Josh loves his wife, Kathy, but lately can’t stand to be around her when she gets stressed out because of her senior position with a law firm. She often arrives home bristling with anger and frustration about her day, becoming loud and demanding of him and the children when things don’t go as she expects. Most humiliating to Josh, she criticizes him in front of their teenagers and tunes him out when he tries to give her feedback about her out-of-control anger. Recently, she has gotten in his face and blocked him from leaving the room when all he wanted was to retreat from her nastiness. He feels extremely hurt by her remarks and is apprehensive whenever she arrives home, worrying about whether he or the kids will somehow set her off. He’s at a loss for what to do, especially now that her business travel has picked up and her angry tirades just seem to be getting worse.
Jenny wants more than anything for her husband, James, to respect her. Lately, particularly when he’s had a few drinks, he gets sarcastic and puts her down in front of their friends, which embarrasses her. James has threatened to separate from her more than once when he gets mad. He’s so changeable that she doesn’t know what to expect next from him and feels powerless to get him to calm down once he becomes upset with her. On the other hand, most of the time he is loving and a great father to their three children. She doesn’t want to leave this marriage, yet she’s unhappy more often than not.
When the behavior of someone we love is frustrating and confusing, we often cut the person some slack at first, even though we also feel hurt. We try to explain the behavior away; we tell ourselves it’s not going to happen again; we decide to be patient and forgiving. By the time the “isolated incident” becomes a pattern, we may not know how we got where we are. This is why bringing your reactions to your partner’s anger into clear focus, by using the RAP provided in Chapter 2, is such an important first step. It is not, however, enough to become fully aware of how your partner’s anger makes you feel and behave. Awareness alone is a good first step, but it will not change Josh’s or Jenny’s situation, and it probably won’t change yours either.
Josh learns from the RAP and his Daily Log that he spends much more time editing his actions to avoid Kathy’s explosive anger than he would have predicted. His life revolves around coping with his anxiety and fear that she will lose it and reacting to calm her when she does lose it, which is becoming all too frequent. Jenny’s responses on the RAP show that she’s afraid of James and often placates him and edits what she says to avoid “making” him angrier. Bringing their reactions into focus has made it harder for Josh and Jenny to shove their discomfort into the background, and they are both coming to realize how much they want things to change.
When you establish new expectations, you’re drawing boundaries, the “B” step of the A–E model. Like the lines in the center of the highway or the hedge separating two homes, boundaries clearly define a border—in this case a line between you and your partner. We all define boundaries between ourselves and others on a variety of topics, drawing lines that clearly spell out which behaviors are unacceptable to us and which are welcome. Sometimes these boundaries are explicit, while other times they are inferred by others from how we’ve behaved over time. While some boundaries you define between yourself and others are pretty minor, like when it’s acceptable to call your house, others are of major importance, like how you wish to be treated when your partner is mad at you—for example, being told calmly how your partner feels versus being cursed at. If such boundaries are so important, how do they end up being crossed so flagrantly and so frequently? Sometimes it’s because we don’t realize what our boundaries are based on and therefore aren’t so sure they’re valid. A short course on boundaries may be helpful.
When you feel frustrated, anxious, sad, angry, or even hopeless in response to your partner’s anger, don’t think you’re alone. It’s completely understandable to react when your partner acts in ways that seem to undermine the stability of your most personal and private life. If the clerk at the grocery store acts like a jerk, you may feel irritated, but you can let it go or quickly resolve your feelings by reporting him to the management. It’s a limited and unimportant encounter in the larger context of your life, and it’s over as quickly as it began. On the other hand, if your partner acts out anger in ways that upset you, and you don’t address it, you’ll continuously be faced with unpleasantness in your most important relationship.
When you feel uncomfortable with your partner’s angry actions, it’s because this person is integral to fulfilling your important personal needs. Uncomfortable emotions like anxiety, guilt, anger, and fear are the direct result of one or more of these needs being blocked in some way. These painful emotions have a purpose. They signal to us that we’re vulnerable: someone or some situation is threatening to keep us from meeting important needs to feel safe, fulfilled, and generally happy in our daily life.
Let’s look at safety. A fundamental and essential need for everyone is to feel safe and secure. Most of us would not put up with threats or verbal abuse without doing something to stop it. We’d likely call the police if faced with threats of physical harm. These reactions reflect our clear boundaries as to how we expect to be treated to feel secure and safe. When you realize that discomfort in the face of your partner’s anger is a signal that your partner has violated a boundary you’ve set to ensure the fulfillment of an important need, it’s a lot easier to stand up for your right to uphold that boundary, isn’t it?
Safety, of course, isn’t the only important need we share with the rest of the human race. Everyone has a unique set of needs, but on the most fundamental level there are four critical needs that every one of us must answer to live successfully. Our boundaries for ourselves and others must ensure that these needs are met.
There are two significant components to our sense of security: safety and predictability. Our brains are hardwired to keep us in a constant state of tension when we don’t feel safe. We can’t relax, and over time our health may be impaired. There are many things that others may say or do that can threaten our safety. For example, Jenny has begun to feel threatened by James’s sudden sarcasm and irrational anger. While he has never physically harmed her, his drinking fuels a level of irritability and then intense anger that is truly scary to her at times—so unlike how her parents treated her and each other. Also, his threats to leave her and the children undermine her sense of security. Will he just leave one day? How could she cope with two young children and all their expenses? She feels paralyzed by her fears while increasingly resenting her husband’s behavior. This conflict has begun to show up in her affection for him. She has buried this resentment for so long that she feels unable to discuss it, yet she is gradually withdrawing from the intimacy that she needs so badly. James interprets this reaction as her being cold and unfeeling, which is so far from the truth as to be laughable. This couple is locked in a sad vicious circle of anger actions and reactions.
Predictability is also crucial to our sense of security. In fact one of the major components of stress is uncertainty about what lies ahead. Can you trust that your basic needs will continue to be met? Can you relax into an orderly existence with your mate, family, or others? If not, you’ll feel like you have to remain vigilant at all times. You may find yourself constantly on guard, checking things out to be sure you can count on your partner: Where is he going? Whom is she with? How much is he drinking? What kind of mood does she seem to be in right now? Your life circumstances can seem unpredictable when your partner, a person you depend on emotionally and practically, tends to act out emotionally, withdraws, or stops communicating directly about how he feels or what he’s thinking of or preparing to do.
Josh’s sense of security is threatened in a different way. Every time Kathy comes through the door after her stressful workday he worries about how tightly wound and demanding she will be. Some days she seems to manage her job with equanimity and seems happy and reasonably calm when greeting the children and telling him the story of her day. More often, though, she is loud, complaining, and hostile to Josh, as if he were to blame for her work problems. She is so unpredictable that he feels anxious every day before she comes home. Which Kathy will he see today? And what can he do “without making the situation worse” when she arrives home in a hostile, angry mood? This low sense of control he experiences greatly contributes to Josh’s level of stress. Lately he’s been having more headaches and tension in his neck. What to do? How to get her to understand that she is driving him away from her? How can he feel more in control of his life and his actions when the storm of anger arises?
Every theory of human development describes the importance of attachment or “bonding” for us to thrive. From the time of our first interactions with our parents we need to feel affirmed as loved and respected unconditionally. If you had a warm and happy childhood with parents who were unconditionally loving, who were predictably there for you, who reacted to life’s challenges in a calm manner, you may be unprepared for the intense acting out or emotional withdrawal of your partner. On the positive side, you might feel confident enough in yourself to set and enforce boundaries regarding your partner’s anger.
If, on the other hand, you did not experience this loving affirmation in your own childhood, you may need a lot of affirmation from others to feel “okay” with yourself today. When your loved one withdraws, is critical or contemptuous, or withholds the intimacy you continually ask for, you may feel particularly vulnerable and threatened. In a way, these experiences mirror how you were treated by your parents. At the risk of oversimplifying a complex developmental process, this means that you may not have learned how to cope effectively with whatever emotion you experience as a result of feeling vulnerable and threatened—hurt, betrayed, frightened, or furious. You may then return to your childhood ways of reacting, whether that means switching off your own feelings, withdrawing into your room, opposing anything your partner wants, or whatever else you typically did as a child. More important, unless you’ve found other avenues to provide you with affirmation in your work, with other friends, in your family, or as a result of your talents, your self-esteem may be further damaged.
Having the person you love frequently act out one or more negative faces of anger can sap your confidence and rob you of the energy to carry on the relationship. Remember how hurt Josh felt whenever Kathy blew up? His need to feel affirmed by her is heightened by his childhood experience of never having felt totally acceptable to his father. Josh did well in school and was a pretty good athlete, competing on numerous teams over the years. He yearned for his dad’s praise to confirm that he was proud of him. Instead, his father, having himself grown up with a strict and emotionally distant father, never learned how to be affirming. He rarely hugged Josh and was cold and reserved with Josh’s mother in front of the children.
Josh’s universally experienced need for affirmation was intensified as he sought clear and unambiguous expressions of love and affirmation from Kathy—his family of today. When she rejected his efforts, screamed criticisms at him, and was so angry that she would sometimes sleep in the guest room, Josh felt deep hurt along with fear that Kathy would leave him and worry that he was somehow not worthy of love. Even though Josh knew intellectually that he was a capable and competent man, these threatened inner needs for affirmation kept him unsteady and anxious much of the time in his marriage. He found himself giving in to his wife’s demands and trying very hard not to anger her. He told me he would do almost anything to stop her from getting so angry. In the process he knew he was losing his own sense of identity and putting aside a lot of important personal needs in favor of pursuing affirmation from Kathy.
Despite a strong desire to change this cycle, Josh couldn’t quite figure out how to do so because he blamed himself for letting his wife get under his skin and didn’t understand why he did so. He had begun to view his reaction as a personal weakness, an attitude that only made it harder to figure out how to make any changes in their life together. It was therefore essential for Josh to see that a childhood marked by thwarted needs for affirmation, love, and support had left him with an increased need for the same affirmation as an adult and fewer resources for coping with the hurt he felt when faced with a hostile and rejecting partner. Once he stopped blaming himself for letting Kathy get to him, he was able to look at her actions more objectively and feel less threatened by them. He understood his own needs better and began searching for ways to get them met without depending on her “good moods,” which were occurring less and less frequently. He began spending more time with his children, looked up some old friends, and joined a softball team at work—he had been quite an athlete as a teenager and had always felt good about his ability. Josh now accepted the reality that he was living with unacceptable behaviors in order to feel affirmed. He recognized that this was an understandable response given his childhood, but he could also see that it wasn’t working for him. Now he could begin to confront his fears of losing Kathy and find other ways of getting his needs met.
Threats to affirmation by someone you love can be devastating and may lead to any of the unfortunate patterns of reacting described in Chapter 2, like avoiding or even getting angry yourself.
Once basic needs for security and affirmation are met, we are free to venture out and set and achieve personal goals. Life takes on its true spice. We may begin this journey with achievements in elementary school or in sports or the arts that cement our self-esteem as we realize the vision we have of ourselves. While experts say our self-worth should not be determined exclusively by what we achieve, can you imagine feeling really good about yourself without having some yardstick, like a job you love, children you’re raising, or an organization you believe in? Research tells us that as we make things happen that we’re invested in, we are happier and report feeling more fulfilled. Conversely, imagine sitting at home with no goals or few activities to invest in and continuing to feel good about yourself.
Sometimes our loved ones criticize our efforts or interfere with what we want to accomplish as a way of acting out their own anger or perhaps proving the cliché that “misery loves company” by trying to bring us down. Or maybe an angry relationship so saps our energy that our dreams begin to fade away as we just try to get through every day in the presence of a person who is hard to live with. When James feels angry and rejected by Jenny, he sometimes belittles her dreams. She’s taking classes at a local community college to get a degree in social work. Jenny has always dreamed of working with abused children but instead she works part-time as a bookkeeper for a small local business to help pay the bills. Sometimes tending to the children, keeping the house going, working, and taking evening classes seems overwhelming. She wonders if she’ll ever achieve her vision of a new career and feels stung by attacks from James like “Why do you persist in wasting your time and our money on an illusion? You’ll never finish that program going to school two nights a week. Why kid yourself?” Jenny is very confused about where she stands with James, her career, and herself. She is starting to realize that she can’t continue to live in a love–hate marriage that seems consumed by levels and expressions of anger she doesn’t understand.
Over the years psychologists have studied the enormous impact of ongoing stress in our lives. What we call “stress” is actually made up of a set of bodily reactions like muscle tension, increased pulse rate, and stomach upset, along with being overly reactive to the world around us. Called the “fight-or-flight response,” these reactions occur when we feel somehow overwhelmed or intimidated by too many demands, too little time, or frankly threatening events (such as yelling or threats). Anger also triggers this cascade of physiological changes. When we’re stressed by life events we are much more likely to lose it. The sidebar on page 32 in Chapter 2 shows how your body reacts when anxiety, stress, or anger fuels the fight-or-flight reaction.
Research has shown that feeling in control is critical to coping with life stressors. If you’re stressed out or angry and don’t feel like you have options for changing things or you feel powerless to manage it, the likelihood of having emotional and health problems surges. For example, some of us feel overwhelmed by the anger of others. We might feel trapped in a relationship of cold anger—never able to resolve problems and never able to move on. Or the intensity of a partner’s anger might seem so overpowering that we are stuck in quiet desperation, checkmated by anger we don’t understand and seemingly cannot do anything about.
Both Josh and Jenny experience the impact that a low sense of control has on the quality of life and relationships. Josh believes he can’t cope with Kathy’s hostility and criticism, so he feels anxious (his chest gets tight and his heart pounds) whenever he even thinks about a confrontation with her. Lately his headaches are getting worse. Jenny has just gotten a workup by her doctor for GI problems. She often feels nauseated and has little appetite. Her physician points to stress as the culprit. She is already taking medication and has been told that she needs to get a grip on this ongoing stress or face serious health issues.
Jenny and Josh both identified important needs that helped to explain why they were each caught up in unhealthy behaviors with their angry partners. While they were often critical of themselves for “putting up with it,” they now understood the reasons past and present why they felt so emotionally vulnerable. In some way they were both hesitant to risk making a change that might further upset their partner or make things even worse. Their anxiety and sometimes fear kept them locked into their old patterns of denial, placating or even giving in to their partner just to make the anger stop. Rather than blaming themselves, they now understood that these emotions grew out of the possibility of a loss: loss of a sense of security and safety, of feeling loved and affirmed, of their dreams for achievement, and of a sense of control—needs that felt threatened by their partner’s inappropriate expressions of anger. Their childhood experiences made them particularly susceptible to feeling threatened when these needs were not met, and they perceived few alternatives for changing the situation without having to endure these losses. Thus they got stuck in a pattern of reacting to their partner that was painful, ineffectual, and sometimes demeaning to their self-esteem.
As they considered what new boundaries of unacceptable and acceptable behaviors they would now communicate and reinforce with their partners, Josh and Jenny both looked over a list of the types of behaviors that can block or support the fulfillment of each of the four fundamental human needs, shown in the table on the next page.
As you look over the table, ask yourself whether you see your partner as generally failing to support one or more of your important needs. If so, how? What behaviors listed in the table or others you’ve observed seem to block your needs? These are the behaviors that you will wish to discourage as you set new boundaries to communicate with your partner. While you probably already know how you would like your partner to respond to support your needs, look over the right column of the table for more ideas as you begin to flesh out your new boundaries.
It should be clear by now that a boundary has two components: (1) specific unacceptable actions in words and deeds that occur when your partner is angry or otherwise upset and (2) desirable alternatives.
Now that you’re aware of how frequently and flagrantly some of your most fundamental needs have been thwarted by your partner’s anger, you may be wondering if setting new boundaries will be a futile exercise. How do you know your partner will respond differently? How best to communicate and reinforce your boundaries so that your partner chooses to speak to you and behave toward you in acceptable ways will be explained and illustrated in detail in later chapters. For now, remember that you can’t control your partner and you can’t force your partner to change. All you can focus your efforts on is your own behavior. And setting new, clear, explicit boundaries is a big change. In the past your partner’s inappropriate expressions of anger have made you very uncomfortable at the least. Even if you knew this discomfort signaled that your needs were being denied, you probably haven’t gone so far as to translate your reactions into clear, consistent definitions of what you will and will not accept from your partner. So I’ll ask you to take a leap of faith and focus your attention exclusively on creating those boundaries right now without worrying about how your partner will respond. What matters first is that you assert your own needs.
Partner Behaviors That Impact Your Needs
| Needs | Partner Behaviors That Block Needs | Partner Behaviors That Support Needs |
| Safety and security | Threats Abusive words/actions Scary outbursts/rage Leaving |
Calm voice/demeanor Reassurance Controlling emotions Working things out |
| Affirmation | Put-downs Criticism/contempt Withholding intimacy |
Praising/affirming you Respect for your ideas Expressing love and care |
| Achievement | Discouraging remarks Withholding support Withholding resources |
Encouraging you Actively contributing Helping you succeed |
| Personal control | Avoiding commitments Unpredictable actions Refusing to talk |
Taking responsibility Being dependable/stable Collaborating with you |
Think about past episodes of anger with your partner as you begin to formulate an answer to this question: What partner words and actions are out of bounds (unacceptable) for you in the future, and what new actions are acceptable ways of expressing anger to you? In setting a new boundary you should be as behaviorally specific (behaviors in word and deed) as possible. Avoid vague or ambiguous language (e.g., “bad attitude,” “abusive,” “obnoxious,” “uncaring”) when defining the boundary for your partner. Here are some examples:
Vague and Too General: “In the future it is unacceptable for you to speak to me in a disrespectful way.” [Does the listener really know what the speaker means by “disrespectful”?]
Behaviorally Specific: “It is no longer acceptable for you to call me names, to tell me my feelings are silly, and to criticize me in front of the children.”
Jenny wanted to set a boundary for James’s intense anger around her. She recognized that her sense of safety and security was constantly threatened by his threats and put-downs and that giving in to him and avoiding telling him how she really felt had unwittingly reinforced his aggression and hostility, in fact making matters worse. While acknowledging she could not force him to use calm words and actions when he was frustrated by a person, like an “incompetent” clerk or waiter, or a situation, such as a shelf that wouldn’t fit together as quickly as James wanted, Jenny decided that she would let him know in clear language that aggressive and hostile behavior around her was unacceptable from now on.
But where to start? Sometimes people who have been tolerating undesirable behavior for a long time find themselves stymied when it comes time to get concrete about new boundaries. If the ideas in the preceding table were too general to stimulate your own ideas, you might do what helped Jenny and keep a Daily Log of your partner’s anger episodes for a few weeks. This log will crystallize for you how your partner has been acting and how you have been reacting. A blank log that you can fill in is in the Appendix. Once you’ve filled it in for two or three weeks, look over your Daily Log and then on a separate piece of paper write down the anger behaviors that were most upsetting and unacceptable to you. For each, think about an opposite, appropriate, acceptable action you would like your partner to use to express anger or other emotions. Jenny’s new boundaries are shown below.
Unacceptable Behaviors: Raising his voice while standing over her, using sarcastic language; name-calling; putting her down with contemptuous remarks, particularly in front of others; threatening to leave.
Acceptable Behaviors: To use his calm words to directly express his anger and needs, to be seated when angry, to be supportive and kind in words and actions, and to confirm that together we can work it out.
Deciding on new boundaries immediately made Jenny feel more in control and assured that she had a clear set of goals: to insist in every way that these lucid and directly stated boundaries would be respected. She said it felt good to acknowledge to herself and to James that she could decide on what she would accept and how she would respond from now on.
The next step for Jenny was to inform James about her new boundaries. As noted earlier, we won’t discuss how to assertively and directly express your thoughts and feelings until later. For many people, including Jenny, these are communication skills that have to be learned and then practiced. I’ll give you an opportunity to do just that in Chapter 5. Meanwhile, the following shows the kind of exchange that often occurs once an angry person is informed that the rules have changed. (Please understand that James had never been physically aggressive or violent with Jenny. If he had been, we would have taken a different approach to communicate with him and protect Jenny, as will be discussed in Chapter 8.)
JAMES (coming in from work): This place is a zoo! (raising his voice) What do you do all day? You’re teaching our kids to be slobs like you! I’ve had a miserable day, and I come home to this mess! I’m out of here. (Walks to the door, as if to leave.)
JENNY: Wait just a minute, James. Please sit down before you go. I want to get something off my chest. I will not take the blame anymore for your stressful job, I will no longer stay around and listen to your loud, berating anger, and I will not be intimidated by your threats to leave me.
JAMES: What’s this—are you threatening me? All I’m doing is working hard and trying to be a good husband, and now you’re complaining about me? Where do you get off—I treat you wonderfully!
JENNY: That may be your opinion, but I stand by what I said. In the future, James, I expect basic courtesy from you: a calm and softer voice, even if you’re mad about something, not making accusations, and expressing that you value our marriage and want to stay and work things out. If you can’t do these things, I will not be available to talk or to do things with you. You have a choice, and so do I.
JAMES: We’ll see. I will not be threatened by my wife or anyone else. (Walks over to the front door, walks out, and slams it.)
Jenny was literally shaking inside as she informed James of her boundaries. She immediately felt her old fear and apprehension that he would be intensely angry at her. She feared he might now decide to leave her, and she began to imagine how she would survive without him. In the past she would have chased after him when he left the house or repeatedly called him on his cell phone, almost begging him to be more reasonable and return home. This time we had rehearsed how she would think and what she would do to preserve her position and avoid giving in to her fears.
In most cases, announcing your new boundaries is not going to magically erase inappropriate behavior from your partner’s repertoire. You also need to have a plan for reinforcing your boundaries when your partner pulls the same old tricks out of his hat. To reinforce her new boundaries with James, Jenny planned what she would do when he spoke and acted in unacceptable ways. She and I also rehearsed this new script so that she’d remember her lines when emotions began to run hot.
If James began to raise his voice, Jenny would assertively let him know that this was not acceptable around her. As soon as his voice became more intense she would calmly get his attention and ask him to please discuss the matter with a calm tone or to please stop talking or go someplace else in the house if he “had to” raise his voice. If he refused, then she would leave the situation without another word. She would not criticize him or raise her own voice to overwhelm his loudness. She would just calmly state what she needed from him (her boundary) and reinforce it by following through. She found that initially James reacted to her efforts at being assertive by stepping up the intensity of his response with statements like these:
“Who do you think you are, telling me to be calm? I can’t help it if that waiter is acting like a moron, and you should support me!”
“You are just too sensitive. I am not raising my voice. Just making a point.”
“Go ahead! Leave if you want. Be that way, and I’ll keep reacting whatever way is right for me!”
When met with hostile reactions like those of James it is important to first try to defuse the comment with one of the “defusing strategies” shown on page 100 in Chapter 5. No matter what James said to try to derail her assertion of boundaries, Jenny would use the tactic of the “broken record” to stick to her boundary and state her position once or twice: “While you certainly have a right to yell, I have a right to peace and calm as I define it when I’m around you. If you can’t honor that, we can’t be together right now.”
When Jenny reinforced her new boundaries by altering how she reacted while continuing to state what she needed from James, she was calmly but firmly encouraging James to alter an anger pattern that had “worked” for him up until now and to communicate with her in a new, acceptable way. If he did not, she was not willing to continue to talk and do for him as if nothing was wrong. James often ended up talking to the wallpaper because he was unwilling to try to change his behavior quickly. But Jenny stayed the course, refusing to talk with him when he violated her boundary. Sometimes she “blew” it and would get drawn into his defensive retorts or into defending herself as she used to do. She would try to get back on track as soon as she found herself slipping into these old patterns. She tried to remember that behavior change occurs in a gradual way with some ups and downs. Chapter 9 discusses the roadblocks Jenny and Josh and others faced as they tried to implement the ideas in this book and how they overcame them. James finally began to get the message and talk with her more calmly since that was the only way he could express his feelings to her that she was willing to listen to. Note that Jenny did not expect her husband never to get angry but made it clear that for her there was only one way to express anger: calmly, directly, and with respect. She of course made sure she was returning the favor, communicating her anger and issues to him in the same calm and respectful way. In a way she modeled what she wanted, and this also reinforced his attempts at new anger actions.
Along similar lines, Josh decided to communicate a new boundary for Kathy after deciding that her disaffirming, loud, and demanding criticisms of him in front of the children and others had to stop. No longer at a loss for what he needed from her, he set the following boundaries:
Unacceptable Behaviors: Raising her voice, calling him names, criticizing him in front of the children, blocking him from leaving the room, and any restraint of his actions.
Acceptable Behaviors: Telling him calmly how she felt, discussing upsetting events in a normal, moderate tone of voice, asking him to step out of earshot of the children if she wished to offer constructive criticism of him, permitting him to stop the conversation and to leave to calm himself whenever he felt the need.
Notice how clear and specific Josh is in what he asks of his wife. There can be no doubt about what he expects now and in the future. Josh found a time when Kathy wasn’t busy with child or household activities to sit down with her and discuss exactly how he felt about her anger expression and directly described his new boundaries. While she was speechless at first, he was pleased and surprised that she agreed with him that her anger was over the top and also told him some things that she wanted from him. Clearly he had caught her at a stress-free time (a good move on his part), when she was much more willing to listen than she would have been if she had already been irritated. They had the first real discussion about their feelings and needs in a long time, and both felt good about the conversation. Of course implementing a plan to reinforce the boundaries, similar to Jenny’s strategy, was not easy and took perseverance.
As you can see with Jenny and Josh, change is one of the hardest things to ask of anyone, and it rarely happens overnight. That’s because we have to unlearn what we’ve learned so well. Our habits, particularly when they involve anger, seem to form easily and then stick around tenaciously. Perhaps as a self-preservation mechanism, the brain prods us to learn very carefully from any situation that threatens our basic needs. We try something out, and if we “survive,” that new action becomes a stronger habit. Even if it isn’t the best way to cope in the long run, we’re likely to repeat it the next time we confront our partner’s anger because it somehow seemed to “work.” If I’ve learned to immediately agree with whatever my spouse wants as a way to “keep her” from getting angry at me, I have learned a new habit that “works” even if it is ruinous to my sense of self-esteem in the long run. It accomplished its short-term goal: stopping her from acting in a threatening way. This is how we learn a variety of dysfunctional behaviors that seem to stick with us, from permitting ourselves to be dominated by a friend to avoid her displeasure with us to learning to suppress our opinions at work to avoid a supervisor’s wrath.
My goal is to illuminate how you can make necessary changes in how you react to your partner, as painlessly and effectively as possible given that you are up against a strong foe: your current habits in thinking and actions. By identifying how you think and replacing unhelpful self-talk with new thinking that is fact-based and affirmative, you can begin to alter how you feel when your partner gets angry. This relationship between how you think and feel now and how to alter both is described in Chapter 4. You will learn to see what your partner does through a clear lens—objectively and in a way that empowers you to feel differently: calm, optimistic, and secure in your right to be treated differently. When you don’t feel anxious, guilty, angry, or afraid, you are much more likely to be able to react differently. You will no longer be a captive of your uncomfortable emotions.