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January 15 - January 24, 2025
To ask, “Is my anger legitimate?” is similar to asking, “Do I have a right to be thirsty? After all, I just had a glass of water fifteen minutes ago. Surely my thirst is not legitimate. And besides, what’s the point of getting thirsty when I can’t get anything to drink now, anyway?”
Those of us who are locked into ineffective expressions of anger suffer as deeply as those of us who dare not get angry at all.
Nothing, but nothing, will block the awareness of anger so effectively as guilt and self-doubt.
Many of our problems with anger occur when we choose between having a relationship and having a self. This book is about having both.
De-selfing means that too much of one’s self (including one’s thoughts, wants, beliefs, and ambitions) is “negotiable” under pressures from the relationship.
The partner who is doing the most sacrificing of self stores up the most repressed anger and is especially vulnerable to becoming depressed and developing other emotional problems.
maturity. Like a seesaw, it is the underfunctioning of one individual that allows for the overfunctioning of the other.
Underfunctioning can take any number of forms. It may be as subtle as a wife’s turning down a job opportunity or avoiding a new challenge when her husband gives a covert communication that he would prefer things to remain as they are or when she fears he would feel threatened by such a change. A woman may protect her man by confining herself to work that he prefers not to do and by failing to recognize and develop interests and skills in “his” areas. She may, in the process, acquire emotional or physical problems. Underlying her various complaints lurks the unconscious conviction that she must
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“Good or bad, radical or not, the workshop is important to me. If I cancel my registration because you want me to, I will end up feeling angry and resentful. I look forward to the workshop and I plan to go.”
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.
“Right or wrong, good or bad, I need to make this choice for myself.”
Such a maneuver would occur not because he no longer loved his wife or because he was intimidated by this particular workshop, but because he felt threatened by the new level of assertiveness, separateness, and maturity that Barbara was demonstrating.
There are few things more anxiety-arousing than shifting to a higher level of self-assertion and separateness in an important relationship and maintaining this position despite the countermoves of the other person.
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. The entire de-selfing process goes on unconsciously so that she may experience herself in perfect harmony with her husband. If she develops emotional or physical problems, she may not associate her dysfunction with the self-sacrifices that she has made in order to protect another person or keep a
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What matters is the degree to which we are able to take a clear position in a relationship and behave in ways that are congruent with our stated beliefs.
Later, when things were calm, she might initiate a discussion about decision-making in the marriage and explain that while she was interested in his opinions, she was ultimately in charge of making her own decisions.
Perhaps Barbara is not ready to face the risk of putting her husband and herself to the test of whether change is possible. She may already be convinced that the relationship cannot tolerate much change.
Neither is she ready to say to herself, “I am choosing to stay in this unhappy marriage with a man who is not going to change,” nor can she clarify a bottom line and say, “If these things do not change, I will leave.” Or perhaps Barbara is not yet ready to face anxiety or the “funny depression”
Fighting and blaming is sometimes a way both to protest and to protect the status quo when we are not quite ready to make a move in one direction or another.
Of course, most of us secretly believe that we have the corner on the “truth” and that this would be a much better world if everyone else believed and reacted exactly as we do. But one of the hallmarks of emotional maturity is to recognize the validity of multiple realities and to understand that people think, feel, and react differently. Often we behave as if “closeness” means “sameness.”
But what was most impressive at the time was how irrevocably stuck we were. We both behaved as if there was only one “right” way to respond to a stressful situation in the family, and we engaged in a dance in which we were trying to get the other person to change steps while we would not change our own. The outcome was that nothing changed at all.
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.
self-observation is the process of seeing the interaction of ourselves and others, and recognizing that the ways other people behave with us has something to do with the way we behave with them.
it is simply to say that we don’t have the power to change another person who does not want to change, and our attempts to do so may actually protect him or her from change. This is the paradox of the circular dances in which we all participate.
can only tolerate looking at this unfinished job for one week, and I can’t complete it myself without becoming angry about it. So, what might we do that you don’t feel pushed and I don’t become furious? One idea I have is to call the painter if it’s not done by Saturday.” Obviously,
When one individual in a family begins to behave in a new way that does not conform to the old family scripts, anxiety skyrockets and before long everyone is trying to reinstate the old familiar patterns.
To attempt to change another person, particularly a parent, is a self-defeating move.
I owned the problem (“I feel scared”) and I took responsibility for my feelings.
If, however, our goal is to break a pattern in an important relationship and/or to develop a stronger sense of self that we can bring to all our relationships, it is essential that we learn to translate our anger into clear, nonblaming statements about our own self.
how to change “You are . . .” communications into “I feel . . .” communications. Certainly we maximize the opportunity for constructive dialogue if we say “I feel like I’m not being heard” rather than “You don’t know how to listen.”
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.
“Our relationship is very important to me and I’m trying to work on getting things more in balance for myself. What I think will help me is to steer clear of my big sister’s help and advice for a while. I know that may sound silly and ungrateful, because you are so good at being helpful, but that’s what would be most useful to me at this time.”
Anger is a tool for change when it challenges us to become more of an expert on the self and less of an expert on others.
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.
Diagnosing the other person is a favorite pastime for most of us when stress is high. Although it can reflect a wish to provide a truly helpful insight, more often it is a subtle form of blaming and one-upmanship. When we diagnose, we assume that we can know what another person really thinks, feels, or wants, or how the other person should think, feel, or behave. But we can’t know these things for sure. It is difficult enough to know these things about our own selves.
We are never the first in our family to wrestle with a problem, although it may feel that way. All of us inherit the unsolved problems of our past; and whatever we are struggling with has its legacy in the struggles of prior generations.
Now she could better use her anger as a springboard for thinking about her situation rather than remaining a victim of it.
And as we will see, thinking clearly about the questions “What am I responsible for?” and “What am I not responsible for?” is a difficult challenge for all of us.
Why is the question “Who is responsible for what?” such a puzzle for women? Women in particular have been discouraged from taking responsibility for solving our own problems, determining our own choices, and taking control of the quality and direction of our own lives. As we learn to relinquish responsibility for the self, we are prone to blame others for failing to fill up our emptiness or provide for our happiness—which is not their job.
Simply being aware that one’s sibling position within the family affects one’s approach to life can be extremely helpful.
As we learn to identify relationship patterns, we are faced with a peculiar paradox: On the one hand, our job is to learn to take responsibility for our thoughts, feelings, and behavior and to recognize that other people are responsible for their own. Yet, at the same time, how we react with others has a great deal to do with how they react with us. We cannot not influence a relationship pattern. Once a relationship is locked into a circular pattern, the whole cycle will change when one person takes the responsibility for changing her or his own part in the sequence.
To ask a person to do more housework (or parenting) and then say “Do it the way I would do it” or “Do it the way I want you to” is a move that blocks change. If Lisa is truly ready to have Rich more involved with the housework (which means that she is willing to give up some control in this area), she must also be ready to let Rich do it his own way.
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. If Lisa can avoid becoming distant and critical, and if she can allow Rich the space to sulk as he pleases without reacting to it, his sulking will eventually subside.
When we do not put our primary emotional energy into solving our own problems, we take on other people’s problems as our own.
It is also the case that those closest to us may have the greatest difficulty considering our advice if we come across as though we have the final word on their lives.
Underground issues from one relationship or context invariably fuel our fires in another.
First, what unresolved and unaddressed issues with an important other (not infrequently someone from an earlier generation) are getting played out in our current relationships? Intense anger at someone close to us can signal that we are carrying around strong, unacknowledged emotions from another important relationship. Second, what is our part in maintaining triangular patterns that keep us stuck?
When we feel angry, we tend to see people rather than patterns as the problem.
We all handle stress in one or more of the above ways and, ideally, in more than one way. If the only way a family handles stress is to focus on a “problem child,” the outcome will be a severely troubled child. If the only way a family handles stress is through marital fighting, the outcome will be a severely troubled marriage.
How easy it is to avoid this challenge of self-confrontation by keeping our emotional energy narrowly focused on men and children, just as society encourages us to do.
