Hi, this is Linda Nusbaum. It's been amazing being able to help everyone for so long, but it's time for me to retire. The site is up for archival purposes, but I've closed my practice.
Thank you.
Figuring out how to control anger issues in your relationship can be challenging. Everyone gets mad. Some of us even blow up.
Controlling anger issues in a relationship means blowing up less often and learning how to minimize the damage when, despite our best efforts, an episode occurs after all.
Dealing with anger in a relationship can be difficult. Anger can push us away from our partner, so learning how to control anger’s influence on our lives and partner is incredibly important. Many of us don’t develop effective tools for dealing with anger until later in life, if ever. If you’re reading this, maybe you could use a helping hand.
If you get angry at your mate, you are not alone. If you get really mad and yell or do other things to your partner when you get upset… again, you are not alone. Anger is pretty common in relationships. And this is not an article about how terrible it is. This is a message about what to do about it.
I was talking to a friend the other day about a trip I was going to take. It’s an exotic one with a different friend to a place that she wants to go and I said I would go along. It’s a lot of money, more money than I have ever spent on a trip. I have the money, but something inside me says, “Wow, you are spending a lot of money.”
This is part of the package of old messages that I received when I was a little girl. We were not poor, but my mother’s comfort at spending money was always on the frugal side. Day old bread is perfectly fine. Shopping at the 99 cent store is good. Hand me downs from cousins and sisters are was just our norm. I did not grow up poor. But the messages I received about spending money were “don’t spend it, ever.”
All of us have times in our lives when we don’t feel good about ourselves. Every human sometimes wonders if they are loved, or enough, or good enough. This is pretty common for most of us. And when we hold these low ideas about ourselves most of us get a pretty terrible feeling inside us, and we might even think we are alone in the world. And that feels awful.
But what if you could think of your partner, your mate, the one you love as standing strong for you when you have these low feelings? What would it be like for you to actually go to them and say, “I could really use a hug from you right now?”
I was thinking about whether my husband and I are friends. And the truth is, he is my best friend. I know I have other friends in my life and the husband actually goes by a lot of different names like, “partner,” “mate,” “better half,” etc.. But when I thought about whether we are friends, I could find no other answer than, “Yes, of course!”
I like being with him. I like doing things with him. Now that doesn’t mean I don’t have other friends that I enjoy being with, but realizing that the two of us have built a beautiful friendship is something I feel really happy about.
If you are human, you have felt jealous. You might even have some early memories of really feeling the pain of jealousy when you were young. I like to think it’s pretty common for all of us as we grow up to experience the hurt associated with being jealous.
But why do we keep feeling it and how to do we deal with it when we grow up and are in what we consider an adult relationship? Why is it we often still get re-injured or we re-injure our mate and it always centers around jealousy?
As a couple counselor I work with people in relationships. Often the difficult issues surround feelings of jealousy. So let’s talk about it and understand what happens to us and our partner when we feel it.
By the time we are in a relationship most of us are pretty good at navigating life. We have probably achieved some sort of successes with school or jobs and just the ability to accomplish things in life.
So when we finally connect to the person we fall in love with, why is it that so many of us feel as if we can’t figure out how to fix simple things, like misunderstandings and disagreements? If we as humans are good at other things in our lives; taking care of people, working, going to class, why do we fail at simple things like getting along with another person?
For many of us, having expectations is a way of life. As people we often think about things we want or experiences we would like to have and then we just expect them to happen. We might not even think about how many times we just expect things to go the way our head tells us they should.
But in a relationship it’s easy to see when those expectations don’t materialize, because every time that happens we are probably ready to tell the person we love how disappointed we are in them. We have come to expect things in our relationships too. And that can be challenging.
When we fall in love with our person we pretty much land in a wonderful place full of possibilities and promise that leads us to wanting more of this great feeling we are both sharing with each other. Falling in love is one of the most miraculous things we do as humans.
So why, after finding our person do we spend so much time trying to understand how they think and act and get frustrated in the process? Sometimes it can even feel as if we are partnered with someone we just don’t get. “Why do they do things the way they do?” We might be asking our self this question. Or, “Who thinks like that?” When we ask these questions we are not sure about our mate. They are so different we just don’t understand them.
Having an argument with the person we love is one of the most difficult events we can go through in a relationship. When we are not upset, our special person is our favorite individual. We love them. When we get our feelings hurt, or we get misunderstood or get angry at them, they turn from our loving soulmate to someone we war with.
And when we get pulled into an argument with our loved one it doesn’t matter what came before the argument. It doesn’t matter that we get along most of the time. It doesn’t matter that we had a great day just a few minutes before. All that matters is that we are hurt, feel unloved and now we are MAD!