Anger.

I have mentioned a few times that my family have been bereaved five times since December 2010.  One death is difficult enough to deal with, but five........

I feel so angry with three of them for giving up on life and I know that this preventing me from moving onto the next stage in the grieving process.  I know I am trapped in this stage and I know that this is causing me the problems I am having with sleep and the obsession about who is going to die next.

I faced something similar when my son was born 15 years ago.  The year before - 1996 - I fell pregnant and we were over the moon.  But I lost the baby and encountered a pain I thought would engulf me whole.  Had I not had two daughters to care for I think I could very easily given in to the pain I felt.  A few months later I was pregnant again with my son, but I spent the entire pregnancy feeling terrified something would happen.  After he was born I suffered from Post Natal Depression.  One of the worst things I went through was not being able to put my son down.  I felt that if I put him down to sleep somewhere he would die, only I could save him by holding onto him all of the time.
After months of therapy and almost a year on anti depressants I discovered I was angry with my baby for dying and that I had held on to that anger so tightly that is engulfed me.  It was only when I learnt to let go of the anger that I was able to move forward and mourn my baby.

Anger is such a self destructive emotion if we don't let go of it.  Anger can be a good thing if we use it to channel our emotions in a constructive manner, but if we don't then we bottle up that anger and it eats away at us, making us miserable, making us ill, causing us problems.  We have to learn to let go of our anger and resentment, free ourselves of the negativity that these emotions fill us with, only then can we move forward with our lives.