The Dance of Anger: A Woman's Guide to Changing the Patterns of Intimate Relationships

by Harriet Lerner

The “Nice Lady” Syndrome If we are “nice ladies,” how do we behave? In situations that might realistically evoke anger or protest, we stay silent—or become tearful, self-critical, or “hurt.” If we do feel angry, we keep it to ourselves in order to avoid the possibility of open conflict. But it is not just our anger that we keep to ourselves; in addition, we may avoid making clear statements about what we think and feel, when we suspect that such clarity would make another person uncomfortable and expose differences between us.

The more we are “nice” in these ways, the more we accumulate a storehouse of unconscious anger and rage. Anger is inevitable when our lives consist of giving in and going along; when we assume responsibility for other people’s feelings and reactions; when we relinquish our primary responsibility to proceed with our own growth and ensure the quality of our own lives; when we behave as if having a relationship is more important than having a self. Of course, we are forbidden from experiencing this anger directly, since “nice ladies,” by definition, are not “angry women.”

Nothing, but nothing, will block the awareness of anger so effectively as guilt and self-doubt.

We cannot make another person change his or her steps to an old dance, but if we change our own steps, the dance no longer can continue in the same predictable pattern.

Many of us who fight ineffectively, like those of us who don’t fight at all, have an unconscious belief that the other person would have a very hard time if we were clear and strong. Our anxiety and guilt about the potential loss of a relationship may make it difficult for us to change in the first place—and then to stay on course when our partner reacts strongly to our new and different behavior.

In this way, a woman avoids conflict by defining her own wishes and preferences as being the same as what her partner wishes and prefers her to be. She defines her own self as he defines her. She sacrifices her awareness of who she is in her efforts to conform to his wants and expectations.

Women who fall into the peace-maker or “nice lady” category are by no means passive, wishy-washy losers. Quite to the contrary, we have developed an important and complex interpersonal skill that requires a great deal of inner activity and sensitivity. We are good at anticipating other people’s reactions, and we are experts at protecting others from uncomfortable feelings. This is a highly developed social skill that is all too frequently absent in men. If only we could take this very same skill and redirect it inward in order to become experts on our own selves.

No, women do not gain a secret masochistic gratification from being in the victimized, one-down position. Quite to the contrary, the woman who sits at the bottom of a seesaw marriage accumulates a great amount of rage, which is in direct proportion to the degree of her submission and sacrifice.

All of us are deeply affected by the patterns and traditions of past generations even if—and especially if—we are not consciously aware of them.

is not our job to make another person think and feel the way we do or the way we want them to. If we try, we can end up in a relationship in which a lot of personal pain and emotional intensity are being expended and nothing is changing.

Repeating the same old fights protects us from the anxieties we are bound to experience when we make a change. Ineffective fighting allows us to stop the clock when our efforts to achieve greater clarity become too threatening. Sometimes staying stuck is what we need to do until the time comes when we are confident that it is safe to get unstuck.

In the traditional division of labor, men are encouraged to develop one kind of intelligence, but they fall short of another that is equally important. The majority underfunction in the realm of emotional competence, and their underfunctioning is closely related to women’s overfunctioning in this area. It is not by accident that the “hysterical,” overemotional female ends up under the same roof as the unemotional, distant male.

She failed to recognize that she was so skilled and comfortable in expressing feelings that she was doing the job for the two of them, thus protecting her husband from feeling what he would otherwise feel.

Of course Larry had feelings about it. It was his career and the injustice had been done him. However, his style of reacting, as well as his tempo and timing, was very different from his wife’s. Also, Larry was using Sandra to react for him. Her quick outburst actually took him off the hook. He did not have to feel upset about the incident because she was doing all the work. The more emotion Sandra displayed, the less Larry felt within himself.

Much to her surprise, her long-pent-up anger at her in-laws began to dissipate as she became more confident that she could speak effectively to issues that were not to her liking. Also

When a woman vents her anger ineffectively (like Sandra complaining to Larry about his parents, which surely wasn’t going to change anything), or expresses it in an overemotional style, she does not threaten her man. If anything, she helps him to maintain his masculine cool, while she herself is perceived as infantile or irrational. When a woman clarifies the issues and uses her anger to move toward something new and different, then change occurs. If she stops overfunctioning for others and starts acting for herself, her underfunctioning man is likely to acknowledge and deal with his own anxieties.

This is the who-started-it game—the search for a beginning of a sequence, where the aim is to proclaim which person is to blame for the behavior of both. But we know that this interaction is really a circular dance in which the behavior of one partner maintains and provokes the behavior of the other. The circular dance has no beginning and no end. In the final analysis, it matters little who started it. The question of greater significance is: “How do we break out of it?”

Emotional pursuers are persons who reduce their anxiety by sharing feelings and seeking close emotional contact. Emotional distancers are persons who reduce their anxiety by intellectualizing and withdrawing. As with Sandra and Larry, it is most often the woman who is the emotional pursuer and the man who is the emotional distancer.

Emotional pursuers protect emotional distancers. By doing the work of expressing the neediness, clingingness, and wish for closeness for both partners, pursuers make it possible for distancers to avoid confronting their own dependency wishes and insecurities. As long as one person is pursuing, the other has the luxury of experiencing a cool independence and a need for space.

Before Sandra broke the pursuit cycle, Larry had the false but comforting fantasy that all of the neediness and wish for closeness was in Sandra. Likewise, Sandra imagined that all of the avoidance of and flight from intimacy was in Larry.

Our experience of a relationship becomes more “true” and balanced as the pursuer can allow herself to acknowledge and express more of her own wish for independence and space, and, in turn, the distancer can begin to acknowledge more of his dependency and wish for closeness.

less important is the fact that emotional distancing from our first family prevents us from proceeding calmly and clearly in new relationships.

Instead, Maggie tended to keep quiet when she felt unappreciated or put down. She alternated between seething silently, emotionally distancing herself, and finally blowing up. None of these reactions was helpful to her.

When emotional intensity is high in a family, most of us put the entire responsibility for poor communication on the other person. It is one’s mother/father/sister/brother who is deaf, defensive, crazy, hopeless, helpless, fragile, or set in their ways. Always, we perceive that it is the other who prevents us from speaking and keeps the relationship from changing. We disown our own part in the interactions we complain of and, with it, our power to bring about a change.

Maggie was trying to change her mother rather than clearly state her own beliefs and convictions and stand behind them. To attempt to change another person, particularly a parent, is a self-defeating move.

It is not just anger and fighting that we learn to fear; we avoid asking precise questions and making clear statements when we unconsciously suspect that doing so would expose our differences, make the other person feel uncomfortable, and leave us standing alone.

Karen was really afraid of rocking the boat in an important relationship by persisting in her efforts to take up her own cause in a mature and articulate manner. Her tears and her willingness to let her boss play the role of advisor and confidant were, in part, her unconscious way of reinstating the status quo and apologizing for the “separateness” inherent in her initial position of disagreement.

Karen was afraid to be clear about the correctness of her position, because she would then experience pressure to continue to take up her own cause.

Separation anxiety may creep up on us whenever we shift to a more autonomous, nonblaming position in a relationship, or even when we simply consider the possibility. Sometimes such anxiety is based on a realistic fear that if we assume a bottom-line stance (“I am sorry, but I will not do what you are asking of me”), we risk losing a relationship or a job.

More often, and more crucially, separation anxiety is based on an underlying discomfort with separateness and individuality that has its roots in our early family experience, where the unspoken expectation may have been that we keep a lid on our expressions of self. Daughters are especially sensitive to such demands and may become far more skilled at protecting the relational “we” than asserting the autonomous “I.”

If we feel chronically angry or bitter in an important relationship, this is a signal that too much of the self has been compromised and we are uncertain about what new position to take or what options we have available to us. To recognize our lack of clarity is not a weakness but an opportunity, a challenge, and a strength.

It is an act of courage to acknowledge our own uncertainty and sit with it for a while. Too often, anger propels us to take positions that we have not thought through carefully enough or that we are not really ready to take.

Katy’s problem is not that her father “makes” her feel guilty. Another person cannot “make” us feel guilty; they can only try. Katy’s father will predictably give her a hard time if she shifts the old pattern, but she alone is responsible for her own feelings—guilt included.

If we do not know about our own family history, we are more likely to repeat past patterns or mindlessly rebel against them, without much clarity about who we really are, how we are similar to and different from other family members, and how we might best proceed in our own life.

Most of us react strongly to family members—especially our mothers—but we do not talk to them in depth and gather data about their experience. We may know virtually nothing about the forces that shaped our parents’ lives as they shaped ours, or how our mothers and grandmothers dealt with problems similar to ours. When we do not know these things, we do not know the self. And without a clear self, rooted in our history, we will be prone to intense angry reactions in all sorts of situations, in response to which we will blame others, distance ourselves, passively comply, or otherwise spin our wheels.