Skip to main content

The Peaceful Path to Anger Management, Part 2

What strategies can you use so that your anger will no longer harm your marriage?

Being chronically angry at your spouse will ultimately damage the relationship to the point where one or both parties will no longer find the marriage sustainable.

If you feel the exact same way about your marriage because you are unable to manage your anger properly, it’s time that you did something about it.

You don’t have to let anger rule your marriage anymore!

Anger Control Strategies

Why do we get angry at our spouses?

This is the essential question that must be answered in order to make sense of the chaos that ensues when anger does get the better of one or both parties in a marriage. People generally get angry when:

1. They are in an unfair situation.

2. When they feel pressured to do something they don’t want to do.

3. When they feel stressed and they don’t know how to deal with the stress.

4. When there are many unresolved issues in the relationship.

5. When communication has crumbled and no one is interested in making the first move to fix it.

If these problems sound familiar to you, then know that you are like 99% of all individuals who are currently in troubled marriages. You don’t have to feel depressed anymore because you can definitely start managing your anger today.

How can you stop destructive anger before it causes more damage?

Here are some expert tips to get you started:

1. Value Yourself and Learn to Say No

Do you have to be “available” all the time in a marriage?

There is a general misconception that in order to be supportive of a marriage, you have to be available 100% of the time.

While this may sound sweet and idealistic, it’s actually a toxic ideal because it is not humanely possible to be available to think, speak and act for someone else 100% of the time.

If you try to stretch yourself thin just to fit into this idealistic mold, you will find yourself being angry with your spouse all the time.

Why? Because being too available can be an exhausting ordeal. Imagine being an “on call” professional who is expected to respond to every known situation from a broken TV to family-related heartaches.

When you feel that you can no longer keep up with your current responsibilities and you can’t take any more pressure and stress, just say no. I know that this can be quite difficult because saying no seems like a very mean thing to do to one’s spouse.

However, if you want to tone down your anger peacefully, you need to address the most common triggers of this emotion. And one of these major triggers is being forced to do something that you can no longer fulfill because you’re already overwhelmed.

2. Practice Assertiveness

What is assertiveness?

Assertiveness isn’t about domination or controlling someone to do your bidding. Assertiveness is being fully confident about yourself and what you believe in so that you can negotiate and communicate with your spouse as an equal and not as a subordinate.

This is an exceedingly common problem that I see in relationships where one party is more confident about himself than the other.

Being the confident one in the relationship may mean that during negotiations, one party will automatically acquiesce to whatever the confident one is saying.

If you find yourself constantly agreeing with your spouse even if you don’t really agree with him/her, you lack self-confidence. You have to make a conscious effort to assert your wants and needs in a way that you can hold your ground during a negotiation.

3. Acceptance

How can acceptance help end rageand anger?

There are just some things in life that you can’t change and you just have to accept these things if you want a more peaceful life and relationship with your spouse.

There are two ways that you can accomplish full acceptance of a situation: first, you can make the most of the situation and accept it as a part of your life from now on.

Second, you can continue to find solutions to the problems you’re facing so you will gain satisfaction from the positive outcomes of your continuing efforts.


Acceptance is actually the final phase of actualization in a relationship. It’s also a sign that you are a psychologically and emotionally mature person.
Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Schemes and Patterns in Married Life, Part 2

How can you improve your marriage by changing old systems that are no longer sustainable? Married couples often use predetermined patterns of behavior called schemes or systems to maintain equilibrium or balance in a relationship. However, there are many schemes that do more harm than good in a relationship. If you want to start fixing your marriage, you have to start recognizing the negative schemes that are ruining your relationship with your spouse. What negative systems can dissolve a marriage from the inside? If your marriage is wracked by discord and pain and there seems to be no way out, you and your spouse may have inadvertently trapped yourself in a behavioral pattern that has taken on a life of its own within the relationship. Here are some harmful patterns that may be lurking in your own marriage. If you do find them, you will already have an idea as to why they are harming your marriage in the first place. 1. Strict Roles – It is quite common for ma
Post a Comment
Read more

The Past-Present Confusion, Part 2

What does a person feel when aparataxic distortion is about to happen? In our last blog post, we talked about the essential characteristics of parataxic distortion . We learned that sometimes, our minds get confused and make a direct association between the present situation and a past experience or memory in the effort to provide us with useful insight. However, what happens is we end up being frustrated, anxious or angry because we directly project our past experiences on other people (e.g. your husband or wife). Parataxic distortion has nothing to do with the idea of learning from our past experiences. You don’t learn when your vision of reality is distorted – you just end up harming yourself and the people around you. How will you know if a parataxic distortion is about to take place? Each person is unique when it comes to parataxic distortions. Some people experience it once or twice a year when they feel extremely stressed and they are unable to channel their
Post a Comment
Read more

Understanding Defensive Strategies, Part 1

What role do defenses play in amarriage? Whether we’d like to admit it or not, marriage can sometimes be a painful experience because it’s not just an intimate relationship – it’s the type of relationship where all your strengths and weaknesses are bared to another person. When a person’s true strengths and weaknesses are revealed even to just one person, you will feel more vulnerable because the walls that used to protect your most vulnerable spots are now thinner and more transparent. Why do we put up defenses? The number one reason why people put up psychological and emotional defenses is they want to feel some level of secureness in the marriage. We humans are extremely complex beings. It’s not enough that we are part of an established social structure (e.g. marriage), we must also be able to fulfill very specific and complex needs within this social structure. Our complex nature can sometimes cause us to overuse defensive techniques to the point that a per
Post a Comment
Read more