Lesson's Learned: Liz's Anger

Liz’s Anger
Lynne A. Santiago, PhD, LMHC

I recently had a client say “I had been so full of anger there was no room for love”.  She had come to realize that this happened during the relationship—long before her ex asked her to leave.

This client, who I’ll call Liz, started therapy because she was devastated that her lover of 10 years ended their relationship, claiming it was Liz’s anger that she could no longer live with.

Thankfully, rather than blame her ex, Liz listened and decided to understand more about the anger she had carried into the relationship and let spill out on the very person she loved.   

We all carry baggage into our relationships.  We can either help each other unpack the contents or we can throw the contents at our partners without any awareness at all while usually blaming the other for “pushing my buttons”.  But then we are left with a big mess to clean up along with two broken hearts.

The end of a relationship is intensely painful.  As creatures of comfort we rather find ways to avoid the pain rather than sit with it.  Yet it is in the sitting with it that we can learn so much about who we are and what may be driving behaviors that harmed and weakened our relationship.  There are always valuable lessons contained in loss, especially when the loss is a relationship and the person we had shared our lives with.

For Liz, one of the areas she came to realize was that she did not have effective ways to manage and express her anger.  She could even see how this was true in her other relationships to include family, friends and her co-workers.  As she continued to work on understanding herself, she gained insight into the things she tended to get angry about—the common threads that would trigger her.  She also learned that she had a tendency to hold on to anger because she believed if she expressed it there would be conflict. Though often times she had valid reasons to be angry, she held back saying any thing about it.  She was very afraid of confrontation.  But the anger would eventually come exploding out and conflict would happen any way.

It was so important for Liz to learn these lessons, and fast, because she was pretty angry about the break-up and angry that her ex “abandoned” her.  She  genuinely did not want to do anything more to hurt her ex.  They still had to communicate.  They had shared responsibilities to their children and their financial obligations.  There was no getting around it.  They had to talk.  They had decisions they needed to make together..  And they would still have disagreements.

What was great was that Liz decided to start counseling just days after the break-up so as issues came up she could talk them out in her sessions.  For the hour, she could sit with her pain and her anger.  She could step back and explore how she had responded in the past to similar situations and what the results had been.  She could then choose a different approach.  She learned that her past anger reactions were rooted in the fear that if she expressed the things that bothered her others would disapprove, reject or abandon her.  She learned that she was actually depriving herself of love because of this.  Love not only from others, but love for herself.

 And in becoming more conscious of her feelings she was able to ask herself “For this situation, how can I respond from a place of love rather than a place of fear?”.

There is more to this story.  Please subscribe to this blog to learn more about Liz’s lessons.