How do I let go of anger?

[KatrinaGentry]

Since the tragic injury, illness and death of my late husband, a lot of things have come to light that I really wish hadn't.  Apparently he was a habitual cheater and I am angry. I spent almost 20 years with him and knew about 3 instances but since his passing the doors have swung open and many others have surfaced. It's almost daily that new things arise now and I just want it to be over. I loved him with everything in me and I'm returned with this. How do I let it go and move on. It consumes me. It is damaging new relationships for me. How do I make it stop and get the happy-go-lucky me back?

[DWS]

Offering advice or suggestions to you is a tricky one because none of us here know you or anything of what you're discovering. We can offer sympathy and some empathy but it's likely not what you really are looking for. My only small piece of advice...coming from another sad griever like yourself...is to try to understand that grief will change us. The happy-go-lucky you that you want returned suggests that you liked that person you were so this is likely where you need to focus. You shared love and deserved love because you're a loving person. There's so much truth in the saying that to be able to truly love another you must love yourself first. I see that in so many here who are deeply grieving. We grieve because of the sincere love we had for our partners and spouses and that love blossomed out of the love we have for ourselves.

I don't know if that helps but understanding your loving and trustful personal way about you is likely key to moving forward despite the hurt of what's being revealed to you. You may eventually find that the happy-go-lucky you becomes the happy-go-wiser you...still capable of giving lots of love but with the added colour of experience and insight. 

[April Ballou]

@KatrinaGentry there are not enough words to say.  It's sad that so many things keep coming up about your husband's past.  Some of what your going through I went through with my biological mother.   My whole life was lies.  Things came up and I was left with no siblings and my mother was gone.  I am sorry your having to deal with this.  The only way that I was able to get through was prayer.  God has brought me through. 

[KayC]

I am so sorry, it's the hardest thing in the world, not only losing them to death but not being able to vent/ask them questions, get apologies!  So many seem to compartmentalize rather than talk over what they're feeling/doing.  Finding things out AFTER their death is very hard to deal with.  My heart certainly goes out to you.

Mine wasn't cheating, but he'd confessed to me three weeks before he died that his boss had gotten him onto Meth so he'd worth harder/faster.  George didn't have a problem working hard/fast, he already gave them more than they ever paid him for!  They broke weight restrictions continually and I've often wondered how much this factored into his heart attack, the heart surgeon said no but I already know it thins the lining to the heart, I think the surgeon told me that to try to make me feel better.  
I think one of the hardest things was learning about the deception, I was discovering things a year later!  Lies to cover the $ he spent, he left me $72,000 in debt, I had been financially debt free when we married a few years earlier.  He knew it was lies that broke up my 23 year marriage to my kids dad (among other things), he knew how much honesty means to me!  I realize he didn't want to lose me and figured what I didn't know wouldn't hurt me, but that's where they are wrong...the Bible says, "Be SURE your sins will find you out!"  Yep, eventually the truth will be known.  I think once he got caught in the trap of drugs, he didn't know his way out.  I was lucky, he confessed (without naming every deception used to cover his tracks...those I had to find out on my own and deal with AFTER his death!)...I know he was getting counseling and even doing his workbook when he had a heart attack and landed in the hospital...he never came home except in an urn.

I had to learn to forgive him for my own sake, I don't want to let resentment/unforgiveness have the power to change who I am as a person, I've seen people become bittered over that.  I also had to learn to accept the WHOLE of the man, not just the part I didn't agree with/like.  It's a PROCESS, it has a starting point (decision) but it takes time to work through it.  I really hope you'll get some counseling with this, someone professional, who can walk you through it.  (((hugs)))
Cheating husband died
Death of cheating spouse
Forgiveness: Letting go of grudges and bitterness - Mayo Clinic
Eight Keys to Forgiveness | Greater Good

Grief Process

 

This is not a one-size-fits-all, what strikes us one day will be different a few months/years from now, so please save/print this for reference!

I want to share an article I wrote of the things I've found helpful over the years, in the hopes something will be of help to you either now or on down the road.

TIPS TO MAKE YOUR WAY THROUGH GRIEF

There's no way to sum up how to go on in a simple easy answer, but I encourage you to read the other threads here, little by little you will learn how to make your way through this.  I do want to give you some pointers though, of some things I've learned on my journey.

• Take one day at a time.  The Bible says each day has enough trouble of its own, I've found that to be true, so don't bite off more than you can chew.  It can be challenging enough just to tackle today.  I tell myself, I only have to get through today.  Then I get up tomorrow and do it all over again.  To think about the "rest of my life" invites anxiety.
• Don't be afraid, grief may not end but it evolves.  The intensity lessens eventually.
• Visit your doctor.  Tell them about your loss, any troubles sleeping, suicidal thoughts, anxiety attacks.  They need to know these things in order to help you through it...this is all part of grief.
• Suicidal thoughts are common in early grief.  If they're reoccurring, call a suicide hotline.  I felt that way early on, but then realized it wasn't that I wanted to die so much as I didn't want to go through what I'd have to face if I lived.  Back to taking a day at a time.  Suicide Hotline - Call 1-800-273-8255 or www.crisis textline.org or US and Canada: text 741741 UK: text 85258 | Ireland: text 50808
• Give yourself permission to smile.  It is not our grief that binds us to them, but our love, and that continues still.
• Try not to isolate too much.  
• There's a balance to reach between taking time to process our grief, and avoiding it...it's good to find that balance for yourself.  We can't keep so busy as to avoid our grief, it has a way of haunting us, finding us, and demanding we pay attention to it!  Some people set aside time every day to grieve.  I didn't have to, it searched and found me!
• Self-care is extremely important, more so than ever.  That person that would have cared for you is gone, now you're it...learn to be your own best friend, your own advocate, practice self-care.  You'll need it more than ever.
• Recognize that your doctor isn't trained in grief, find a professional grief counselor that is.  We need help finding ourselves through this maze of grief, knowing where to start, etc.  They have not only the knowledge, but the resources.
• In time, consider a grief support group.  If your friends have not been through it themselves, they may not understand what you're going through, it helps to find someone somewhere who DOES "get it". 
• Be patient, give yourself time.  There's no hurry or timetable about cleaning out belongings, etc.  They can wait, you can take a year, ten years, or never deal with it.  It's okay, it's what YOU are comfortable with that matters.  
• Know that what we are comfortable with may change from time to time.  That first couple of years I put his pictures up, took them down, up, down, depending on whether it made me feel better or worse.  Finally, they were up to stay.
• Consider a pet.  Not everyone is a pet fan, but I've found that my dog helps immensely.  It's someone to love, someone to come home to, someone happy to see me, someone that gives me a purpose...I have to come home and feed him.  Besides, they're known to relieve stress.  Well maybe not in the puppy stage when they're chewing up everything, but there's older ones to adopt if you don't relish that stage.
• Make yourself get out now and then.  You may not feel interest in anything, things that interested you before seem to feel flat now.  That's normal.  Push yourself out of your comfort zone just a wee bit now and then.  Eating out alone, going to a movie alone or church alone, all of these things are hard to do at first.  You may feel you flunked at it, cried throughout, that's okay, you did it, you tried, and eventually you get a little better at it.  If I waited until I had someone to do things with I'd be stuck at home a lot.
• Keep coming here.  We've been through it and we're all going through this together.
• Look for joy in every day.  It will be hard to find at first, but in practicing this, it will change your focus so you can embrace what IS rather than merely focusing on what ISN'T.  It teaches you to live in the present and appreciate fully.  You have lost your big joy in life, and all other small joys may seem insignificant in comparison, but rather than compare what used to be to what is, learn the ability to appreciate each and every small thing that comes your way...a rainbow, a phone call from a friend, unexpected money, a stranger smiling at you, whatever the small joy, embrace it.  It's an art that takes practice and is life changing if you continue it.
• Eventually consider volunteering.  It helps us when we're outward focused, it's a win/win.

(((hugs)))  Praying for you today.

 

[KayC]

I am unable to load Sarah's original Ted talk but if you go to it you can see a transcript of what she says...(15 min. video cut to 5 min.) 

"In the summer of 2016, I did the sensible thing: I quit my cushy job at a hedge fund to write a play about my family's murder. (Sighs) I told my friends and family that this was about art, but in truth, I was on a spiritual vision quest. I was seeking closure to a relationship with someone that I barely knew - the kid who killed my mother and brother. He was my friend's younger brother, a kid from our neighborhood. He came over a handful of times to raid our family's snack cabinet. My mom actually used to wave to him from the van and say, "He's going through a hard time, I just want to make sure he knows that I see him." He broke into our house a couple of days before Christmas, looking for some stuff to sell for cash. When he came across my brother Jim asleep on the couch, he panicked, shot him and fled the scene. Then he realized he forgot his coat. By the time he came back, my mom had found Jim. Because he knew that she recognized him, and, to quote him, "Because she wouldn't stop screaming," he shot and killed her too. He is currently serving back-to-back life sentences in a prison in Southwestern Virginia. (Sighs) Over the course of the next seven years, I somehow managed not to hate him, but my grief and trauma did something a little bit weirder. He became a non-person to me. He wasn't a person, he was the face of all evil. He was the twister that came through and ripped up our house and threw it in some hellish version of Oz, but not a 17-year-old boy - or, I realized now, a 24-year-old man. A man who came of age in a cell, if he came of age at all. And as I set down to write the villain of my play and my life, I realized I had a name, some fractured childhood memories, a brief court document and nothing else to go on. So I went to the source of all answers, Google. I googled his prisoner ID number. That's when the internet sucker punched me in the face. Two thirds of prisoners in his penitentiary spend 23 hours a day in solitary confinement in eight-by-ten cells with slats for light. Conditions are so bad that in 2012 the entire prison went on a hunger strike. As I scrolled through case after case of human rights violations at this prison, suddenly, he became a person to me again. I remember the first time I saw mom and Jim's bodies in the funeral home, how my recoiled when I felt the small, destructive supernova that the bullet made in the back of Jim's skull. My mom's face just collapsed in on itself. Not her, just flesh and bones in that black dress we bought at Kohl's the week before. Those were my most painful memories. But when I pictured him - beaten, starving, crying out in a dark cell - yeah, that was somehow just as painful. And I realized it was because we were still connected. That steel tether of trauma that he hooked into my side when he killed them was still there, and I had been lurching against its pull and dragging him through the mud for the past seven years, whether I knew it or not. And it was with a little horror that I realized that he may have killed them, but I chose to keep us connected. So after wading through all the options - I mean, literally every option at my disposal - I realized the only way to get rid of this dude was to forgive him. That was a real bummer of a conclusion to come to. (Laughter) Because the truth was I thought that I already had forgiven him. I told my friends I forgave him; I told my family I forgave him; I even said "I forgive you" in the national news. So if saying you forgive someone is not the same thing as doing it, why was this guy still hooked into my side, dragging me around, making me do dumb things like quit my job to write a play? Turns out there is no fake it 'till you make it in forgiveness even though that's exactly what society expects us to do. So how do you forgive effectively, once and for all? That question started another Google rabbit hole, and then the theological rabbit hole, and then the Psychiatric-Journal and medical-journal rabbit hole until finally, my poor husband came home to a frantic wife, feral, just pacing the apartment, spewing statistics about forgiveness, like, "Did you know that there are 62 passages in the Bible with the word forgive and 27 with the word forgiveness? Not a single one tells you how to do it!" (Laughter) They just say how great it is! It's like the Nike of spiritual gifts: "Just do it!" (Laughter) And then there's this doctor Wayne guy over here, who says, "To forgive, we just got to let go and be like water." What does that mean? My husband approached me very cautiously. "Sweetie, what you doing?" (Laughter) "Trying to forgive the kid who killed my family, but nobody will tell me how." Oh, there are endless five-star historical Yelp reviews for forgiveness. The sales pitch is fantastic, but literally, What do I do? I think I was asking the wrong question, starting with how, when really what I needed to know was why. Why forgive? Why do it? That's when I discovered that most of us are forgiving for the wrong reasons. Some victims, like me, try to forgive right away because it's the right thing to do. But if we're honest with ourselves, there's only three reasons a victim forgives automatically. One: you think that forgiving quickly will make you a good person. That's an easy mistake to make, right? If forgiveness is good, a good person should forgive right away. But in all my research, I actually didn't find a timeline for forgiveness. Everybody was just really desperately urging us to get around to it because they knew we didn't want to. Even Jesus, when he talks about turning the other cheek, isn't talking about forgiveness. He's talking about non-violence. There has to be a middle ground between letting someone of the hook right away and going full an eye for an eye on them. Two: victims feel a lot of pressure to forgive from everyone else. It can come from your friends, from your family, from the media, from mixed up religious messaging. But the truth is, everyone wants you to forgive quickly so they can feel more comfortable, and they can move on. That's a crappy reason to do anything. Three: you think that forgiveness is a shortcut to healing. You think if you skip to the end of the story, you can bypass all the angry, vulnerable, messy healing crap. Spoiler alert: that one will come back to bite you in the butt. For me, it was all three reasons. I want to be a good person, I love pleasing other people, and I hate the vulnerable, angry, messy, healing crap. But it turns out that forgiveness is such a potent force that none of those reasons were strong enough to make it stick. Just like love. If your motivation is selfish, even a good selfish thing like healing, it will collapse in on itself like a dying star. So why do it? Why forgive? It can't heal you; it won't save you or the other person; it can't make you a good person - at least not all by itself - because that's not what forgiveness is designed to do. Forgiveness is designed to set you free. When you say, "I forgive you," what you're really saying is, "I know what you did. It's not okay, but I recognize that you are more than that. I don't want to hold us captive to this thing anymore. I can heal myself, and I don't need anything from you." After you say that, and you mean it, then it's just you. No chains, no prisoners. Just the good, the bad and the ugly of whoever that person was from the start. Our culture thinks that vengeance is freedom, but it is a total prison. Any act of violence, whether it's emotional or physical, is this weird, twisted form of intimacy. That's why the Greeks said that a death by a good man was a good death. Think about it. Every time somebody thinks about my mom and my brother, they think about the fact that they're not here, and then they think about the kid who did this. That one act of violence actually bound the three of them together in people's minds for eternity. When we choose vengeance, we're actually signing a blood oath to chain our story to our enemies for the rest of time. Forgiveness is the only real path to freedom. But to get free, you have to get super specific about what exactly it is that you're forgiving because you cannot forgive something that didn't happen to you. In my research, I came across this idea from Judaism that hit me in the chest. In Judaism, the family can't forgive murderers, because they were not killed. They can only forgive the pain, anguish and grief that the loss caused them. This was a total jackpot moment for me. I had to compartmentalize my damage: not what happened to mom and Jim, not what happened to my family, not what happened to society, what happened to me. This is why justice often feels really cold for victims. It's justice's job to assess what is owed. And it is the criminal justice system's job to assess what is owed to society. Not to victims. It is up to us to get really clear, individually, on what we are owed. You can't forgive your father for beating your mother. You can only forgive him for how sad, alienated and angry that made you feel. I couldn't forgive him for killing mom and Jim. I'm still here. I had to assess my damages. The wedding that I had without the two of them. The parts of me that my husband and kids will never get to understand without knowing the two of them. The way my life was supposed to start at 22, and he broke it. My inherent sense of safety and belonging, which, I got to be honest, I don't think are coming back. Those are my damages. Most of us avoid forgiveness like the plague because we do not want to look at our wounds. Wounds are scary, they are nasty, they are icky, it is why most of us look away when we donate blood. It is way easier to take all of that emotion and channel it into rage at another person. I got to be honest with you, I say: do it. (Laughter) You thought this would be about forgiveness, huh? It's an important part of the process. Anger is important; it is the fire that cauterizes our wounds and lets them scar over and heal. Too much anger, and yes, you'll get third-degree burns. Without a little bit of heat, you'll never scar over, and you'll never know exactly what happened to you. If you don't know what happened to you, you can't know what you're forgiving. But once you know what's happened to you, it's time for some good old-fashioned justice. Sorry, I married a Texan. (Laughter) So what in justice's name am I owed? An apology? An explanation? A front-row seat to their torture chamber? Maybe - not the last part - but maybe you are owed those things in general. Nine times out of ten, if you ask for those things, you will get them. Which is why forgiveness is not the right thing in most situations. Forgiveness is only right when waiting for what we're owed comes at too high a cost. In all those years, with that guy chained to my side, I got a lot done. I went to grad school, I married a wonderful man, I started a career that I honestly really love. But I did it all a little more slowly, and I wasn't just dragging him along, I was dragging my mother and brother in the process, twisting the three of them up together in those chains. Pretty soon, that little posse started to crowd me out of my own body and my own experience. And one day, losing myself in order to punish him and keep the two of them alive felt like too high a cost to bear. It was there, in that crossroads, when I knew what had happened to me. I knew what I was owed, and I decided than choosing myself was more important than being right. That's when I was ready to forgive. So I stepped away from Google, and I didn't ask any more questions, and I wrote him a letter. I tore unused pages out of my mom's journals, actually, and I wrote. I told him that what happened on December 19th, 2008, was not okay and would probably never be okay for either of us. But just because it wasn't okay, that didn't mean he owed me anything - not an apology, not an explanation, not his role as my villain. I told him that I hated to be reduced to one thing that happened to me one day. I yearned to be more, to be whole, and I didn't think that I could do that if I looked at another person and reduced him to one thing he did one day and made evil the sum of its parts. I told him that I wished him a lifetime full of healing and that I forgave him. Then, without thinking, I plopped that letter into a mailbox on the corner of Flatbush Avenue and Church. For the first 10 steps, there was this lightness of being, and then that lightness started to feel like a lurch in your stomach, when you hit the spiritual tripwire. My chest unwound, it burst, and suddenly, I was alone with myself. I mean, really alone, giving birth to a stranger, saying hello to a girl that I hadn't spoken to in seven years. (Sighs) Sometimes I miss him. (Laughter) Not him, the monster that I created. Things were a lot harsher and black and white, but they were a lot simpler when I had a villain to fight, and more familiar. As long as he was around, mom and Jim were never that far away. They were characters, just offstage, waiting in the wings, the rest of us on stage, talking about them. But my story was about the three of them, always. To get free, I had to get clear on exactly what contract I was shredding. Once I did that, I found myself alone, center stage, in the spotlight, with endless possibilities. Real forgiveness has to let go of all expectations. You can't expect a certain outcome. You can't accept them to reply. You can't even expect to know who you're going to be on the other side of it. Forgiveness is really tricky. It's one of those tools that is only properly wielded when we have healed just enough that we have nothing left to lose. If you're still hemorrhaging in pain, it is too soon to forgive. If you can't roll up your sleeve and show me your scars and tell me exactly what happened to you, it's still too soon to forgive. But it's never too late to let go of your villains and reclaim yourself. And if you're ready to let it all go - the grief, the pain, the anger, the trauma - and you're open to finding out who you are instead of always trying to prove yourself - I got to be honest with you - all this forgiveness hype is legit! (Laughter) Ten out of ten, five stars, would highly recommend. Thank you. (Applause)"