323 - You Won't Like Me When I'm Angry
Anger is healthy
We get a lot of mixed messages about anger throughout our lives, which makes it difficult to approach anger in a healthy way sometimes. Often:
We are taught that anger is unacceptable to feel.
Our TV shows and movies glorify anger as vengeance and tell us that hurting the target is justified.
We see ourselves or others feeling justifiable anger but then being dismissed or ignored for showing it.
Anger is portrayed as a personality trait.
This episode focuses on healthy anger.
Five qualities of healthy anger
Experienced and not suppressed.
Safe to be around (and safe for yourself).
Message.
Empathy for self and others.
Results in responsible actions.
This episode delves into what each of these looks like and how we can use anger expressed in a healthy way to live more authentically.
Transcript
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Jase: On this episode of The Multiamory Podcast, you won't like me when I'm angry, or you might be scared of me, or I might not like myself very much, or some combination of those. Today, we're looking at anger. We're looking at both the beneficial aspects of anger, including ways to ensure that you are listening to it in a healthy way, as well as the unhealthy or scary side of anger, which results in rage-filled outbursts and causes damage to ourselves, others, and our relationships.
Anger is a huge, huge topic that some researchers and clinical psychologists literally devote their entire professional lives just to studying anger. It's really fascinating, and there's so much that we wish we could cover. If anything in this episode resonates with you, please take that as a jumping-off point to do some of your own research about these concepts or these ideas to find even more resources and support if this is something that is really important for you to deal with in your life, because unfortunately, we can't cram a lifetime worth of professional work into just one episode.
Emily: Yes. Anger, it's this tricky emotion. It's kind of convoluted. It gets messy at times because we, as a society get and give so many different messages about it because there's a lot of us out there who are taught that anger just simply isn't acceptable ever, it's not acceptable to feel, it's not acceptable to show, it's just unacceptable. Our TV shows and our movies, we do see sometimes anger super glorified, and as glorified maybe as vengeance, or if we're hurting the target of this vengeance, then our anger is justified and celebrated. What comes to mind is the Liam Neeson movie. What is it?
Dedeker: Taken.
Emily: Yes, Taken.
Dedeker: Yes, of course.
Emily: The series of Liam Neeson movies.
Dedeker: And literally every single action--
Jase: Action movie of all kinds. Yes, exactly.
Dedeker: We often can see ourselves or others feeling very justifiably angry about something, but then being dismissed, being minimized, sometimes being ignored for showing it. Of course, this shows up along gender lines, along racial lines. Typically, we are more likely to celebrate white male anger and really shun female anger, or non-white anger, in particular, can bring up more problems for people to experience that emotion depending on what you look like or how people perceive you.
Sometimes also, anger is portrayed not as a feeling or as an emotion but as a personality trait of somebody that we can know that somebody has a short fuse or they have a temper. Sometimes, that's even portrayed as a funny aspect of somebody's personality if they're on a hair-trigger.
Jase: Yes. It's such a mix of messages that we get. When it comes to looking at healthy anger, it's honestly really hard to come up with examples of that from media, thinking about media representations, particularly. It's actually quite difficult to come up with examples of healthy anger. That's why I do think it is really important to look at this and look at what researchers have found about it, what psychologists look at who actually deal with anger specifically as a focus rather than just the armchair psychology where in the '70s, the armchair psychology and popular psychology was all about, "Don't suppress it. Let it all hang out. You got to feel it. You got to let it out because if it bottles up, it'll kill you."
Emily: That's how scream therapy became a thing.
Dedeker: Wow, I've never even heard of it.
Jase: Exactly, or anger rooms, where you go in and smash stuff. There's some research showing these things are actually not helpful for you. They're not healthy. They're not encouraging healthier ways of dealing with your anger. They're either just encouraging bad behavior or just providing you with other escapes from actually dealing with what the anger's trying to tell you and what's going on.
Dedeker: There was a very early form of marriage therapy. I learned about this from doing my Gottman training, but I think in the '50s and '60s, maybe even before that, there was this very early, early version of couples counseling that did literally just involve the couple taking foam bats to each other.
Jase: Foam bats. Oh, wow.
Dedeker: Because that was the thing. It was just like, "Oh, you just need to cut out the emotion. You just need to get it out, and then it'll be okay."
Emily: I don't know. That would be really traumatic for me. I wouldn't like that.
Dedeker: I couldn't imagine for a second being in a room and beating you up with a foam bat, Emily. I also can't imagine you actually returning any foam bat. I can't imagine--
Emily: I do enjoy stuffed animal. I do enjoy sometimes throwing things when I'm angry. I definitely do that.
Dedeker: Yes. I've thrown some pillows recently, but it hasn't helped anything is the problem.
Jase: Right. What we're going to talk about in this episode, and I do want to clarify, what we're focusing on here is we're looking at what healthy anger looks like, what the properties of healthy anger are, as well as within each of those talking about what are things that we can do to try to embody more of that trait when we're feeling angry, and because this is a relationship podcast, we are focusing on anger mostly in the context of close personal relationships like romantic partners, maybe close friends, family members you get along with, assuming that there's some mutual goodwill here or at least that's the foundation that the relationship's based on.
Anger shows up differently in other situations, but this is what we're focused on as a relationship podcast right here. I also wanted to give a shout-out to the writings of Dr. Bernard Golden, PhD. He has written a ton about anger for psychology today for many, many years. There's just a lot of really good resources about really getting into some of these topics even more. That's definitely a place to go check out. His name's easy to remember because it's Golden.
Emily: Dr. Golden.
Jase: Now, we're going to start going through these five qualities of healthy anger, and just first as a quick overview of what these are, and then we'll go into each one in-depth. The first is that it is experienced, not suppressed. Second is that it's safe to be around and safe for yourself. Third is that it has a message. It's trying to tell us something. It's trying to communicate something to us. Fourth is that we still have empathy for ourselves and for others, and then five is that it results in responsible actions.
Emily: Great. Let's go to the first one, the first healthy quality of anger experienced and not suppressed. Denial. Denial of anger, denial of most things, it's just a defense mechanism. It protects us from acknowledging parts of ourselves that are incompatible with our self-identity. You might be out there thinking, "I'm not an angry person," but there's a pattern that happens when every time something is really annoying to you or really hard for you that automatically, you get into a rage-filled terror. Yes, that's something to maybe take a look at.
Jase: I think the key there is that, in that case, the tendency if you think, "I'm not an angry person," something happens where you feel angry, and then instead of acknowledging that and letting yourself feel it, you're saying, "This doesn't fit with my identity, so I'm going to deny it.
Emily: That's true.
Jase: No, I'm not angry. I'm not angry." Instead, you just go longer and longer without your needs being met or without feeling safe, or without getting the support you need or something. It's that suppressing--
Emily: Pushing it down.
Jase: Pushing it down, ignoring that it's trying to tell you something.
Emily: Yes. That makes sense because I think there's a lot of shame and fear involved in denial in general and especially with denial of anger that you may have, or if you don't believe that you're an angry person, I'm just going to continue that narrative within myself and say like, "Okay,
no, this isn't happening. I'm not angry, I'm going to brush it off instead of really looking at what's going on there."
Dedeker: Yes and the urge to do that could come from many different sources. You could have grown up in a family that just didn't express anger where the culture of your family that wasn't okay to do. It could be because you grew up seeing anger be punished or you yourself were punished in some way whether that's a literal punishment or a social punishment or being ostracized or things like that.
The media that we consume, what we see from our teachers, our culture, our religion, our social group can also influence the desire to suppress anger rather than feel it. For a lot of people, there is also a sense of fear around our own anger, that if I let myself feel it it's automatically going to be out of control. If I let myself feel it, someone's going to get hurt, and so it's safer to just not feel it at all and deny it and push it down.
Jase: Yes and I think that the old way of thinking about anger like what we talked about before about the like, "Just let it all out," way of approaching it is that there was almost this idea that anger is like a pressure that if you keep suppressing it you're containing this gas that's getting more and more pressurized until it eventually breaks through its container and explodes.
That's not how emotions actually work but what's actually going on when you're suppressing that anger is that the anger is coming from something, often from a perceived threat of some sort, whether that's a physical threat or more likely a psychological or emotional threat that by denying that anger and denying that feeling it can actually lead us into other secondary ways of coping with those feelings that are even worse for us.
Things like depression and anxiety or being really passive-aggressive in your behavior, or substance abuse, or often redirecting that anger to someone else. This comes up in that case of suppressing anger toward one person like suppressing anger toward a parent because it's like, "Well, either I wasn't allowed to or I think I'm not the kind of person who's just a bratty kid who's angry at their parents."
You don't acknowledge and actually deal with some of those things that then you might redirect that anger toward whoever the person in line in front of you at the store or your partner or your friends or something like that. In certain cases, this thing of feeling like, "Well, I have to suppress this anger towards someone like my parents or maybe suppress anger I feel toward my religion that maybe caused harm to me growing up," or something like that.
That in suppressing that it can actually lead us to idolize or make extra excuses for those people or that institution of like, "Oh, well, they're amazing, they're right, they're always right," but then that anger can get redirected outward to somewhere else because that feeling is still there, and so you try to find something to blame. This could be just like authority figures in general or it could be, it could turn into xenophobia or homophobia or extra radicalized religious beliefs or conspiracy theories or any sort of thing that's giving this outlet for that feeling that's not appropriate.
That's not actually about the thing that's going on, it's this secondary direction of anger, the redirection of anger. We don't want that. When we feel the anger the first thing is just realizing it's okay to feel, that it is an emotion and as we're going to get into later I think people associate if I feel angry, I'm going to do angry and that those two things are not exactly the same.
Emily: All right, let's move on to the next quality of healthy anger which is that you're safe to be around and you're safe for yourself to be around as well. You're not going to be hurting yourself, you're not going to be hurting others. Some people say that anger is exactly the same thing as rage, or that maybe it leads into rage, but anger is a feeling and it isn't necessarily harmful while rage which is I think one of the things that a lot of people are worried that anger will turn into.
Rage is that feeling of like boiling over. I'm so angry that I'm going to start producing destructive anger and destructive behavior that can grow out of that more controlled like, "Hey, I'm having this internal feeling."
Dedeker: Yes I know for me often when I think about anger in my own personal experience, it makes me think a lot about how my own experience with PTSD changed my relationship to anger. Both in bad ways initially and then much better ways once I started going to therapy essentially. For me, that really highlighted this difference between feeling anger and feeling just extreme rage.
For me, really surprising PTSD response, for me, was this really surprising rage that sometimes felt like it came out of nowhere like this is very out of control, I'm going to pop out of my skin level of anger. Before I really started looking at that or getting any healing around that that yes I came to associate actually feeling any anger at all, first of all, it would turn very quickly into rage, and also even low levels of anger I would be afraid it's going to turn into rage.
It's the sense of any anger at all is not going to be safe, and so I can't really go there. The reality is and as we've covered before feeling, letting yourself feel anger is actually very very important and can be really safe as well and it can be safe to be around your anger.
Jase: Yes. This I think is especially important if you think about relationships where you're in close proximity to someone. Again thinking about this in romantic relationships and friends and roommates and things like that is like if you've ever been stuck in the car with someone when you're having an argument, like with a partner where it's like you can't escape, you're literally trapped in a small space, it can really suck.
Even if we're not talking about to the point of truly fearing for your physical safety, there's still an element of fear that we can feel in that situation where there's a lot of intensity in this closed space or in close proximity to us. This safety part is really important when it comes to how we can feel our anger and also express our anger in a way that isn't causing harm to our relationships or to other people.
As Dedeker said for a lot of us we feel like, "If I get angry, then I yell." Right? It's like one to the other, boom-boom, right? There's no in-between steps, there's no middle ground, it's just if I get angry it's full-on rage, screaming, yelling, hitting things throwing things whatever.
Emily: I think in one way it's also challenging to be on the receiving end of anger and then feel like, "Wait a minute, am I allowed to feel unsafe in this moment?" Is that an overreaction of the situation? Sometimes I've been in situations where I felt that as well and questioned my own emotions regarding being unsafe, like, "Am I overreacting here?" It's interesting on both ends, that safety question because you want to internally feel safe because of your anger, or you want to feel safe because the other person in some way is particularly making you feel unsafe.
Jase: Right and so for this, we're talking in the context of the person feeling the anger, trying to feel healthier anger. Because that's a perfect example of, "Look at what you're doing to your partner." This person that you say you care about, if you're forcing them into a situation where now they're, one feeling scared which that sucks and then two having to question themselves and doubt themselves about whether that's even okay because they're wrestling with, "Well, I want them to be able to feel anger."
That's why this distinction is really important, right? That feeling your anger and expressing your anger is different from displaying anger and aggression and rage and that those two things are not the same. While you can say, "Yes I have a right to feel my feelings," you do, but that doesn't translate into, "Therefore, it's okay for me to yell or be physically threatening or cause damage," or something like that. Now that doesn't always end up so easy.
Like we said it seems like I get angry and then just boom I'm there, I lose control, I'm seeing red. We've got so many terms and metaphors for this sort of concept. It's really challenging and so for this, I wanted us to look at a technique. This one is called the slow-motion replay. I think they actually just call it slow motion but slow-motion replay is cooler. This is from I don't know how you say this from Ananias Foundation? Ananias.
Dedeker: Ananias?
Jase: Ananias, they're specifically an anger management and abuse prevention group that does therapy and counseling and stuff. I don't know that I would necessarily recommend them wholeheartedly, they're also a very Christian religious group and while that can be helpful for some people, I can't give it a blanket endorsement because of that because that can also cause some damage. Anyway, basically it's this if something happens, so there's a stimulus and it makes you angry, it can feel like after the fact, when you're looking back you're like, "Gosh, that thing happened and then I just lost it." The challenge with
the slow-motion replay is to do that, is to say, "Okay it seems like it went stimulus, boom, rage." Can you slow it down and try to remember and look at what are all the little things even if they just happened in fractions of a second, what were the little things that happened in between there?
More realistically it happens actually over several seconds, it's not actually in a split second it just can feel that way in the time when you're upset, but it might look something like this. You might actually realize in doing your slow-motion replay, "Well, okay there was the stimulus, whatever, the thing my partner said or did or something. That then there's a tightness in your gut, and then at least you saying something sarcastic to them in response.
Then you raised your voice, then your heat's pounding and you're raising your voice more so you're yelling and your fists are clenched and then full-on rage. You see that there were actually little steps in between there that at first you just saw all as one thing just like boom-boom. The idea is first just that, is identifying what are actually the steps for you? For you, that pattern might be different, but try to look for a pattern of what are the things that happen in my body and my behaviors that lead up to that rage?
Emily: Yes and then with those patterns it's really important to look at them, try to use them as signposts, and say, "Okay these are the warning signs, these continually happen when I'm getting upset, when I'm getting super angry," and then yes that'll give you a warning sign and a place to get to where you're like, "Okay, I need to take a timeout."
Practice moving the time out if you're-- we talked about HALT all the time on the show but maybe even before you get to sarcasm and raised voice and stuff like that, then perhaps you move that time out even earlier and earlier. If the stimulus happens and immediately you feel this tightness in your gut, you're like, "I know where this is headed, perhaps I should just throw that timeout in right now, give myself a moment to take a breath, and step out of the room." Then I can come to rational solution or better communication with my partner or something along those lines.
Dedeker: Yes, I sometimes have a hard time with this. I will notice I think over the years I've gotten a lot better at getting that appropriate receptive sense of what's going on in my body and knowing when I'm heading in a direction of more out of control anger. However, I tend to be like, "Okay, yes I noticed that thing, but I think I'm okay," I can keep going. I'm trying to internalize the lesson that a halt called maybe earlier than I think I need to is less likely to cause damage to myself and others than a halt called later than I need to.
It's probably best to air on the side of pausing earlier than you think that you need to, even if it feels silly. Even if it just like, "It's just this little bit of tightness, it's okay I can still communicate." Maybe try that out, you can experiment with stopping yourself much much earlier on and giving yourself some time for your nervous system to regulate and then seeing what happens.
Jase: Yes and this is something that it's a process, right? At first, it might be, it's not until I start yelling that I go, "I should pause," right? That's where your cue is and then maybe the next time it's like, "Okay, I'm going to stop myself right after I notice I say something sarcastic," and you can get to the point where you can do it a little bit earlier and then move it earlier and earlier like Dedeker said to maybe even just ride away where it seems almost comically early but stops you from taking those later steps.
Because if you think about it too, a lot of times we're angry and we're going to get to this more in the second half of the episode, but a lot of times we're angry because we're unhappy about something, right? Because a need's not getting met, or we're feeling a threat, or we're feeling fear, or there's something that we want changed, and reacting angry or doing that time out later means that then in order to get what we want we first have to repair the damage that we did by our rage reaction before we can even get to actually try to get what we want and what the anger was really about.
The earlier you can stop that the more the focus of your communication and focus of your actions can be on what's really going on rather than just having to fix all of the problems that you caused by getting to that rage state. Now we're going to go on to talk about how healthy anger is sending us a message but before we do that, we're going to take a quick break to talk about some sponsors of this show, if you go and support them it goes directly to help this show and helps keep this content coming to all of y'all out there for free.
Dedeker: Now, we're moving to the quality of healthy anger which is that anger sends us a message. The signals that anger is giving us, it could be about something externally happening or it could be about something that's going on internally. First, we're going to talk about the internal signals. Our anger could be connected to a shame trigger. This is something that we talked a lot about if you go back to episodes 281 and 282 where we did a deep dive into shame that often anger is a response to something shameful and especially when it comes to internal shaming.
We could feel ashamed about our intelligence, our skills, our behavior, our self-worth in general. Then we're much more likely to react in an angry way to innocuous statements or to criticism even if it's kind criticism or constructive criticism, and we may be much more likely to lash out in anger as a defense. The anger that's coming up could be sending you some messages that are connected to some kind of past trauma or baggage or abuse, emotional or physical abuse or neglect from your childhood or from a past relationship, or whenever.
Emily: It could also be connected to the social messages that we receive about our gender or our sexuality, our race, religion, social-economic status, things like that. In any case, it may be showing us that this is an area that we're sensitive to and maybe we need to do some personal internal work there especially if it keeps coming up over and over again that you see a pattern of this thing is spoken about, or I hear a maybe innocuous statement about whatever and it just makes me really pissed, what's going on there?
Jase: Yes and I think what's important to keep in mind with all of this, with that it's sending you a message about something internal, is I think sometimes we can get caught in this narrative of, "Oh, well if my anger is based in just something from my past or my own shame then it's not real or it's not valid or something like that. The important thing to keep in mind here is that your anger is very important, and it is trying to tell you something and the key is to just spend some time trying to figure out what that message is and then what you can do about it.
Because at least in my experience, and I think from most people we don't really enjoy feeling angry that much and so the idea being that by looking for these signals and figuring out what that is we can help actually take actions and we'll talk about that a little bit later too but actually take actions to fix the problem and address some of those things so that we're not constantly having to feel this way. Then now moving on to external, this could also be showing you a very important message about something that is actually going on outside of yourself.
This could be something like a fundamental need not being met. I guess you could argue this is also internal at the same time but say it's coming from some need not being met like care from your partner or time with a partner or equal amount of participation in the household from your partner, or there's lots of different ways that this could look and these are very real. I think something that's good to keep in mind here is that these needs not being met by your partner, assuming that they care about you, are almost never going to be intentional.
If they're intentionally keeping things from you or hiding things from you then really we should be having a different conversation about reevaluating this relationship. If we're going to base it off of this assumption that you actually do care for and want to do the best for each other, then this is really an important opportunity to realize this is the message and so that's what I need to communicate because probably my partner doesn't understand this and so we can collaborate and work together on getting this to be better.
Emily: Your anger could also be telling you about a boundary that you haven't really clarified for yourself. We want to reiterate, we've talked about this on our boundaries episode but it was a bit ago. That a boundary is not something that you put on other people, but it's something that you put around yourself and it isn't negotiable. Essentially like a boundary could be for instance, "Okay my partner is raising their voice and I don't want to be around that and so I'm going to choose to leave the room if that is happening. Something like that.
Jase: Right, something you can enact for yourself.
Emily: Correct, yes.
Jase: I think this is a good example of how maybe--
your anger in response to that is the clue to you to go, "Huh? Maybe I have a boundary here that I haven't recognized and so my anger is my body trying to do that boundary for me.
Emily: You mean like we need to get out of here, yes, exactly. It could also be an indication of a frustration or something that you haven't communicated clearly enough to your partner or that they haven't really understood. Something along those lines, like even about, okay, my partner is really on my ass about doing the dishes or cleaning the house, but I have a lot of trauma around that because of stuff that happened in my past. Maybe I just need to communicate to my partner, "Hey, it's hard to hear the way that you talk to me about doing these chores. Can we maybe sit down and have a chore wheel or figure out a nice seemingly sweet way of talking about this that isn't as triggering to me."
Dedeker: Yes, I think at the risk of oversimplifying this, as far as thinking about signals or messages that anger might be sending to us, that for me, I think about it in three ways. That either it's indicating there's a boundary here that maybe I wasn't aware of or that I didn't protect or was unable to protect in some way, and that needs to be restored somehow, or there's some trauma.
It could be bringing up something from the past, some incompleted response, especially incompleted protective responses, depending on what type of trauma it was that's getting activated here, or I could have some longing especially when we have complaints or frustrations with partners often there's some longing underneath it. It could be sending a message about the thing that you need, the thing that you're longing for, the thing that maybe you need to ask for, or need to find a better way of asking for from your partner.
Jase: Yes. I really liked this idea of during that time-out that we talked about in the previous step, to short circuit getting to that rage reaction. That something you could be doing during that time out is trying to find this message, is doing that exploring, and trying to find out what's underneath this. What's it trying to tell you. All right. Step number four or pillar number four, part number four of healthy anger is that it contains empathy for yourself and others or put another way, has compassion for yourself and for others.
First, we're going to look at directing that at yourself. I know for me, at least with anger, this one's the one I think I struggle with the most, is having this compassion for myself. As we talked about before, anger often feeds off of this self-directed guilt or shame or embarrassment, and it can be really hard to have compassion for ourselves.
A lot of times, if I feel like I screwed something up, I feel that guilt and that shame, I get angry at myself, and then as a defense, then I need to find somewhere else to direct my anger at like the company that made my computer or something else. We do this a lot. We see this happen a lot of just this I've got to find someone to be angry at because I can't handle how guilty and how shameful and embarrassed I feel personally.
As we talked about in our shame episode, again, episodes 281 and 282, that guilt and shame evolved in humans for good reasons, but they can very easily get out of hand and turn toxic and destructive. This is an example of how that can happen.
Emily: Yes and really the antidote is self-forgiveness and self-compassion. I do agree with you that often if we get angry at someone else, immediately afterwards, that anger is directed inward and you're like, "Fuck I screwed up here. Oh jeez, I was such a dick or whatever."
Jase: It can have a cycle, yes.
Emily: Absolutely. There is this idea that you have to have empathy for yourself that things happen and anger occurs and sometimes you're also going to be saying the wrong thing and that's okay. Try to have some self-forgiveness with that. Robert Enright a researcher on self-forgiveness defines it as a willingness to abandon self resentment in the face of one's own acknowledged objective wrong while fostering compassion, generosity, and love towards oneself. That's really nice.
Jase: I think the thing that's so fundamental there in that definition that I really love is that it's abandoning self resentment in the face of one's own acknowledged objective wrong. It's not saying like, "I'm letting myself off the hook," and being like, "Oh no, no, no, I'm fine. I did everything right." It's like, "No, you're both acknowledging I did something wrong while also having compassion, generosity, and love for yourself." That right there is the magic combination that means it's not just like, "Oh, whatever self-love. I don't care I have no consequences," and it's also not what a lot of us do, which is just beat ourselves up and feel constant shame.
Dedeker: We have some questions to ask yourself specifically as part of a self-forgiveness exercise. This also comes from Dr. Bernard Golden who has done a lot of the research and writing about anger that we're referencing in this episode. When it comes to self-directed anger, you can ask yourself, "Okay, realistically, is there anything that I could do to rectify the past?" Of course, be careful of judging yourself with hindsight about the insights that you lacked back then. It can be really hard to put yourself back into a situation before you knew the things that you know now.
You can also ask yourself, "What can I do differently if I face a similar situation in the future?" You can identify essentially almost like a mission statement listing out your values and the morals that are meaningful to you, that help you guide your life. If you go back and listen to our episode 316, specifically all about figuring out your values and finding ways to tie difficult experiences or stressful experiences to your values, that can be really, really effective and really good for your mental health.
You can also describe to yourself how is your life going to improve if you embrace self-forgiveness. I really like that one. This idea of if you could just flip a switch and have forgiven yourself, what would be different? What would feel different? How would you move through the world differently?
Emily: Yes, that's really why lovely. Wow, indeed. All right. Let's direct some of that compassion now towards others towards maybe your partner, the one who may be pissed you off in the first place. Yes, sit with yourself when you have these angry moments because it's interesting. I think we get angry and then sometimes have a tendency to hold on to that anger instead of having compassion and sort of letting it go.
Because we may have some unreasonable expectations of our partners, there's that idea out there that if you really love someone you know exactly what your partner wants and thinks and feels at all times, and that just simply isn't the case. I wish it were, I would love to be completely perfect and know exactly what my partner needs or wants, but in reality, that's just not going to be the case.
Have some compassion for your partner and for yourself in that moment. We may be immaturely seeking unconditional love from our romantic partners. We may think, "Hey, our partner needs to love us regardless of what we do or how we act or the way that we're being in these moments," I mean, our parents did that for us. There's unconditional love there with our parents, but it's not necessarily a healthy or reasonable thing to expect even and especially I think in the face of doing things that are destructive for the relationship.
Jase: It's again, one of those movie tropes that really reinforces this actually very immature idea of what love means. Another one is, just to go back to the first part about having self-compassion, is that having more self-compassion and self-forgiveness also makes it easier to offer that to other people and that if you're holding onto that for yourself, or you find it really hard to forgive other people, it's very likely that there's something you're not giving yourself compassion for.
As Emily said, your partner can't read your mind, so also keep that in mind, that part of this is also learning to better communicate with your partner rather than just being mad when they don't know what you want. Then also ultimately realizing that your partner is their own person and that they might not always make decisions that you like or that are the same ones that you would make.
Especially if this is a recurring anger or frustration or argument that comes up, there could come a point where you have to realize either I need to accept that there are different from me and make different decisions and have different values from me and be okay with that, or that I'm not okay with that, and I need to get out of this relationship. I think we're also falsely given this idea that "Oh, well, if you just try hard enough or just stick it out, they'll change and they'll get better in this way that you want them to." They just might not and that's not even-- I don't even want to say like better, but just they might not be the same as you, and have the same values. While that's okay, it doesn't necessarily mean that you need to stay in that relationship. That is a very important evaluation
that you're going to need to make for yourself during this having empathy, but also realizing also, maybe this just isn't compatible.
Emily: All right. Now we're going into the final pillar of our healthy qualities of anger. This is the last step in everything, which is that it results in responsible actions. You do all the things that we talk about before you take the necessary time to decrease your anger arousal, maybe take some time for self-compassion, for forgiveness, introspection on the messages that your anger might be telling you. Then finally, you're going to get on stage and act. Now, you're going to have some responsible actions here.
If you discovered something about yourself, then let your partner know and ask for support if that's an appropriate thing to do. Maybe go and seek some counseling or support outside of your partner, that's really ideal because truly, your partner can't be the person that you sleep with and the person that you live with and the person that is also your therapist, et cetera that's not particularly healthy. We've talked about that a lot on this show.
Specifically, try to find someone that will help you process the messages that are occurring because of that anger, or the messages that you're receiving, like, "Hey, I've done a lot of introspection here, and I'm finding I have a lot of trauma around this." Go find a person to help you process that, and yes, not just someone out there, like a friend that's going to help fuel that anger, or maybe someone that's going to get pissed off with you. We do have those friends that are like, "Yes, this person sucks. Let's continue this angry cycle." Maybe don't do that.
Dedeker: If you've discovered a boundary that you didn't know about, or maybe a boundary that you realized that you haven't been the best at enforcing, you can spend some time thinking about and making a plan about how you will enforce that boundary for yourself. It could look like, I think our classic examples that we give it could look like removing yourself from certain situations or conversations or relationships. It doesn't even have to go that far.
For you, the way you enforce a boundary could just be when this happens, I will speak up about it. When this happens, I will say no, or I will make a choice to protect myself or protect my body or protect my energy in some way. That's also perfectly wonderful ways of enforcing boundaries. If you've discovered from your anger that you haven't been clearly expressing something, you could do your best to be as clear as possible and don't be afraid to assert yourself when going after what it is that you need or making requests for what it is that you need.
Of course, we want to remind you to stay compassionate and collaborative in the way that you share with a partner. Of course, you're going to want to use your best communication skills to increase the likelihood that your partner is going to be able to hold that and hear that and listen to you as well.
We do recommend keeping it short and specific to the best of your ability. Sometimes if you're a little bit of a spewer, let's say, or a little bit of a rambler, sometimes it can stoke the anger back up again. Like I've definitely noticed that that sometimes we can get ourselves angry, again, going through something, or just be aware of that when you're communicating
Jase: Then as you're communicating and having this conversation again, realize that at the end of the day, your partner may not agree. This may end up as something that you can eventually come to an understanding about, or you may have found a deal-breaker and that's either of those outcomes is better than continuing to suffer and not get to that conclusion.
Also, acknowledge that you may have done some damage during either your angry outburst if it got to that point or during previous ones that maybe you need to do some repair for those things, or perhaps keep that in mind as you're having this conversation with your partner at another time of acknowledging that maybe there's some stuff I need to repair here too so that my partner can better hear the message I've realized is going on underneath this.
Realizing that it's not just like, "oh," well because I realized this now I'm off the hook. It's like, well, just acknowledge that we're all humans here and that even if we didn't intend to cause harm, we still can sometimes, and we need to be responsible for that.
Emily: All right. One of our favorite multiamory aphorisms is, it's okay to break up. It truly is or deescalates, or just change your situation in some form or fashion. Relationships do really take work, but a relationship that's dominated by conflict and anger is not serving either of units' current forum, so do something about it. Sometimes the first step is just internal like, "Hey, I need to be looking at what the heck is causing me to fly off the handle on a regular basis." The two of you, it might be important to take a look at the relationship together and see if it's serving you or not.
Dedeker: Yes, though some times I think because of pop psychology around anger, what I've seen is these two trends of sometimes people can think, "I need to do anger management," when really what's going on is there some unresolved trauma healing that needs to happen or people can think, "Oh, I need to do anger management," when what's really going on is they're being an abusive POS. That's all.
Sometimes people can confuse, "Oh, it's the anger that's the problem," and maybe there's actually some deeper things going on underneath. Just be aware of that. To recap the five qualities of healthy anger, one that you can experience it without suppressing it, two, it's safe to be around and safe for yourself as well. Three, it's giving you a message, four, you're still able to access empathy yourself and for others, and five, it results in responsible actions.
Jase: For our bonus today, we're going to be talking a little bit more specifically about holding on to anger longer, holding grudges and some of the research on that, as well as talking a little bit about what to do in those situations. We would also love to hear from all of you on our Instagram story. We have a question which is what is the healthiest display of anger you've experienced?
I love this question because it turns this whole topic on its head from how people normally think about anger. It's like, "Oh, what's something you're angry about? What's a time someone was angry with you?" It's like, "No, no, can you think of examples of healthy anger that you've experienced, especially if it's been directed at you, and what made that different from unhealthy anger? The best place to share your thoughts with other listeners is on this episode's discussion thread in our private Facebook Group or Discord chat. You can get access to these groups and join our exclusive community by going to patreon.com/multiamory.
In addition, you can share with us publicly on Twitter, Facebook, or Instagram. Multiamory is created and produced by Dedeker Winston, Emily Matlack, and me Jase Lindgren. Our episodes are edited by Mauricio Balvanera. Our social media wizard is Will Macmillan. Our production assistants are Rachel Schenewerk and Carson Collins. Our theme song is Forms I Know I Did by Josh & Anand from the Fractal Cave EP. The full transcript is available on this episode's page on multiamory.com.