Every religion is right about one thing
And it's the way you get your life back
I have a friend who bleeds anger. You can feel it drifting up from his skin, pointing at you from behind his eyes, and waiting with a rubber-band tension to snap forward if it finds a release. A general anger, always present, and completely unrelated to his current surroundings.
This bitterness does not age well. Old men with hunched backs, old women with frown lines that sag past their chins, muscles tight and inflexible from never being able to relax. Musculature withers the body and forces the angry into an easily-recognizable posture. Anger becomes their aura.
The perpetually angry have a tight grip on a burning marble of bitterness deep in their core, fingers squeezing with a dedication that has absorbed the heat of that anger for so long that it has melted their personality.
Where does it come from? How does the seething fire never run out of fuel? How does it escalate so quickly from a low-grade flicker to an all-consuming torrent of flame, at the snap of a finger?
Bitterness.
That kind of lifelong anger comes from bitterness, skewed and aggrandized by the unreliability and survival-focused lens of the human memory system. Our foundation-level brain was designed to recognize threats and let them overshadow everything else, lasering in on whatever may cause us harm.
The bad things tend to stick.
Over time, that results in a hindsight full of the negative instances of our life, a memory bank with the clearest images often being those that threatened our safety. With enough threat, those memories shape our world view, painting everything with a brush that says ‘don’t forget about the pain’. That fear becomes imprinted as a shadow layer on how we perceive everything else downstream of it, even when it is deeply illogical.
Fear does not care about logic. Fear cares about safety. About never being in a vulnerable position again. About getting one up on the other guy before he can get one up on you.
So you approach everything resembling that painful memory with your shield up, with a defensive posture and a brow furrowed in suspicion. That memory forces us to key into what reinforces it, to seek out supportive evidence and to ignore what says ‘put your guard down, it will be ok’.
No way you’re falling for that. Better to miss out on an opportunity than to be hurt again. Better to hold onto the anger at the core, because if I let go of it, then the perpetrator gets away with it. Better to assume every person is like my parent, or my ex, because I will not be fooled again.
This unsettled anger that pushes people to point fingers towards those that they feel wronged them, even when they have never met each other before. At the root of it, being harmed when you are vulnerable causes a loss of innocence, a hole that craves the safety and optimism you assumed existed before the world took it away from you.
A time of security and trust, before it was carved out from your psyche, leaving only the traces of what it meant to be free of the burden of fear and sadness and longing.
“How could you do this to me? How could you steal the goodness and leave me only with the knowledge that the good can be taken away?”
Each loss of innocence, each gaining of a cruel perspective, imprints deeply on our feeling of safety and redirects all action towards preventing that threat from happening again.
People who hold onto that bitter marble go one of two ways.
One party assumes everyone will try to deepen the hole, and that perpetual fear turns to anger. Assumptions are made that every new interaction is from a profit-seeker, bettering themselves at your expense. That the whole world is trying to get one over on you, and you hate them for it.
The other party seeks desperately for the hole to be repaired, for anyone resembling the perpetrator to swoop in and make up for the pain. They date people who resemble their parents/ex/boss in the worst ways, hoping for that proxy to see the pain they carry, to recognize and validate the hole they are stuck in, and to change their ways, to recreate the shift they always wished would happen in the person that hurt them. This second group wants to recreate the experience of cruelty but give it a different ending, so that their perpetual fear can be resolved and close the loop. “If my partner can change, then the one who hurt me can change, and can make up for stealing my innocence.”
So how does one deal with it instead? You get to the core.
These manifestations of that core pain show up incredibly diversely throughout our life, but the root cause is often relatively simple enough. In general, humans only have about 10 basic problems, which get manifested in a billion ways. This sounds reductive, but it is empowering. Much as a weed needs to be plucked from the roots, you cannot unearth the issue unless you get to its simple foundation.
Getting to a point where you can ask yourself “What is at the core of this and where is it coming from” lets you get straight to the marble, without dealing with whatever mask it happens to be wearing.
I know several people who hate the concept of an immigrant, because immigrants are taking what these people perceive to be a limited resource. They have a fear of the nuts they gathered to make it through the winter being dispersed to others and not leaving enough for them to survive.
They would rather hold on to the marble of fear and let it be distributed as anger, than to be put in a position of vulnerability. Survival over happiness.
The core is fear of not having enough, because they’ve never identified what enough is.
I have another friend who carries his independence like a scar, forever assuming ‘fuck em, I gotta get mine’ and warily eyeing everyone who comes close. Be alone and be safe, throw rocks at anyone who knocks at my door, just in case they want to take what is inside.
For him, the core problem is a deep pain caused by not being cared for when younger, an almost childlike agony of his cries not being heard by his parent.
“Why didn’t you care for me?” his every action asks. “Why was my cocoon of safety ripped from me so harshly?”.
The core is trusting anyone enough to love him again. But he refuses to risk it.
This pain imbues a deep bitterness towards the parent that safety was never assured. In the most vulnerable position, the most innocent and helpless, a hole of fear was carved that no one would be around to protect you. So you take care of yourself and hate the world that caused you to fear it, all the while carrying that marble of bitterness against the first lash, the pain that was seared deep into your foundational brain.
That bitterness of not being taken care of also seeks a shadow proxy to make it right. It may cause one to demand more from the world, to make up for not being given enough. It builds a chip on your shoulder from the memory of the pain, and a lashing out whenever you feel disempowered by not receiving what you are owed again.
“My partner has to do everything to my liking, because if they don’t and I feel even the slightest sense of being uncared for, I will feel the pain again”.
They may even press the matter, unconsciously demanding more and more until the partner breaks and they can finally get the sweet justice of that anger releasing in a sweet torrent of relief.
“I guess you don’t care about me”, one might say. “I guess I’m just a piece of shit who doesn’t deserve your love, since you didn’t even consider how this would make me feel”. The sadness of not being loved manifests as anger for the current love not being able to repair the hole.
But they are yelling at the past. Whatever shape stands in front of them is just a shadow form of the original pain.
The nugget of anger grows from feeling as though they did not get what they deserved, did not get the care that they are entitled to, leaving an open wound of anger towards the caretaker figure, projected out to the world in general, which promised safety and delivered pain.
They are in a negative state, down 800 points in the game of life, in a visceral way. No other amount of being catered to will fill up that original hole. While you hold on to the bitterness, no other points will have value unless given to you by the original perpetrator. They are poured into the hole by others, but it never gets filled.
The original wound has to be closed, but explaining it to the original caretaker puts you in a helpless position that the ego will not tolerate, because if you ask and it is not delivered, then the hole might become permanent. No one wants to ask for something from those who were supposed to give it, then have it not be given. It’s the same mechanism as ‘if you never try, you can never fail, so it’s better to not try and just never solidify myself as a failure’. Better to leave the door open for closure to walk through by itself, rather than invite it in and be denied.
They really want the caretaker to realize it themselves, and to own up to it and make up for it. They want the caretaker to address their faults, admit the wrongdoing, and grovel at the feet of the abandoned.
Unfortunately, this also will never fill the hole.
The moment is gone. You are not the same, they are not the same, and the conceptual embodiment of the uncared for is not the same person as you are now, it is a base of fuel inside of you, based on a memory. The current manifestation of the caretaker cannot apologize to the abandoned in the same way that fills the hole and that alone fill the void.
The hole will remain. It is a curse, but one we can learn to live with. We can carry our scars without letting them be a burden.
The only retribution comes from forgiveness. Only once you let go of the bitterness can healing happen. This is especially difficult, because it directly means that you are accepting the loss. That you are absorbing the hurt that was not your own fault, that your life was made worse for reasons beyond your control and it can never be made whole again.
And you just have to accept it and move on.
At its core, anger is yearning for retribution. For the concept of yourself to be made whole, for the validation of your existence as a self-contained entity, and an expectation of fairness as you expected it to be. Forgiveness means you come to terms with the fact that someone started you off at -800 points in the game of life and that you are left alone to pick up the pieces.
Even if the caretaker mends their ways and comes back to help you, you may be grateful for their current embodiment, but bitter towards the old one. That duality maintains the bitterness.
Forgiveness, real forgiveness, which is the acceptance of pain that will never fully be made right, is the only way to move past it and release yourself from the burden.
You have to love and trust yourself enough to make up the 800 point deficit and then go even further to bring yourself the life you deserve. You have to crawl out of the mud, inching forward, scratching with your nails and teeth if that’s what it takes.
You have to trust yourself.
Carrying the bitterness forever is something that I see people act out in several ways, but one that interests me is those who are actively antagonistic towards religion, towards the concept of a god figure.
The godhead is the original caretaker, and since the symbol of the all-knowing created the world that caused you pain, you carry the burden of pain and loss when you demanded fairness. Many become entrenched in this bitterness, choosing not to make the first move towards acceptance until the other party, the parent does. And who are you to make the first move instead of the godhead? Why would you need to forgive the all-knowing?
Because that is the great lesson. All religion is lessons, at its core. I’m not a religious man, but the parables are time-tested, universal, and valuable.
The ability to ‘turn the other cheek’ is the gift itself, because it places control back firmly in your own control. It gives you trust in yourself.
Others may take from you, but they will not shoulder you with the burdens of anger and bitterness, which poison the well of happiness. Learning to forgive lets you become the steward of your own waters, choosing to purify them at will. This lesson is not intrinsic to Christianity or Islam, or any particular teaching, but it is within every peace-espousing religion, as well as the core of self-development.
Forgiveness and an inner locus of control lets you fully become that pure water, allowing stones to pass through you without harm. Ripples settle, sediment falls to the floor, but they do not alter your still clarity.
If you can learn to trust in yourself, you can learn to release anger through forgiveness. If you can forgive the universe, you can forgive anything.
Turn the other cheek and lead your own life again.
With love, from me to you.
-Deacon
Note: No AI was used to write, edit, or otherwise modify this article.