Fellow blogger, Therapy Doc, has great post on anger. I've excerpted parts of it below, but click here to get to her entire post. It will have you fuming!!! (Kidding, of course.)
There's another "new" development in therapy. New is in quotation marks because for family therapists, the idea that arguing is healthy isn't at all new.Owning one's anger, discussing it with passion, not insisting that it be mollified, relishing the conflict as a hallmark of differentiation, a divine right to one's point of view, well, this is nothing new.
I just spent 45 minutes today with a kid and his parents and insisted he spleen them, that he argue his point until he won. He lost, but only because it was about curfew, and face it, I can't tell parents to let their kid break a law, and they sure weren't going to give him permission to stay out past curfew.
It's all about the killing on the streets of Chicago, which does have something to do with anger, I imagine. But that's for another day.
That family argued and screamed. They cried and threw up their hands in disgust, and at the end of the session everyone was hugging and kissing and it was a wonderful thing to behold.
Fine. They didn't hug and kiss. But they did feel pretty darn good and went home for another round about something else.
The process of resolving conflict and hurt feelings is the foundation of intimacy. It has to happen to have healthy family (and marital) relationships.
Anger as adrenaline is really functional, perhaps the driving force in some creative problem solving. Even working to avoid anger as such is good; it channels the arousal. But as a concept, anger has always been just that, an interpretation of bodily arousal, an emotion, something we have to contend with, manage.
It's how we express it that separates the amateurs from the pros. We try not to be too indelicate, but sometimes we are! And when that happens, then damage control is necessary. When anger builds up it can be especially nasty, and all the zen distraction in the world won't stop it. And perhaps sometimes that's for the best. As long as there's resolution. (To read the rest of her post, click here.)
To read more Beyond Blue, go to www.beliefnet.com/beyondblue, and to get to Group Beyond Blue, a support group at Beliefnet Community, click here.
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I used to be very depressed & then manic. I am bipolar & stable on meds. I don't throw & break things or yell now. I have learned to go to meetings & talk about my anger & I eat right & exercise hard so it keeps my flustration level down.
It's so funny. I reread what I wrote and think, I wrote that? But yes, having the argument is important, listening it out, letting both parties another express thoughts and desires, wishes and dreams. Hearing one another first, then throwing around those alternative solutions until we find one that isn't totally reprehensible to both of us.
Editing an argument so that NONE of it is verbally violent is elemental, of course. Anything that can be interpreted as violent or hurtful is a foul in the ring of problem solving, which is what arguing is all about.
So that's the key, keeping it all safe and loving, and we're not at all finished with this topic, either. Thanks for reposting me, Therese.
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