No one can provoke us to anger more than our spouse. We live with them day in and day out, so we have a tendency to grow more vexed by the things they do and say. Our spouse knows us, knows our flaws and our weak spots and, whether they intend to or not, can wound us profoundly. What’s more, our spouse matters. Unlike the jerk who cut you off in traffic or that idiot who keeps screwing up at work, you two are a team. Our spouse is supposed to have our back, so when we think they’ve committed an injustice against us, it becomes particularly infuriating.
The Church warns us especially against wrath. Wrath is typically defined as excessive anger. It is anger that has slipped the reins of your self control and spilled out into your thoughts, your speech and your actions.
In Dante’s Purgatory, the souls of the wrathful penitents walk around in blinding, acrid smoke, symbolizing both the blinding effects of wrath and the burning harm it does to the person who is angry (there is an old Buddhist saying that wrath is like holding on to a hot coal in order to throw it at someone else; whatever damage you might do to them, you will certainly get burned).
But defining wrath as excessive anger doesn’t really get at the distinction between these two states. Anger is a feeling, one of a full repertoire of emotions, some negative and some positive, that pop up as a result of how we perceive the situation we’re engaged in. Perhaps, something your spouse has said seems particularly disrespectful.
Wrath is a response to those thoughts that fuel your anger, which involves blaming the other person as well as a desire to “get even”.
It’s easy to see how this happens. You feel fine until your spouse says or does something that doesn’t sit right with you. Suddenly you don’t feel fine any more, you feel angry. It’s a simple step to assign your angry feelings to your spouse, making it their fault that you no longer feel fine. This allows you to claim victimhood, to make your spouse the problem.
But contemporary psychology agrees with the ancient wisdom of the Church: no one can make us feel angry or anything else. Sure, our husband or wife can say or do something, and we may react by feeling angry or frustrated, but those feelings are ours and what we do with them is up to us.
The Gospel states:
You have heard that it was said to your ancestors, you shall not kill; and whoever kills will be liable to judgment. But I say to you, whoever is angry with his brother will be liable to judgment, and whoever says to his brother, raqa (revenge), will be answerable to the Sanhedrin, and whoever says, ‘You fool,’ will be liable to fiery Gehenna. Therefore, if you bring your gift to the altar, and there recall that your brother has anything against you, leave your gift there at the altar, go first and be reconciled with your brother, and then come and offer your gift.
-- Matthew 5:20-26
As Matthew’s Gospel above implies, wrath is anger expressed in some way that seeks revenge. You feel hurt so you want to hurt back. You feel disrespected so you try to take someone down a notch. Wrath is thus not only a feeling but is tied to action. The question of anger is not how you feel, for we all get angry with one another at times. The question is whether and how you express your anger.
In other words, anger itself is neither right nor wrong; it is our emotional response to another. How we act on that anger is the moral problem. When our anger is expressed as wrath it is dangerous to ourselves and our families.
You know your anger is a problem if:
it is too frequent
it is too intense
it lasts too long
it leads to aggression
it damages family and work relationships
it begins a destructive cycle that we do not control
it hurts people
Most marriages struggle with anger at some point. We express it in multiple ways. First, the obvious one: we blow up at each other. We yell and rant and scream. And we believe that we’re justified in our tantrums because the things we are angry about seem like injustices to us. But that’s not how we are supposed to deal with our anger; St. Paul urges us instead to be slow to anger.
Just as importantly. St. Paul urges us not to dishonor one another by venting our anger to friends. Gossip that seeks to belittle your spouse, or to arouse the sympathy of the listener toward you and away from your spouse, these are wrong.
The way out of anger is forgiveness. Jesus promises that any sin we commit is forgivable. But he adds a codicil: “Forgive us our trespasses as we forgive those who trespass against us.”
How many times must we forgive our spouse? Seventy times seven, he tells his disciples. Imagine forgiving your spouse for the same offense 149 times before you blow up.
That’s slow to anger.
This post is excerpted from our book Climbing the Seven Story Mountain. You can read the entire chapter here.
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