The Room


Right now my life is like a big house, full of large spacious rooms. I wander freely around the house, in and out of whichever rooms I choose when I like. Except for one. There’s one room that I never go in. The door is locked and bolted, and when I wander past it I don’t even look at it. I pretend it’s not there. Why? Because if I don’t I have to look at what’s in there, and right now that is terrifying. 


There have been times when I’ve tried to go in the room on days I’ve perhaps felt particularly strong, and times when it feels like other people have opened that door against my will, forcing me to look at what’s inside. And each time produces the same results, overwhelming sadness and anger, so powerful it scares me. So the best thing to do seems to be to slam the door shut again, bolt the lock, and continue to ignore it. 


This is one of a variety of coping mechanisms that we put into place to help us function and continue to live our day to day lives when something extremely painful happens to us. If the door on that room was permanently open, I would cease to be able to function in the rest of the house, and so the ability to shut the door and walk away is helpful in enabling me to get on and live my life. However there is a fine line between a helpful defence mechanism and one that pushes us to ignore and not deal with the pain that is after all still there, it’s just been shut behind a firmly closed door. 


At the moment, each time I try to go into that room it gets harder and harder and I spend less and less time in there. I could perhaps cope with the sadness, if I knew I could feel it for a time and then close the door again, but the anger that I feel whenever the door opens is getting harder and harder to manage. It’s as though as soon as that door opens, the storm raging inside the room bursts out and overwhelms me. I struggle to think rationally, I can’t pray, all I do is feel full of anger and rage and there seems to be nothing I can do to safely let it out. It swallows me up and I lose myself in a feeling I can’t control. And lately it’s seemed that the more I try to shut the door and walk away, the worse the anger gets when I do return the next time. 


I’ve tried to work out why I’m so angry, but I’m still not clear on it. It could be a normal part of the grieving process, it could be anger at our situation feeling so unfair or a feeling that God let us down and cannot be trusted, or a combination of all of those. I don’t know, but I feel that if I did know I could move forwards in dealing with this. But for now all I can do is ask God to show me and wait. If I feel able to I’ll peer through the door from time to time, I know it’s not healthy to ignore it forever, but the waiting continues as I put my trust in a God who right now I can’t feel or understand but who I know is there and is my loving ally, my tower of refuge and my safe place.