to produce neurotic anxiety. I’ve had to struggle with this myth nearly all my life.” And what I like about that quote from R.C. Sproul is that the intellectual awareness that it’s okay to be angry, that anger is an emotion, that it doesn’t carry a moral weight until it’s acted upon by the will, he gets all that intellectually, but he still struggles with this myth that anger is wrong, and he struggled with it all of his life. The intellectual knowing is not enough. There has to be an experiential knowing. Alright, so we’ve just covered the section on why your anger at God is so frequently banished in to your unconscious.

[00:58:40] And now we’re going to go to how that actually happens. We’re going to talk about the 16 defense mechanisms that drive your anger at God into the unconscious, outside of your awareness. So let’s go ahead and do that. But as we get started here, let’s talk about first what is a defense mechanism, what am I talking about? And this is from the American Psychological Association Dictionary of Psychology says, “In classical psychoanalytic theory, a defense mechanism is an unconscious reaction pattern employed by the ego to protect itself from the anxiety that arises from psychic conflict.” There’s a better definition from Saul McLeod, in his article ’10 Defense Mechanisms: What They Are and How They Help Us Cope’, where he says that a defense mechanism is “a mental process initiated, typically unconsciously, to avoid conscious conflict or anxiety.” Sometimes we just call them defenses, sometimes we call them coping mechanisms. That’s what defense mechanisms are. And the 16 that we’re going to discuss are repression, suppression, minimization, passive-aggressive behavior, reaction formation, compartmentalization (which is also related to isolation of affect, so I’m going to discuss those two together), compartmentalization and isolation of affect, displacement, turning against the self, externalization, projection, avoidance, distraction, hypomania, somatization, obsessions, and scrupulously. Yes, that’s right. Scrupulously is a defense against anger at God.

[01:00:13] Alright, so let’s go through each of these on the list. The first one, repression. According to the APA dictionary, the American Psychological Association Dictionary of Psychology, repression is “a basic defense mechanism that excludes painful experiences and unacceptable impulses from consciousness. Repression operates on an unconscious level as a protection against anxiety produced by objectionable sexual wishes, feelings of hostility and ego-threatening experiences and memories of all kinds.” So what’s really important here is that repression is an unconscious process of restraining something, holding the anger at God back, not letting it be realized. Some people refer to repression as motivated forgetting. The focus is on internal experience, and an example of this is that anger at God is just too threatening, we need to put it away. You just need to put it into the unconscious. Remember that it’s not chosen, right? It’s not conscious. That sets it up in contrast to our second defense mechanism, which is suppression. Suppression is defined by the APA dictionary as, “a conscious effort to put disturbing thoughts and experiences out of mind or to control and inhibit the expression of unacceptable impulses and feelings. So this differs because this is where we are deliberately and intentionally trying to put our anger at God outside of our conscious awareness. So an example might be when somebody says, “I’m going to banish my angry thoughts toward God. Out! Out, spirit of anger! Be gone.” Or another example, “I’m not going to think about my anger. I’m going to press it away from me. I’m just going to send it away from me.” Suppressing.

[01:02:00] The third one is minimization. And minimization is a defense that is “a tendency to present events to oneself or others as insignificant or unimportant. Minimization often involves being unclear or nonspecific, so that the listener does not have a complete picture of all the details and may be led to draw inaccurate or incomplete conclusions.” So in this, the person is minimizing his or her own anger at God for himself or herself. So an example of this might might be might sound like this. “Yeah, you know, I’ve got some irritation with God, you know, once in a while. Sometimes – just common stuff, stuff everyone has, you know, it’s not anger, really. It’s just little typical, normal irritation. You know, sometimes I don’t get God, I understand – that’s okay. It’s okay. Happens now. And then to all of us.” Right? When indeed there is a lot of anger toward God for this individual. You can hear the minimization basically damping it down, minimizing it, making it small, making it much tinier than it actually is, minimization. That’s the third of the defense mechanisms.

[01:03:12] The fourth one is passive-aggressive behavior. Now, this is a characteristic of behavior that is seemingly innocuous, accidental or neutral, but that indirectly displays in an unconscious, aggressive motive. For example, a person who constantly keeps people waiting and then is baffled at why they resent this behavior is passive-aggressively disavowing an unconscious wish to be special and to provoke those who fail to acknowledge the specialness. This is unconscious. This is not direct aggression – it is unconscious. An example of a passive-aggressive behavior that expresses aggression toward God because of the anger might be to forget to go to Mass on a Holy Day of Obligation. Just forget. “It’s just slipped my mind!” Or to get to mass late, or to not have time for prayers in a given day. These are all ways that we can act out unconsciously against God in aggressive ways – ways that are ordered toward irritating him, because we tend to treat God the same way that we treat other people when it comes to these defense mechanisms. So that’s the fourth one, passive-aggressive behavior.

[01:04:29] The fifth one is a little more complicated. This one’s an important one, though, because I see it a lot and it’s called reaction formation. And according to the American Psychological Association Dictionary of Psychology, where I’m getting all these definitions unless I say otherwise. It says “in psychoanalytic theory, reaction formation is a defense mechanism in which unacceptable or threatening unconscious impulses are denied and are replaced in consciousness with their opposite. For example, to conceal an unconscious prejudice, an individual may preach tolerance’ to deny feelings of rejection, a mother may be overindulgent toward her child.” So, reaction formation goes beyond repression. In repression it’s enough to just restrain the anger at God and keep it out of conscious awareness. That’s not enough for reaction formation – In reaction formation, we so need to refute the anger that we have to have the opposite emotion toward God, warmth or affection for God. But here’s the problem with reaction formation. There’s always something kind of hollow about it. It doesn’t really have the right vibe. And you hear this in church circles, right? Especially among people that are very active in parishes. They might say something like, “you know, I just love God. I love him so much. You know, his ways are not my ways, but I just know he’s so loving and kind to me.” And then somebody else asks, “So when your beloved husband died unexpectedly in that traffic accident, you didn’t have any anger at God?” “No, no, no! I’m never angry at God – I want to suffer for him. I want to be wounded by him. And I know my husband’s in a better place and he loves me even better than he did before.” All that said, when in fact unacknowledged, there is a deep anger, a lot of anger, unresolved grief, all kinds of unresolved emotions toward God. We have this kind of reaction formation in the spiritual bypassing. So that is the fifth one.

[01:06:45] Let’s go to the sixth one, which is compartmentalization. And in compartmentalization, thoughts and feelings that seem to conflict or to be incompatible are isolated from one another and separate in apparently impermeable psychic compartments. So basically it’s walling off your emotions one from another. And it’s related to isolation of affect, which is a defense mechanism in which the individual screens out painful feelings by recalling a traumatic or painful event without experiencing the emotion associated with it. The main thing here is things being walled off – not experiencing the intensity of the emotion because it’s so threatening to be angry at a God who could smite you with an awareness that that anger is disordered, it just seems really, really risky. So an example might be a man who has just heard that his cancer is terminal. He’s only 27 years old, he’s engaged; this turns his life upside down. And he might recount in a very factual way, a very logical way, a very theologically sound way, you know, his situation. But no emotion is connected to how he considers the hand of God operating in his life. Compartmentalization with this isolation of affect.

[01:08:14] The next one is displacement. This is really a critical one. Displacement is “the transfer of feelings or behavior from their original object to another person or thing. In psychoanalytic theory, displacement is considered to be a defense mechanism in which the individual discharges tensions associated with, for example, hostility and fear by taking them out on a less threatening target. Thus, an angry child might break a toy or yell at a sibling instead of attacking the father; a frustrated employee might criticize his or her spouse instead of the boss.” People displace anger at God all the time. All the time. And this is where I think a lot of times priests get a tough, tough job. I think priests are often the safer object to be angry at. A person doesn’t want to be angry at God because of the smiting, but man, they’ll take it out in the pastor or on the associate pastor. So that person becomes the safer object upon which to focus the anger. Priests become lightning rods for so much intensity, not just about anger toward God, but also about anger toward the natural father, right. Because of their identity as father. It takes an incredible amount, I think, it takes a very high degree of human formation to function effectively as a priest. You can’t just have a normal level of formation because of all the intensity. In fact, I think priests are so poorly understood by so many of their parishioners, it can be very difficult because of these psychological processes for parishioners to understand their priests in an accurate way. They’re just seen in so many through so many distorted lenses, and that’s really hard on priests. People don’t realize that. People can also displace anger at God onto bishops or to the pope, you know. Now, that’s not to say that popes can’t generate all kinds of anger on their own. It’s not all anger at God displaced onto the pope, but popes are a lightning rod for displaced anger at God. It just happens. There is a special type of displacement that warrants its own category here in our defense mechanisms.

[01:10:37] So the next one is turning against the self. Turning against the self. Now, this is where where Dr. Saul McLeod in his article ’10 Defense Mechanisms: What They Are and How They Help Us Cope’, he describes turning against the self as “a very special form of displacement, where the person becomes his or her own substitute target. It is normally used in reference to hatred, anger and aggression.” Alright, so what happens here in turning against the self is that the anger that a person has toward God is turned back against the self. “I’m not angry at God! I’m angry at me.” “I don’t have aggression toward God. I am aggressive toward myself.” And this is anger turned inward. It leads to self-condemnation. Anger at God is redirected toward the self. That’s where you hear people say, “this never would have happened if I were holier or more virtuous or if I loved God completely. I’m a bad person. That’s why God is abandoning me. I deserve this – that’s why it’s happening. And God is right to treat me this way.” The anger at God was redirected, turned against the self. And that is the eighth of our list of defenses we’re halfway through.

[01:12:00] Next one is externalization. Externalization is “a defense mechanism in which one’s thoughts, feelings or perceptions are attributed to the external world and perceived as independent from one’s self or one’s own experiences.” So an example here of externalization of anger at God is a person who says, “I don’t understand why so many Catholics are so angry. You’ve got the progressive liberal Catholics who are always up in arms about social justice, complaining about the wall on the southern border, treatment of immigrants. Then you’ve got the traditional Catholics who have their knickers in a twist about Pope Francis and the Latin Mass, and you’ve got all these talking Catholic heads on the internet up in umbrage about synods and synodality and Communion for politicians. And I don’t get it. You all need to chill out, guys. It’s all okay. All shall be well,” says Julian of Norwich. And that’s all happening when this guy is externalizing his own anger and seeing anger, his own anger in the experience of those around him. He’s not owning his own anger. He’s externalizing it. It’s being acknowledged, but not as his own – it’s attributed to other people around him. That’s the defensive externalization.

[01:13:14] Then the defensive projection. The offensive projection is a particular form of externalization, but it’s a really important one. So it’s going to get its own separate little category here in psychoanalytic and psychodynamic theories. The process of projection is when one attributes one’s own individual positive or negative characteristics, ethics and impulses to another person or group. This is often a defense mechanism in which unpleasant or unacceptable impulses, stressors, ideas, affects or responsibilities are attributed to others. For example, the defense mechanism of projection enables a person conflicted over expressing anger to change “I hate him” to “he hates me”. This is what happens so often with Catholic anger. It’s not owned by the person who’s experiencing it – it’s projected onto God. So the existence of the anger is not denied, the existence of the anger is acknowledged, but the directionality is reversed. “It’s not that I’m angry at God. It’s that God is angry at me.” So the person who’s projecting anger onto God may say, “I don’t know why God is so angry at me. I don’t know why he treats me this way. Why can’t I ever do anything right for him or be enough for him?” when in fact the person is very angry at God, just totally out of touch with it.

[01:14:50] The next defense mechanism is avoidance. And according to the APA Dictionary of Psychology, this is “the practice of keeping away from particular situations, environments, individuals or things because of either a) the anticipated negative consequences of such an encounter or b) anxious or painful feelings associated with them.” Alright, so this is where we just avoid God – we don’t pray, we don’t connect, and that leads us to a particular form of avoidance, which is distraction. This is where we use various things to keep our minds away from our anger at God. Anything could be used this way. So many things can be used this way. Video games, screen time, any kind of stimulus to move my attention away from my anger at God and onto something else.

[01:15:39] And another form of this is hypomanic states. So a hypomanic state is a state of enhanced mood and increased energy and activity that resembles mania but is milder. So it’s euphoric mood. It’s the exact opposite of a depressed mood. And this is something that Conrad Baars brought up. He was a Catholic psychiatrist. He discussed it in terms of obsessive compulsive disorder, but he framed it in terms of an energy-based repression, which was described as when “a person uses energy, for example, courage, daring, hope, fearlessness, etc., to get rid of unacceptable emotions or feelings. The person may seem to be well-balanced, self-controlled and efficient, but he or she is forcefully keeping control over the unacceptable emotions by preventing them from being felt.” We’re canceling out this anger at God by this euphoric mood, by this hypomanic mood. And sometimes this gets paired up with reaction formation like we talked about before.

[01:16:46] Next one is somatization. And this is, “the expression of psychological disturbance in physical or bodily symptoms.” And Bessel van der Kolk, trauma researcher, famously sum this up in ‘The Body Keeps the Score’. For example, a woman could express her anger at God in her body. I had a case like this many years ago where a woman that I was treating was so, so angry at God. I’ve never seen anybody this angry at God, and it resulted in a partial paralysis. She couldn’t move her arms because there was this intense desire to strike out at God and at other people. So much rage that her body became so involved in this and it led to this psychogenic paralysis. You can see this in jaw clenches sometimes that’ll express anger that could be anger at God. Clenched fists in prayer, not realizing that you’re doing it. Muscle tension of various kinds. There’s lots of different ways that the body can express anger at God.

[01:17:59] The next one: obsessions. Obsessions are persistent thoughts, ideas, images, or impulses that are experienced as intrusive or inappropriate and that result in marked anxiety, distress or discomfort, according to the APA dictionary. I went into this in a lot of detail in episode 86 of this podcast called ‘Obsessions, Compulsions, OCD, and Internal Family Systems’, so I’m not going to spend a lot of time on it right here. But there’s a particular kind of obsession that is really important, and that is the scruples, right? And the International OCD Foundation Fact Sheet in its article, ‘What Is Scrupulously?’ By C. Alec Pollard defines scrupulously as “a form of obsessive compulsive disorder involving religious or moral obsessions. Scrupulous individuals are overly concerned that something they thought or did might be a sin or other violation of religious or moral doctrine.” And I covered this in great detail in episode 87 of this podcast titled ‘When OCD Gets Religion’. I said in that podcast episode that scrupulously is the son of anger and the grandson of shame. And there are core issues of shame that are suppressed and generate anger. Anger is suppressed and generates fear and scruples.

[01:19:20] Okay, so those are the sixteen defense mechanisms that drive your anger into your unconscious. There are many more of them, by the way. This isn’t all of them. These are the main ones, though, that I think are important for us to be aware of. This next idea, this next section is how anger can be overpowered by fear. And this I was first introduced to by the work of Conrad Barres. He’s the Catholic psychiatrist that I mentioned. And here’s a quote from the Conrad Baars’ Institute website. “When an individual considers even one emotion or feeling unacceptable or dangerous, then the stage is set for repression. When an emotion, for example, love, hate, desire, aversion, joy, sadness, fear or anger is repressed by fear, that emotion is pushed into the subconscious or is buried alive where that person can no longer deal with it. Instead, this emotion exists in a state of tension or anxiety which the person cannot ‘get rid of.’ Fear influences the entire psychic life including the imagination and motor activity. As the person does not know the reason for the anxiety, he or she may try unsuccessfully for years to figure out the cause.” And I have seen that over and over and over again. Now, I think it’s easier to think about this in terms of parts. A part that is experiencing so much fear is exiling a part that experiences anger toward God. In Barzun thinking, it’s really one emotion that is dominating another emotion and forcing it outside of conscious awareness.

[01:21:00] Alright, so moving onto the last of our seven major sections for this podcast, the signs and symptoms of your unacknowledged anger at God. So what are the signs and symptoms? I’m going to cover 11 of them. We’ll just roll through these pretty quickly and then I’ll describe each one in a little more detail. Number one: so the first sign or symptom of unacknowledged anger at God – thoughts that suggest anger at God. The second is general laxity in the spiritual life. The third is a lack of bringing God and Mary to mind – lack of thinking about them. Number four: not seeking spiritual counselor advice. Five is anger at the Church. Six are intrusive thoughts. Seven is swearing, especially taking the Lord’s name in vain, either internally (in your thoughts) or externally. Eight is indulging in borderline activities – these are marginal activities that kind of border on being sinful. The ninth is overindulging in good things. The tenth is leading others to indulge in borderline activities or to overindulging good things. And the eleventh is having little consideration of the afterlife. Now, when I bring these up, I’m saying that these are sensitive signs, but not specific signs. And what I mean by that is just because you may have these doesn’t mean that they have to reflect anger at God. They can, and often anger at God is reflected by these types of signs or symptoms, but these signs and symptoms are not specific. It doesn’t mean necessarily that they’re reflecting in anger at God – they can have other causes. So we want to be really clear about sensitivity and specificity.

[01:22:57] Alright, so let’s start with the first one: thoughts that suggest anger at God. And we’ve got a list of these from Novotni and Petersen on page 166. These are the kinds of thoughts that suggest unacknowledged anger at God. “It isn’t fair that God allows bad things to happen to me.” “I feel that God is so distant from me.” “I’m afraid to ask God for what I really want.” “God lets me suffer and doesn’t come to help me.” “It seems as if God is waiting around the corner to trip me up. He’s out to get me!” “It seems that God is never satisfied with my efforts to please him.” I feel so bad about myself. God can’t see any value in me.” Alright, so those are the thoughts. The person is not feeling anger – they may feel sadness or fear or they might feel other things, but they’re not feeling anger, but they imply certain God images that are unjust. So I begin to wonder, “okay, where is the anger?” It might be an unacknowledged.

[01:24:04] So the second of the signs and symptoms of unacknowledged anger at God is general laxity in the spiritual life. This can be expressed through issues in the life of prayer, like avoiding prayer. And I had a weekly reflection from January 4, 2023, titled ‘The Secret Psychological Reasons We Fail to Make Time for Prayer’. You can check out these weekly reflections in the archive at soulsandhearts.com/blog. This one is from January 4 – get into that in detail. You can also avoid personal prayer – intimate conversational prayer with Our Lord and Lady, retreating to formal vocal prayers which aren’t very relational in the way that you pray them. Another issue in the life of prayer that can reflect general laxity in the spiritual life as a way of expressing unacknowledged anger at God are allowing distractions in prayer, and I had a whole series of weekly reflections one from January 11, 2023, titled ‘Distractions and Prayer: Satan, Symptoms, or Something Else?’ Then the weekly reflection from January 18 was ‘Distractions in Prayer: When Our Parts Cry For Help’, and then the one from January 25, 2023, titled ‘Distracted Prayers: Hidden Reasons for Avoiding God.’ So issues in the life of prayer can reveal a general laxity in the spiritual life, but so can compromised Mass attendance, avoiding Mass, looking for excuses or seeking justifications for dispensations – minor illnesses for yourself or others that you care for – “I’m not going to go to Mass.” Coming late to mass or leaving early, squeezing in a busy weekend schedule, choosing the shortest Mass, or forgetting holy days of obligation. You can also engage in distractions in Mass. And again, you can see that when people compromise their confession as well – delaying confession beyond once per month or minimizing engaging in the process of confession, seeking confessors who are the easiest, who don’t ask questions, who accept a minimalist approach to confession, you know, the 90-second confession – get ’em in, get ’em out kind of a thing. That can indicate a general laxity in the spiritual life, which expresses anger toward God without us being aware of it, including things like a lack of spiritual reading, lectio divina, not living out a plan of life, things like that. That is the second sign or symptom of your unacknowledged anger at God, that whole class.

[01:26:38] The third is lack of thinking about God or Mary. This happens when hours go by with no thoughts of God as your Father, Mary as your Mother. No thoughts of the love of God. You’re just caught up in what is going on in the immediate circumstances of your life. The next one is not seeking spiritual counsel, advice or advice when you need it. Sometimes because you might hear something you don’t want to hear. Something might be inconvenient in that spiritual counselor advice. And there’s a way of avoiding that that also expresses anger toward God, even though you’re not aware. The next one is anger at the Church. The Church is the mystical body of Christ, so when there’s anger at the Church, we might be seeing this displacement. This goes back to that defensive displacement where there’s anger at the Church. That could be reflected in not giving to your parish or your or your dioceses, even if you’re generous to other causes. That’s an example of that.

[01:27:45] The next one is intrusive thoughts. This sometimes comes up when parts who are really angry at God are not given a voice, and they come up with disturbing imagery, disturbing ideas, those kinds of things. For example, desecrating the Eucharist, right? An image of you desecrating the Eucharist or maybe acting out during mass, standing up and yelling something. These kinds of impulses – it’s often a way that parts are trying to get our attention about the intensity of anger toward God. The next one is swearing, especially taking the Lord’s name in vain. That could be ‘inadvertent’ swearing. You know, “I don’t know why I’m swearing.” You know, a lot of times it happens internally. It’s not necessarily vocalized, but it happens internally. The next one is this indulging in borderline activities – asking the question, “is it sinful?” instead of asking the question “what would be best here? What does God will for me?” It could be movies or video games or things like gambling or drinking that are being pushed too far. Overindulgence in various things. Anything from sleeping to shopping to exercising. When we do that, we might be expressing some sort of anger toward God and the way that we do that.

[01:29:14] And then this idea of leading others to indulge in borderline activities or to overindulge, to draw them away from God. This can be unconsciously seen as a good thing to some parts of us. For example, a part of you that might say, “Tina, she is kind of a holy roller. She’s a little too tightly wound in her Catholicism. She needs to let her hair down a little and live life. She should come out with us to the bar and have a few drinks.” And then the next one, the final one, is little consideration of the afterlife. Not looking forward to heaven. You know, a lot of times people do not look forward to heaven because of anger at God. They’re conflicted, because parts don’t want to be with a God who is like their God images. You know, how would you like to be gazing face to face with a drill instructor God for all eternity? Parts do not want to be in that situation. So heaven doesn’t sound appealing to certain sectors within us or certain modes of operating that we have. Now, this list is far from exhaustive. There can be many, many more signs and symptoms of unacknowledged anger at God. But I offer these to you just to get you to start thinking about what this might look like.

[01:30:32] Now we’re coming to the end. We’ve laid out the problem of anger at God today in detail, but we did not get to the solutions yet. And I want you to have what Father Henri Nouwen calls, “the beginning of a new, very honest encounter with the Lord.” We are going to get there in the next episode. Mark your calendars. The live experience of the Interior Integration for Catholics podcast will be on Saturday, February 18, 2023, from 10:00 AM to 11:00 AM EST. February 18 – that’s a Saturday morning, 10:00 AM to 11:00 AM EST. That’s episode 106, and it is an experiential exercise, all about your anger at God. It’s all designed to help you get in touch with your anger at God. And it’s titled ‘God in the Hands of Angry Sinners.’ It’s free to participate. Registration links have gone out in our Wednesday email reflections. You can sign up for those on our home page at soulsandhearts.com. I’m going to give you a special free gift if you sign up for the weekly emails or if you get the weekly emails. You will get access to my notes from this episode as a downloadable PDF. That’s a free bonus for my email subscribers. 17 pages, single spaced, 11 point font, narrow margins, all the information in here full of links and quotes and all kinds of information. If I mention it in this podcast, I generally link to it in my notes and some of you have been requesting my show notes and now you can have them, but they’re only for those in the Souls and Hearts communities, the Resilient Catholics Community and the ITC, the Interior Therapist Community, but also for those who sign up for my weekly email reflections go to soulsandhearts.com, our home page and click on the blue box that says, “Get Dr. Peter’s weekly reflection in your email box each Wednesday.” And if you’ve done all of that and you’re not getting the email, check your spam folder, white list the soulsandhearts.com domain. Also, you might have unsubscribed. Some people do that. We’re not going to spam you – resubscribe! We are never going to share your email address or sell your email address to anybody else. So your email address is protected with us. We take that seriously. I want you to know that so that if you do decide that you want to subscribe, that you’ve got some peace of mind about that. The link to register for episode 106 – that’s the live experience you’ll exercise titled ‘God in the Hands of Angry Sinners’ is also on the IIC, the Interior Integration for Catholics landing page at soulsandhearts.com/IIC. It can be a really powerful experience for those who come and join us live, and we will release that episode as a regular podcast episode on February 20, 2023. Get in touch with me if you’d like: crisis@soulsandhearts.com, that’s my email. It’s much faster to reach me by my cell. My number, 317-567-9594, 317-567-9594. I have conversation hours every Tuesday and Thursday from 4:30 PM to 5:30 PM EST. I sit by my phone and I talk to people one on one. It’s not therapy, but we can have a conversation about anything that came up for you in the podcast or in the weekly reflections.

[01:34:02] The other thing is that you can come and meet me in person in San Diego. You can meet me and Dr. Jerry at the Catholic Psychotherapy Association Annual conference in San Diego, California, from April 20-22, 2023. This year’s theme for the CPA Conference is, ‘In The Beginning…Etiology, Treatment and Healing of Human Sexuality.’ And at that CPA Conference. Jody Garneau and I will be presenting a three hour workshop titled ‘The Integrated Catholic Therapist: A Compassionate Approach to Sexual Concerns Using IfS.’ We’re going to be presenting on Friday, April 21, 2023, from 1:30 PM to 3:00 PM and again from 3:30 PM to 5:00 PM local time. That’s PST. And we’re going to offer our audience live experiential exercises in case presentations. There is a livestream option, if you can’t travel in person, and you don’t have to be a therapist or counselor to attend. More details and registration information are on the Catholic Psychotherapy Association website at catholicpsychotherapy.org. And I’ve saved the most important thing to last. Please pray for me. Please pray for our staff at Souls and Hearts. All the efforts at Souls and Hearts are fueled by prayers. Your prayers and my prayers. And know that I am praying for you as well. And with that, we’ll close it out by invoking our patroness and our patron. Our Lady, Our Mother, Untier of Knots, pray for us. St. John the Baptist, pray for us.