Anger isn’t just a “stage of grief”. It’s a pervasive emotion that can feel overwhelming, unfamiliar, and challenging to manage. After pet loss, anger is not only valid, but also a normal part of the grieving process.
Anger can sometimes feel easier than the raw, vulnerable, seemingly irreversible pain that comes with grief.
If you’re experiencing anger as part of your pet loss journey, it doesn’t mean you’re now an angry person or have anger issues. It’s simply part of your grieving process.
Why Does Anger Show Up
Grief can feel powerless and anger tends to be rooted in the disruption of life after pet loss. Accompanied by a sense of injustice and unfairness, anger after pet loss can be a protective emotion, shielding you from some of the pain of losing your beloved pet.
A challenge with anger in grief is that it may not be an overly familiar emotion for you. Of course some people struggle with anger throughout their life, but the vast majority of people have created a life made up of things that don’t make you angry.
This means that for many, when anger surfaces while grieving, it’s hard to know what to do with it. There might not be a lot of tools you’ve naturally honed for dealing with intense, sometimes prolonged, anger.
It’s important to acknowledge the presence of anger. Stuffing down anger can make it feel stronger.
The Faces of Anger After Pet Loss
Anger after pet loss can be directed at so much – others, yourself, veterinarians, disease, a higher power, the universe.
Sometimes anger is quite understandable – if someone is directly responsible for the passing of your pet. And sometimes anger is more ambiguous – angry that you’re faced with a world without your precious pet by your side.
Anger can be sneaky too; it doesn’t always appear as a red in the face, blatant temper. Anger can be frustration – with grief, with life, and with others. It can be resentment towards people who aren’t grieving similarly to you or to those who don’t understand the depth of your pain.
Anger can mask itself as annoyance with things in life that once seemed important but now seem insignificant. And it can look like blame, directed at yourself or others.
Recognizing the faces of anger can help to expose it, give it less power, and to make coping with anger a bit more manageable.
Ways To Channel or Discharge Anger
The million dollar question if you find yourself contending with anger. What do you do with it?
Channeling anger might not be an existential or transcendental experience. It’s more primal. We know anger is an active emotion, which means that it needs purposeful, equally active tools to cope with it. The spiritual revelations can come later.
Your personality and life experiences will shape the active coping skills that help channel anger. You may use several different types of coping tools throughout your journey.
And you might notice that the things that help with anger after pet loss evolves as your grief does.
Highly Active Coping: Screaming, singing loudly, hitting a punching bag, engaging in intense physical expression, going to a rage room (i.e. breaking something), dancing.
Calming Active Coping: Yoga or meditation, grounding techniques, journaling or letter writing, drawing or painting, changing your surroundings, talking with someone.
You get the gist. Channeling anger means you have to do something else active. And it’s not a one and done. Working on anger is a practice that you will likely regularly need to come back to.
Why should you want to work at anger after pet loss?
Anger, much like guilt, can stagnate grief. It traps the grief in your mind instead of being free to fully grieve from your heart. These emotions that grief brings along require compassion, understanding, and a dash of motivation.
Anger can also manifest itself physically. Anxiety, headaches, insomnia, high blood pressure, and mental fatigue are just some of the ways anger can present itself in your body.
Lastly, anger can affect other parts of your life. Relationships, friendships, your other pets, your career. You may find yourself responding to interactions with others in ways that do not resemble your typical self.
Anger is an emotion you need to take control back from, in your grief.
If you can do nothing else, make it a habit to speak compassionately to yourself every day, even if just for short bursts. Like grief, anger does not define you.
