My Anger Was Grief in a Different Costume

I had lost my closest friend in an accident when I was 24 and had, in the months that followed, done what I understood at the time to be grieving - the acute period of sadness, the adjustment to his absence, the eventual return to functional daily life.

At 25, returned to my work in Birmingham and to the surface structures of my ordinary existence, I noticed that I had become angrier than I had previously been.

Not raging or destructive anger, but a persistent low-level irritability that was present in more situations than it had previously been and that expressed itself in responses that were slightly more than the situations warranted. I attributed it to work stress, to the accumulation of adult responsibility, to the general difficulty of my late twenties.

None of those explanations were wrong in any absolute sense. None of them was the primary explanation, which arrived in a therapy session at 26 when a therapist asked me to describe the situations that most reliably produced the irritability.

The situations, when I described them, had a quality in common that I had not seen from inside them: they were all situations involving loss in some form, however minor. Things not going as planned. Arrangements falling through. Opportunities missed.

The irritability was grief looking for an exit in the situations that rhymed with its origin. I had finished the acute grieving and had not finished the grief, and the grief had found the expression available to it.

The therapy that followed was specific to grief that had been processed to the functional level but not the emotional level. The irritability resolved as the deeper processing happened.

What I carry from the experience is a more sophisticated understanding of what anger can be carrying - and a willingness to ask, when I encounter sustained irritability in myself or in others, what loss it might be expressing that has not found a more direct route.