Suppose that a little girl whom you were close to died.

In the first scenario, I want you to imagine that the girl died in a tragic accident and was killed unintentionally by one of her friends.

In the second scenario, I want you to imagine that the girl was brutally murdered.

How might you feel in either scenario? Would the loss of someone close be the same regardless of how she died? Could you blame someone if they didn’t intend to hurt another but did? Is it okay to be angry even if it was an accident?

It’s easy to be angry if that feeling was justified. But what if it is not?

Sometimes I feel angry at Matt. It is hard to justify feeling anger towards someone severely mentally ill. I don’t think that he intended to be violent towards us, his siblings. But the end result was the same, he ruined our childhood.

Luke said that when he was younger he told Matt to hit a wasp nest with a stick. Matt got stung.

We were told that feeling angry was bad. Yet we still felt that way.

Sometimes it was hard not to feel angry at our mother for favoring him so.

But isn’t it natural to want to soothe the baby that is always crying?

Luke said that he needed to have boundaries. He told our mom that he didn’t want to hear about Matt unless he asked how Matt was doing. Our lives don’t revolve around Matt anymore. It was hard to break away from that. But we needed to break away from that to heal.

It is okay sometimes to feel angry.