You’re angry. Boy, are you angry. She didn’t do things the way YOU wanted them.
A lot of good that anger’s going to do you.
I mean, did you think that because you’re angry, she’s going to say, “Oh, I’m so sorry!” Did you think she will turn to you with eyes full of love and affection and stroke your back? Were you expecting your anger to turn a hostile environment—that YOU created—into the warm, loving one that you long for?
Who are you kidding?
Oh, did I say these things before in an earlier post? Well, I guess I have to do that again. For all of you who are tired of hearing me remind you that anger is one of the most worthless emotions and we could all do well to leave it at the door, just skip this post. But there was someone out there who needed to hear this again. I just know it. And by the way, repeated anger is abuse. No two ways about it.
“Worthless emotion?” you’re saying. “Why? Isn’t it a natural expression of feelings?”
Anger may be natural. So is poison ivy. It’s certainly not helpful. It’s decidedly unhelpful. The angrier you get, the more you push away those you love, the more you muddy up the waters as to what, exactly, you want, and the more hostile an environment you create. Everything you want gets pushed that much further away. Is that what you want to do?
I don’t think so.
Instead, learn to see the world from your partner’s place. How about trying one simple exercise the next time she does something that you think “makes” you angry:
–Do your deep breathing and calm down first.
–Then ask her why she did it.
–And—here is the key thing—actually listen to the answer.
–If you still don’t like the answer, don’t get angry. Ask more questions. Keep asking and keep listening until you really do understand her point of view. Really understand, not fake understand. Understand well enough to articulate it for her if someone else asked.
I’ve asked clients to take a pair of their wife’s shoes (or husband’s shoes) and keep them handy. Whenever the gulf between you gets to be too far away, put them on or at least wriggle your toes inside them and imagine what walking in them would be like since they won’t actually fit. Be your partner for a few meditative minutes.
Do whatever you can to bridge the gap.
Being angry isn’t on the list of choices. It creates walls.
Anger, I think, is a mixture of hurt and fear. Fear is always a fear of loss – so being hurt, then being afraid of losing something/someone or even power over someone else are major reasons to be angry/afraid, or so it seems. So if the guy is showing anger – at everything – that he chooses to make the ‘rules’ of their lives so that he can ‘control’ and manifest a regime which allows him never to feel hurt or afraid of loss, then there is a no win situation for the partner; in my experience the anger was a mask to order fear (in me) so that I would do anything, he thought, to avoid it; however, I have come to see that I have no need for his ‘approval’ since I no longer respect the way he is so afraid to live and tried to control me so that he didnt have to really ‘live’ at all – that I would do everything for him; and so the ‘anger’ (which I think is fake) had reduced outward impact on me,(inwardly I was devastated and so hurt I cannot describe it, that he would treat me like that when I was so kind and loving to him and married him because of that) so he upped the game to intimidation, phyical assaults and threats to me, threats about my sons – that he would hunt them down etc. So really there is no hope of return to the family for him since he would rather control, hurt and abuse and use fake anger etc to keep himself ‘safe’ from hurt boo hoo, poor wee boy (he is 44..6ft 2″ and was trained in the army..) This has been a terrible and dibilitating and disappointing two and a half years of my life (and counting)..that a man would behave like this to 14 and 16 year old younger men and me, a much smaller human with different muscle structure to him. Why, does this go on and no one seems to do anything much about it? The world has gone mad if this is how men of the 21st century wish to use their physical and intellectual evolution from a few million years; Darwin, think again….! ps I tried EVERYTHING and he only ever continued, exhausting himself to ‘win’ (to win what I have never worked out)resorting to lying, coercion, countering, false accusations, physical violence, using every word I said and everything I did to find fault – why? I only ever wanted and worked hard for us all to be happy. I have no idea what is going on but now he is trying to get our house and money when he refused to work and contribute anything during our marriage; seems he has a claim. I feel this man is a predator and saw in me, in us, a ticket to money and had to waste everything to allow himself to ‘get’ what he was after. What threw him was that I really love him and supported and cared for him and yet, at the end of the day he seems to believe that getting money from us will give him something (by the way I am only just keeping myself up, very hard for me and my family) I have half the income I had now and I am only just now getting back into work (I am an artist/writer) where I can bring money to the family, meanwhile he gets everything for free still – house, no tax etc when I am now fearful I will have to sell our family home which we have lived in for years before he came into my life. I just dont know what to do and feel panicked so often about what will happen, to further add to that, I have been afraid he will turn up and I am afraid he may cause the ‘hunting down’ of my sons that he threatened or me if I am somewhere and this is all too much for me, really, What keeps me going is that I know what is real and what is not and I am facing every single one of these issues as it comes up, but I could use some support and dont really know what to do; I guess there is nothing I can do but get the divorce and possibly lose everything so that I cannot afford to support my sons through college/uni and that I just hope my new book sells! but mainly I do not really know who can offer me support and inside I just wanted him to stop it and be the loving guy he seemed to be in the first place. I really do want that, but I see I cannot make someone stop if they dont want to and I still dont know if he ever really loved me or it was all fake. I cant see how I couldnt have known??
Thanks for writing and sharing.
I have a few comments and an answer or two.
I do agree with you that the anger in him causes fear in you. The anger in him certainly could be coming from his own fears and it could be an attempt to hide his own pain. Here is where I part company with others in the therapy field: I don’t think angry and controlling people set out to inspire fear or to control. If you ask them and could get an honest answer (which I do get from them in therapy), they say they are only “reacting.”
What they are reacting to is just what they reacted to way back when they were growing up in their own abusive homes. They are really not reacting to the present circumstance which includes you. They don’t know any better and they can’t get themselves out of it. The more they act this way, the more they hate themselves, the worse their mood, the worse the behavior and so on.
His love probably was not a fake. However, you could not supply him with what he never got growing up – no one can do that. Only a person working on himself (generally in therapy) can do that.
You need to be strong. You need to constantly affirm your own goodness for yourself. You might need an attorney at this point, which is so sad because as you see from my site, I believe in marriage and even a marriage as dented and bruised as yours could be turned around if both parties work together on it. So one option is to say to him, “It looks like you are very unhappy, as I am. Do you want to work with me on fixing it?” Perhaps you want to try that before you take that next step to court. Let me know how that goes.