Alison: you don't validate anger, because anger is a secondary emotion, they express anger due to some other underlying emotion. Also, you don't validate their criticism of you, you validate the underlying feelings but not their interpretation. Validation is not sitting there taking someone hurling abuse at you, if it gets abusive then you put in a boundary for that behaviour.
So my IC has been helping me to explore my anger when I've expressed it. It's usually because I feel a sense of betrayal or abandonment, either on my behalf or my kids' behalf. Anger usually comes from feeling hurt, or ashamed, or fearful. I feel like I misunderstood my H's anger for a long time, and that helped neither of us, he's actually a very anxious person underneath and that comes out as irritability at best and anger at worst. Funnily enough, he expresses a lot less anger nowadays. I'm still learning how to deal with it when it does happen, that's an ongoing process for me because I grew up in a family which rarely expressed anger and avoided confrontation unless the anger turned explosive. Anger can also be useful, because it drives action, so sometimes anger is something I use in order to try to change things. But wallowing in anger or allowing it to continue for too long without addressing the underlying emotions is unhealthy.
Sorry, I got onto my own anger stuff there, but I think it helps if you can understand your own anger to then translate it into other people's anger, and which bits of it you validate. Being abusive towards someone else is never acceptable but validating the feelings behind anger: that is where true understanding can be made. Very hard, especially if you have a pattern of responses learnt over time!
