Learning how to manage anger in a relationship can be challenging, but the rewards are well worth it. Learn where anger comes from and what you and your partner can do in response to the other’s anger.
Many of us get mad when our feelings get hurt. This is a very common human feature. A lot of us are wired to express our pain by getting upset, and that’s what we do.
All of us are good people. We all intend to do well with people we love. Sometimes we are not our best and that is when difficulty can arise.
Here is a way to remember your goodness and it is a practice that might work for you. Let’s say you got into an argument with your partner. You might start to tell yourself something about your behavior, or their behavior and stay angry for a time.
This is suffering. Yes, an argument did happen. That’s what occurred. But the difficulty is inside your mind where you might be rehashing what happened, why it happened, and how you could do better or how your partner could do better.
As humans all of us have every emotion and feeling known to man and woman. At sometime or another we might all feel that we didn’t deserve something, or that we might feel embarrassed about something else.
This is natural. We interact with others and sometimes those interactions just don’t go the way we wish. But what if you carry around some feelings like you aren’t loveable because of who you are?
Some of us didn’t get a chance to figure out what our feelings meant when we were little. If our caregivers couldn’t read their feelings it is likely they couldn’t teach us ours.
If we didn’t learn what was going on inside of us we might have a couple of different behavioral responses. In my case if I was upset I would blame the one who upset me. Since I didn’t learn otherwise, I just used this habit well into my forties.
You can see as I write this that blaming someone for my difficulty is not effective. In fact it usually makes the person you blame react with some kind of defense or their own anger…
Many of us are trying to find the perfect mate, or have the perfect relationship. This is something many of us strive for in our lives. If I only had this then it would be perfect, we might say to ourselves.
But let’s look at this for just a few moments. What in our life is ever really perfect? And if for the moment something feels exactly as it should be, how long does that feeling really last?
Nothing ever really stays the same, but many of us want the things to go back to the way they were and then it would be “perfect.”
I was reading something yesterday about the yin and yang. This is a Chinese symbol from the 3rd century. It can relate to how couples work or how they don’t. Here is how I understand it. The yin is the female: caring and nurturing. The yang is the male: hard, strong, fast.
They depend on each other and when they are in balance, they create harmony. I was thinking about this concept recently as it relates to most of us who are in relationships.
You may have heard the story about a Native American grandfather talking to his grandson. The grandfather told the grandson there are two wolves inside of him having a war. One is mean and angry. The other is kind and loving.
Curious the grandson asked, “Who will win?” Grandfather replied, “The one that I feed.”
I have heard this story a few times and every time I nod to myself that I too want to feed the right wolf. I want to be kind and loving, not angry and mean. And I bet if you are reading this right now you would agree with me.
All of us grow up and believe that when we meet our person we will live eternally happy. This is a wonderful fantasy. But that is not the reality of most couples.
If you are in a relationship then you know that your relationship started out so great and then became a little more difficult. And that is the story of most relationships. Only we don’t think about this part when we fall in love.
Some of us blame our partners when things do not go right. Some of us even blame ourselves when things are not great. If you blame yourself, this article is for you.
Many of us seek love from another person. That kind of explains why we couple. We look for the right kind of mate so we can feel good about ourselves. This is very human. But the more I learn about myself and other people, the more I understand that when we are fully ourselves, and only ourselves, that is when we can feel love.
Let me explain. When we find our partners we feel complete in some way, as if we have been missing something and after finding them we now feel whole. But if we always need to feel this feeling with our person, when we don’t feel it, we might start to feel less than—like we lost something important.
Most of us enter into a relationship trying to do the best job we can for our mate. We are pretty capable individuals and we often apply what we think they might need, enjoy, desire and want and try to anticipate what that might be, and then produce it.
Everyone does this in the beginning. But something happens after we try and try to make things good and right. We might get frustrated that our partner doesn’t understand all of our efforts and we might even get mad and feel unappreciated at them for not seeing what we are doing for them.
Does this sound familiar? I think all of us in a relationship have been here before. So, what do we do about it? This is where we learn to do what we can and not do more than we want to do, and reveal what may seem obvious.