How Anger Harms Intimate Love Unless We Get Better at Expressing It

We have been taught that suppressing our emotions is unhealthy, but we haven’t learned responsible, loving ways to express difficult feelings.

(Photo by Maliki M Beser on Unsplash)

We attempt to be honest about our feelings, but we don’t practice techniques for communicating our more difficult emotions in healthy, intimacy-enhancing ways.

Consider this: How compelling is our almost irresistible urge to let our rage lose on our partners? To what extent do we feel that same kind of urgency to release what we view as our positive feelings?

Anger is a normal, human emotion. We ought not to suppress or deny our angry feelings or we run the risk of hiding from ourselves. Anger that goes unacknowledged has a way of exploding outward when least appropriate and most damaging.

Research on anger has revealed that no one learns from our angry outbursts. When we scold children or punish them for misdeeds, they are more — not less — likely to persist in doing the very things we admonished. Similarly, angry outbursts, often termed rage, are unhelpful in shaping our partner’s behavior to conform to our wishes. We seek to avoid the anger of our partners, yet we feel compelled to release our own angry feelings in our relationships.