Arschengel: Why Your Most Irritating People Are Often Your Best Teachers

I was having a conversation with a German friend recently when a word surfaced in my memory that I had not thought about in a long time: Arschengel. I had once seen it printed on a postcard, and it made me laugh. But sitting there, mid-conversation, it came back to me. And with it, something Robert Betz once said about what the word actually means.

It unlocked something. It reminded me of a pattern I have noticed looking back at my life, one I could not see while I was living it. The moments that shaped me the most were never the easy ones. The people who taught me the most about myself were rarely the gentle ones. The experiences I would have never chosen, the ones I wanted to skip, rush through, or forget, those turned out to carry the lessons I needed most.

When you are inside a difficult moment, all you feel is the difficulty. When someone challenges you, all you see is the friction. But with enough distance, a strange picture starts to form. The hardest chapters were also the most transformative ones. And the people I once wished out of my life? They left fingerprints on who I am becoming.

So what is an Arschengel? And why did it change how I see almost everything?

The Arschengel: they don't cause the pain. They trigger it.

There is a word in German that I fell in love with the moment I heard it: Arschengel. It was coined by the coach Robert Betz, and it is exactly what it sounds like. "Arsch" means ass. "Engel" means angel. An ass-angel.

The idea is almost funny at first. Certain people in our lives seem like absolute nightmares. They provoke us, they disappoint us, they touch our wounds with what feels like surgical precision. They earn the "Arsch" without question. But Betz noticed something: these people have an uncanny ability to reach the exact emotions we have spent years suppressing. Fear. Shame. Anger, you name it. The feeling of being small, or unseen, or not enough. Feelings that did not start with them. Feelings that were already living inside us, quietly, waiting for something to bring them to the surface.

That is the "Engel." The angel in disguise. Because once that suppressed feeling surfaces, you can finally see it. And once you can see it, you can begin to heal it.

Carl Jung, the psychologist who spent decades mapping the unconscious, wrote that everything that irritates us about others can lead us to an understanding of ourselves. He called this the shadow. The parts of ourselves we have rejected or refused to look at do not disappear. They get projected outward. And the people who trigger us most intensely are often holding up a mirror to the very thing we have been avoiding.

I think about this when I remember that person who at some point made my life so difficult. The fury I felt was real. But it was also old. It belonged to moments long before them. They just happened to find the door.

Maybe.

Once upon a time, a Chinese farmer's horse ran away. His neighbours came to express their sympathy. "What terrible luck," they said. The farmer replied: "Maybe."

The next day, the horse returned, bringing seven wild horses with it. The neighbours celebrated. "What wonderful fortune!" The farmer said: "Maybe."

His son tried to ride one of the new horses, was thrown, and broke his leg. The neighbours were sorry again. "Maybe," said the farmer. Then the army came to conscript young men for war, and they rejected his son because of the broken leg. "How lucky!" said the neighbours. "Maybe."

Alan Watts loved this story. He used it to illustrate something that most of us resist: we do not know what anything means while we are inside it. We label things as good or bad almost instantly, and then we build entire emotional worlds on top of those labels. The farmer refused to do that. He held each event with open hands.

I used to read this as a story about detachment. Now I read it differently. The farmer is not indifferent. He is humble. He knows that the river of life is longer than his ability to see around the bend. And so he stays present with what is, without closing the story before it is finished.

The neighbours, meanwhile, keep writing endings. Every chapter is either a tragedy or a triumph. The farmer knows better. The chapter is still being written.

The wound is the doorway.

So here we are. The Arschengel shows us where we are wounded. The Chinese Farmer shows us that we cannot judge the wound while we are still inside it. But where does that leave us? Wounded and patient?

This is where Rumi walks in, eight centuries ago, and says the thing that no one wants to hear and everyone needs to: "The wound is the place where the light enters you."

Sit with that for a moment. The wound is not something to fix so you can get back to who you were before. The wound is an opening. The light does not enter through the places where you are strong and polished and put together. It enters through the crack.

The Japanese have practised this idea in physical form for over five hundred years. When a piece of pottery breaks, rather than discarding it or hiding the damage, they repair it with lacquer mixed with gold. The art is called kintsugi. The broken object does not become less beautiful. It becomes singular. The fracture lines, now glowing with gold, become the most striking part of the whole piece. The history of the breaking is honoured, not erased.

I think we are like that. I think the people who broke something open in us, the events we thought would ruin us, the seasons we barely survived, those are the golden lines running through our lives. They are the places where we became more ourselves, not less.

Pema Chödrön, the Buddhist teacher, once wrote that if we learn to open our hearts, anyone, including the people who drive us crazy, can be our teacher. But when we protect ourselves so we will not feel pain, that protection becomes like armour that imprisons the softness of the heart.

That word. Imprisons. It has stayed with me since the first time I read it. Because the armour does work. It does keep the pain out. But it also keeps out everything else. The softness. The connection. The capacity to be moved by life.

And so the question becomes: can you stay open, even when it hurts?

The grand scheme.

I do not think we are meant to understand everything. I think the desire to understand is beautiful, and the willingness to keep going without full understanding is even more beautiful.

Psychology has a term for what happens when people walk through the fire and come out changed. They call it post-traumatic growth. Researchers have documented it across thousands of studies: people who have faced real adversity often report, on the other side, that they understand themselves more deeply, that their relationships have more meaning, that their sense of what matters has been clarified in ways that comfort alone could never have achieved. The breaking was not the end. It was a reorganisation.

The Chinese Farmer knew this without needing a study. He knew that the horse running away and the horse coming back and the broken leg and the avoided war were all part of one long, unfinished sentence. He did not try to punctuate it too early.

And the Arschengel? They are part of that sentence too. The colleague who diminished you. The partner who left. The friend who showed you, through their carelessness, what you actually need. They played a role in your story that you could not have written for yourself.

I am not saying everything happens for a reason in some neat, prepackaged way. I am saying that within the difficulty, there is almost always something growing that would not have grown any other way. A new boundary. A deeper understanding of what you will and will not accept. A tenderness that only comes from having been cracked open.

Maybe the universe sends us exactly the people we need. Not the ones we would have chosen. The ones who will show us who we are becoming.

Maybe.

Who has been an Arschengel in your life? What did they teach you that you could not have learned any other way? I would love to hear your story.

If this stirred something in you and you want to take this kind of inner work further, to learn to stay open, to meet the mirror, and to find the gold in the cracks, Breathe and Bloom might be a space for you.

Further reading:

• Robert Betz — Frieden mit meinen Arsch-Engeln

• Alan Watts — The Story of the Chinese Farmer (available on YouTube)

• Carl Jung — The Archetypes and the Collective Unconscious

• Pema Chödrön — When Things Fall Apart

• Rumi — collected poetry (translations by Coleman Barks)