What if the person lashing out — even when it’s you — is really just calling for help?
I came across a few lines online not long ago. I was actually hunting for a Maya Angelou quote; this wasn’t hers, and I don’t know who wrote it, but its truth is powerful:
When someone lashes out at you, they’re not showing you their power. They’re showing you their pain. And if you can see it that way — really see it — you won’t take the insult personally. You’ll see it as a flare from a heart that is struggling to stay afloat.
A flare from a heart struggling to stay afloat. Sit with what a flare actually is. We send one up when we’re in trouble or when we need help. So what if the sharp word or sudden eruption is exactly that — a flare? Pain in disguise, dressed up as power; perhaps because we haven’t the courage to address it directly.
I’ve been exploring what it means to transmute fear into faith. Not to pray it away, or pretend it isn’t there — that’s a spiritual bypass. Transmutation is changing the nature of one thing into another. Fear isn’t just something to suffer through; it can be instructive. It can be the signal that something in us wants to be known, to be brought into the light. And anger is often fear’s loudest messenger.
The lamp of the mind
The 19th-century orator Robert Ingersoll said, “Anger blows out the lamp of the mind.” I’d add one thing to that: anger blows out the lamp not only in the person who’s angry, but in the person who feels that anger aimed at them. Two minds go dark at once.
Speaking love to anger isn’t about fixing or changing the other person. It’s like forgiveness — it’s generally understood that forgiveness is for the forgiver, not the forgiven. Speaking love to strong emotion is for you. It’s how you keep your own lamp lit when someone else’s has gone out.
Brené Brown teaches that anger is often a mask for the feelings that are harder to bear — grief, rejection, shame. When we can’t access those feelings, it’s human nature to reach for irritation, disapproval, or a flash of temper. So when anger shows up now — in someone else, or in you — pause and let your curiosity come forward and ask what is actually underneath the strong emotions you are experiencing.
Answering love’s call
I keep thinking of a scene from Ted Lasso. If you’ve never seen it, all you need to know is that it follows an impossibly kind coach with a gift for seeing people beyond their behavior. One of the characters is a very talented young player, Jamie Tartt, whose cruel jokes and arrogance make him easy to write off. Everyone does — except the coach, who keeps questioning instead of judging. Then one afternoon, after a brutal loss, Jamie’s father storms into the locker room and humiliates him in front of the whole team. It’s a car wreck. Nobody knows what to do. And when the father is finally gone, it’s Roy Kent — the gruff veteran, Jamie’s own rival, the last man on earth you’d expect — who walks across the room and simply holds him. And Jamie crumbles.
Roy didn’t know what the outcome would be. He just heard the call and answered it. That, I think, is what all our spiritual practice is preparing us for: the moment when Spirit calls us forward to participate in healing. It’s up to us to respond — we don’t need to know exactly what to do or how it will land — we just say yes to the call of love in the moment.
The master class
Offering compassion when someone else lashes out — that’s the entry-level course. Hard, but doable. The master class is when you’re the one who lashed out. When you can catch your own flare mid-air and are willing to pause and look at your own pain underneath your behavior.
The only place real change happens is within ourselves — that’s where we have agency. So whichever side of the dynamic you find yourself on, there is something to be learned, something asking to be brought to light — some piece of God wanting to be expressed.
Anger is simply energy, and energy can change its form. You wouldn’t argue if I told you water can become ice or steam — same substance, held differently. Anger is like that. What matters is how we hold it, and whether we can steady ourselves and create a holy pause. I wear a small blue bracelet most days that says respond with love. I don’t always remember to glance at it. But I have a far better chance when I do.
I have a family member who is full of passion — and sometimes that passion spills over into strong emotion aimed squarely at me. It took me years to understand that they could pour those feelings out because they felt safe with me. Once I saw it that way, I could speak love to their anger instead of bracing against it. Not long ago, in the heat of one of those phone calls, I simply hung up — I needed space. But I picked the phone back up fifteen minutes later. I hadn’t withdrawn from them — I’d withdrawn from the emotion, from the illusion that we were separate, that they were trying to hurt me. I took the pause I needed so I could come back to them with love.
And a word of caution I’ve learned the hard way: emotion we swallow and turn inward doesn’t simply vanish. All the experts warn us that emotion will find its expression one way or another — and if we won’t move through it consciously, it tends to leak out the seams in unholy ways. So we do the practice. We face our feelings and let the energy move, consciously, toward love.
An invitation, not an enemy
If you know A Course in Miracles, its entire teaching boils down to a single idea: everything we experience is either a call for love or a call to love. Every encounter is an invitation. Sometimes we’re the one doing the inviting, through our own intensity. Sometimes it’s someone else. It is deeply human to want to protect ourselves — to fight, or to flee. But we are not only human. We are also spiritual beings, with everything we need within us to answer Love’s invitation. And sometimes love looks like crossing the room to hold someone. Sometimes it looks like quietly stepping out and creating space.
So I invite you to meet your fear not as an enemy to outrun, but as an invitation. Be courageous. Drop into your heart and trust the very Life that breathes you — the One that longs to express itself as you, as a healing presence, in whatever way is safe for you. Because no one is asking you to stand in harm’s way. The invitation is to listen for the quiet whisper of Spirit on your heart. When love calls you forward, trust that you’ve been prepared and you’re not alone — love will always walk with you when it calls you to act.
