When I was really really really angry last weekend, I thought about all the things I wanted to do with my anger, and why I wanted to do them, and how I'd acted the other times I'd been angry in the past, and what I'd wanted to achieve by what I'd done, and where it had got me. It gave me a real moment of clarity - to sit with being angry and think it through like that, rather than acting on it. It was extremely difficult and just because I managed it last weekend I don't imagine I will always manage it: I'm not lecturing you from a position of enlightenment here, just sharing some experience.
So - I wanted to really really hurt him. Shout at him or give him some home truths or destroy his stuff or kick him out or humiliate him in some way. I dug under that. Why did I want to hurt him? So he'd know what being hurt felt like. So I wouldn't feel powerless. So he'd stop hurting me.
What else?
I wanted to change him. I wanted to hurt him or lash out at him in some way so he'd behave differently. Okay. And how would that work for me? Say it worked and he started communicating like an adult and being more honest and responsible for himself and affectionate and giving with me? I'd always know, wouldn't I, that I scared him into it - that he was doing it, in some very real way, to avoid my anger.
And I realised that just as you can't 'nice' someone into forgiving you or loving you or being kind to you or choosing you, you can't 'anger' them into it either.
But I was still angry.
And I started to imagine that anger as a very beautiful bear that would protect me - a bear with endless energy that was always, always on my side. A bear that was saying, pretty loudly, 'No way! Enough!'
I'd been wasting my lovely bear's precious energy on changing someone else, which does not work. Laws of physics. We might as well hammer ourselves against gravity or the laws of motion. Or I'd been throttling my lovely bear into silence with guilt and shame. When I just listened to this bear, what she was saying was 'no, this is enough. More than enough. Get out of this. Right now.'
And from then on, I was very clear and calm and it was pretty easy, in the minor skirmishes and also in the big preparing-my-finances stakes - to take immediate and clear action that was about using that precious and hard won energy to protect myself and to get myself into a good place.
I don't know what the end of my story is. But I do know I am not where I was, and because I am not where I was, my marriage cannot be where it was. It is possible for me to single handedly change the dynamic because I simply will not participate at all - not one tiny bit - in the old one. The status quo is dead because I killed it and I killed it because I had absolutely had enough.
I am sure there will be backsliding. And my situation is not your situation and I am not presuming to be an expert here that can tell you what to do. I don't think I could have reached this place one second earlier than I did. I think I had to exhaust all my other strategies of acting the victim, pacifying him, playing dumb, swallowing my anger, punishing myself with guilt, hiding behind a sense of superiority and contempt, self pity - all of that I had to do whole heartedly for bloody months until they just Weren't Enough. But you asked about anger, so perhaps my recent experience with it might be helpful for you.
When you sit in your anger, what does it say to you?
