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

by Harriet Lerner

The marital seesaw is hard to balance. When couples do try to balance it, especially under stress, their solutions often exacerbate the problem. The emotional, feeling-oriented wife who gets on her husband’s back to open up and express feelings will find that he becomes cooler and even less available. The cool, intellectual husband who tries calmly to use logic to quiet his overemotional wife will find that she becomes even more agitated. True to stereotype, each partner continues to do the same old thing while trying to change the other. The solution for righting the balance

Although no one has died from sulking yet, women, the emotional rescuers of the world, can have a terribly difficult time allowing others just to sit with their feelings and learn to handle them.