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Is Your Anger Ruining Your Relationship? Learn to Manage Your Anger. |
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Is the anger you feel coloring
everything in your relationship? Where you're so
angry with him so much of the time you find
yourself turning it around and blaming yourself? If you're having trouble managing anger, and it's turning into depression, you'll want to listen to my Reconnect Your Relationship CD program. It has a special section on the anger, guilt, fear and depression cycle and teaches you how to break it, fast. Do you feel like anger is wrecking your love life? And if you could just manage your anger better, or if HE would just STOP making you ANGRY, everything would be okay? If you do, then you know what a problem it can be to manage it. If you stuff it down, it either explodes out exactly when you don't want it to, or it makes you sick. And if you try to express it, he accuses you of complaining and whining and being "dramatic," or he just withdraws. And even worse, if you're like I was, you can't FEEL your anger. Instead, you just feel this lumpy, heavy, dreadful sensation all the time. It's like a confusion, a lostness and sadness that I used to take for the "blues," when really, I was ANGRY! Well, what if your anger could be the best thing you've got going for you? So that instead of having to shove it aside or bury it, you could treasure it, enjoy it and USE it to deepen your relationship with your man? You can. Anger is just another emotion in your inner "Soup" of emotions. And it just happens to be one of the most POWERFUL ones. We women aren't taught to handle anger, like boys are. We're supposed to be nice and sweet and flowery and gentle. And that's how we get ourselves into trouble. Because we weren't taught that anger was okay, we never became "friends" with our rage and competitive impulses, and so we never got to practice how to deal with them. But now you can. Your anger is so powerful, that if you don't acknowledge it, embrace it, and express it (and there are ways to express anger you might not even have heard of - yet) it will RUN you. And it will RUN you in ways you don't want. The easiest, fastest, and most wonderful- feeling way to keep your anger from running you, and to keep yourself from turning it against yourself into self-blame and depression, is to FIND OUT ABOUT IT. ***Here's a letter from "Lonely in Ohio," who's fighting her anger by stuffing it down, and finding that even then, unexpressed, her anger is running her relationship and causing distance between her and her husband: "Dear Rori, I am confused. I have always had a temper, and I am now learning to control my temper. I have been taught to "pick my battles" so to speak, and not haggle over every little thing. I am trying to learn how to control my feelings, and I started reading your e-mails, and your e-book, etc. I've been practicing your advice (and it is working with the man in my life - who has even SAID he was "waiting for me to blow" and he "wants to see the real me." Little by little we are getting closer and closer - but I still have this confusion over "controlling" myself and expressing my feelings. When is it too much to overload a man with my feelings? Please let me know what you think, as I am sure there are many other women who feel the same way.... This Saturday my husband and I will have been married for 17 years. I wish to stay married and pursue happiness together. He acts distant and picks on me about the house being "disorganized". It's a nice clean house and I do all of the basics for him and always have. He has to look hard to find fault but he finds it. I try to give him space and meet his needs. He doesn't seem to care what I want or need or pursue me in any way in the least. If I ask him, he says he's still attracted to me but doesn't like my anger. I am only angry at the lack of love and companionship and I don't think I express it inappropriately. He claims if I were less angry he'd be more loving......Any advice? Lonely in Ohio" ***And Here's a letter from "No Angel," who's doing the exact OPPOSITE of "Lonely" by allowing her anger to run her as if she has NO CONTROL at all over either her anger, her words, or how she relates to her man. "Dear Rori, I lived with my boyfriend of a year. He broke up with me and kicked me out of our home. I don't blame him because of the way I acted. I never lied or cheated or anything like that but I acted out of insecurity. I'm the opposite from most. Instead of showing my weak insecurity it was easier for me to be mean, start arguments and to act indifferent around other people. There are lots of things I did right, too, but there was too much arguing caused by the two of us reacting to one another which was a lot of my fault. This breakup has really shown me how I had the wrong mindset and have been doing it my whole life. I have learned so much I feel like a new woman whose actions in retrospect are so NOT ME. We had broken up here and there but never for this long...it has now been three months and he will not give us another chance to start over no matter what I do. Do you have any advice and can your book help me at all? Thank you, No Angel" Dear "Lonely" and "No Angel," My heart goes out to you both, and to all of us who're working our way toward understanding our anger and using it for our own good instead of being at the mercy of our anger and everyone else's, too. Anger is at the root of so many of our problems - women and men both. War is a constant in our world. War between individuals and War between countries. War between ideas and opinions, and War between lovers. War between us and ourselves. But ANGER is different from WAR. Anger is just a feeling. It doesn't DO anything, it's just an energetic FEELING inside us that goes through all the cells of our bodies and effects us deeply. And when we're FEELING our feelings, other people can feel something, too. They usually feel more CONNECTED to us, because experiencing us FEELING our feelings helps them to get in touch with THEIR OWN feelings. This is how it works in a romantic relationship with a man. If we're feeling our feelings, he'll feel us feeling, and then he'll get in touch with his own feelings, and he'll feel connected to us. It's like a Heart-To-Heart Connection. But the moment we take "feeling" a step further, and SPEAK, or DO something - everything changes. All of a sudden our ACTIONS create a whole new dynamic out there in the world. What we say, and what we do, have an effect on everyone else. If, out of anger, we attack someone else, verbally or physically, they will react very differently than if they're experiencing us just FEELING. Let's say we hit someone. Chances are they will react in a defensive way. They might hit us back. And then it would just get worse. We'd hit, we'd yell, they'd hit, they'd yell, and very soon we'd be at War with each other. Even if we make up later, we'll always remember that awful War, and it will change forever how we feel about each other. If we're lucky, and the other person is more mature and finds another way to solve the situation - by talking, diplomatically perhaps, with words, or engaging us in a martial arts way and disarming us without harming us, or just being self-protective by running away or calling for help, we may not be at War, but we will certainly still have changed the relationship forever. Anger expressed as "Drama" and verbal attacks, no matter how righteously angry we believe we are (and we're ALL angry inside about SOMETHING) can feel, to a man, like a betrayal might feel to US. It might be something a man is not willing to "get over." So for "No Angel," you may have truly changed the way you process and express your anger, but your man may not be willing to forgive and forget. This is not the end of the world, even if it feels like it. Really - it's a new beginning. Because you may be forgetting, right now, by taking so much of the "blame" on yourself, that your man was contributing big time to creating so much anger for you. And, if you really have learned how to manage your anger and speak about it in a better, more connected way, you may find yourself meeting a MUCH better man for you! I've seen this happen over and over again. So, please, No Angel, don't get stuck on this one man. Take your changes and your new self and meet and date new men who have never even met that old, angry, argumentative, attacking, fighting, WARRING self, and begin a new love of peace and contentment, where disagreements are solved without pain. "Lonely" is doing something different from No Angel - stuffing her anger down and then exploding. I remember doing exactly the same thing - trying to control my feelings, stuffing them down, but I took it even further. I never really exploded. I stuffed my anger so deep inside of me even I couldn't find it. The weird thing about doing that, though, is that we don't get rid of the anger. We don't make it smaller, it doesn't fade with time. Nope. Instead, it grows inside us, like a monster. It gets bigger and bigger, and it's voice gets louder and louder inside our heads and bodies. And what happens is, we either get very sick from it, or we explode one day and damage our relationship beyond repair. So what's the solution? How do we deal with our righteous anger in a way that brings a man CLOSER, instead of pushing him away for good? I was lucky to find my anger and learn to turn it into one of my biggest assets - and before I got horribly sick or exploded. Even though it felt like my marriage was beyond repair about four years into it, I had never exploded. Instead, I was anxious and tense, and making him wrong all the time. Though all three of us, Lonely, No Angel and I, were expressing and not-expressing our anger in different ways, we were all having the same result - damaging our relationships and pushing the men we wanted away. Here's how it worked out for me: I slowly came to realize that I wasn't sad, I wasn't depressed, I wasn't frustrated or overwhelmed or too busy. I was MAD. I was mad at everyone. I was mad at my husband for making me feel so angry, and I was mad at myself just for BEING angry. I was irritated and angry at everyone who slowed me down or tried to tell me what to do. But I couldn't bear that picture of myself. I was terrified of my angry, irritable self. So I tried to be the "nicest" woman on the planet. Even though I was a "know-it-all" at home, with a big smile and a solution for everyone and everything at every moment, I did it with a smile. I was just so mad, I spent most of my energy trying to cover it up. Even my years in therapy had done me little good. I'd found my grief, but not my anger. I was still afraid, on some deep level, of my anger. And then, one day, out of the blue, I just "got" it. I understood that I was "okay" with being sad. I was okay with my grief and pain. But I suddenly realized I was NOT OKAY with being angry. Every moment I'd even FELT angry, I thought I was being BAD. I'd immediately feel GUILTY, and then bounce right back to FEAR, and then to sadness and grief and depression and feeling stuck. And in that one moment of clarity, just before, finally, exploding in total frustration, I asked myself a simple question. I asked myself - what am I angry at? And a whole slew of words and reasons went through my brain, so many that I grabbed a piece of paper and wrote them all down. And everything I wrote had to do with another person or a circumstance. Until, finally, I wrote: I'm angry with MYSELF for allowing this to HAPPEN. And that was it. I'd put myself between a rock and a hard place. I'd made it so that I felt so bad about myself on such a deep level (I couldn't even get to it until I started asking these kinds of questions), that I couldn't be comfortable being SUCCESSFUL, either in my work or in my marriage. And so I was almost automatically holding myself back, and then even MORE angry at myself for letting that happen. I made it so that every time I even THOUGHT about WANTING success in work and in love, I'd swat myself back down. I'd say to myself, "Who do you think you are, you angry person, you?" I'd say to myself, "Who are you to want all that?" I'd say to myself, "You can't have what you want, so you'd better work REAL HARD to get it from HIM." And then, of course, I WOULDN'T get it from him. But I WOULD FEEL BETTER! How can that be, that I would feel better when he wouldn't give me what I wanted? The answer is: "Because I'd worked it out that way." I'd made absolutely sure that he couldn't and wouldn't give me what I wanted - just because of the way I'd asked for it - so that when he didn't give it to me (as I could have predicted), I could be angry at HIM instead of MYSELF! This is all a very odd and weird kind of psychological game we all play with ourselves, and it really helps to know this is how we work when low self-esteem has us by the throat. We go back and forth between blaming ourselves and blaming our men for the situation we find ourselves in. Well...the moment I caught on to how I was working this, and how it wasn't helping me at all to have what I really wanted, I was able to start figuring out new ways to relate to my husband. The truth is, since this whole wretched thing is a cycle, there's no one particular place to start. Low self-esteem may be at the bottom of it all, but if you're in the middle of an argument, or feeling sorry for yourself, you may not be able to go to "Self-Esteem 101." I think the reason therapy didn't work as well as it should have for me was that "understanding something" and "doing something about it" are completely different things. That's why, in my work, I start with helping you to understand, but quickly give you actual, real steps to take to break this cycle and feel free and happy and loved. Here are the different ways my books and CDs can help you: If you don't have my Have The Relationship You Want ebook, this is the time to get it so you can understand the basics and get some fast results going for you. My Heart Connection Toolkit CD set has very special techniques for righting your self-esteem. And I walk you through them, step-by-step. This is the only place you can get my "Body Dialogues" and shift your frame of mind, quickly, to feeling hopeful and that you CAN have what you want. And my Reconnect Your Relationship CD program is 6 hours of very new, very SPECIFIC help to understand men and the way relationships with men work, and also how, exactly, to get out of this ANGER, Guilt, Fear, Depression and back again cycle - fast and forever. Everything has a long Free Trial Offer attached, so there's absolutely no risk. All three, wherever you choose to start, will help you use these free eLetters twice as fast, and help me answer your questions in new ways, without having to go over material that's already in my books and CDs. I'm constantly developing new Tools - please let me know what works particularly well for YOU. Here's the fastest way to get out of this anger cycle, no matter WHERE you are in it: 1. The moment you realize you're Leaning Forward with your man, Stop. 2. Stop talking, stop moving, stop thinking. 3. Get your body very still. 4. Breathe in and out through your HEART. 5. Now ask yourself what it is you're feeling. 6. Don't go into your head for an answer - start small. You might be shutting down the moment you ask yourself - be prepared for that by answering what's TRUE in the moment - like "I'm FEELING shut down." (Notice the word "Feel" in there.) Start with a sensation if that helps - "I feel TENSE in my tummy." 7. Now - ask yourself - What am I angry at? 8. You might have to leave the room to go write this down or just process it. Just tell him you don't want to argue and leave to go talk to YOURSELF. 9. If the answer to your question is "I'm angry at HIM, for doing.......fill in the blank here," then you're halfway there! 10. Now, say out loud exactly what you're mad at him for. 11. Now - CHANGE THE WORDS. Cross out anything that says YOU or HIM, and only leave in sentences that say "I feel...." (you'll find the template for how to do this in the ebook, and then I go into more detail in the Toolkit and Reconnect). It might look like - "I feel so sad." Or "I feel so frustrated." Or "I feel so lonely." 12. Now STOP talking, and just listen to him. 13. No matter what he says, listen. If you can do this the next time you feel an argument starting, you will change everything between you and your man. If you can do this the next time you're even THINKING about how ANGRY you are, you'll be lifting your self-esteem. And please, if you're able to do ANY of this, for even a few "Rounds" with him (Talking instead of Boxing), then please pat yourself on the back, give yourself a huge hug, and go do something nice for yourself. And you'll be on your way to the relationship you want and deserve. I'll be writing more and more about how this works in very specific scenarios, so let me know how you're doing. |
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What You’ll Learn From Rori Raye
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