Harnessing the Storm: Anger in Marriage- Full Transcript
Brad Aldrich:
Let’s start the conversation. Hello everyone, Welcome back to Still Becoming One. Yes. We’re glad that you are here today. We are. Yeah, it’s been a long, busy couple of weeks, but it’s good to be on the other side of spring breaks and Easter and all that kind of thing.
Kate Aldrich:
Why is it good to be on the other side? I?
Brad Aldrich:
don’t know, my weeks got really busy the end of March there.
Kate Aldrich:
But you think that was related to spring break. I don’t know, guys, I’m learning something new today.
Brad Aldrich:
I was actually going to ask how do you come today, brad’s like I am looking forward to a little bit lighter week than I have had the last like four you have been working really hard, but I don’t know that that has anything to do with spring break, but I get it.
Kate Aldrich:
I have no idea, it’s just.
Brad Aldrich:
I looked at my calendar today and it didn’t seem as insane as my last couple of weeks.
Kate Aldrich:
Gotcha, it’s been rough for you for sure, but we did have a kiddo home over the weekend because he goes to school close enough that he could come home, so we had that. That was fun. Easter weekend is always a special weekend for for us and so, but it also went by like a really fast, yeah, yeah, really fast so, um, yeah, so I am excited for monday morning yeah, here we are, monday morning, okay.
Brad Aldrich:
So, um, we were going to talk about something that we do see come up in coaching often and, honestly, probably not enough, although that might surprise some people hearing the title here but that we wanted to talk about anger and how anger affects you and how anger affects your relationships. And, yeah, how do you actually approach this emotion of anger.
Kate Aldrich:
It’s a good question. I find, working mainly with women, that it comes up more than probably. You said it should come up more. I’m contemplating that, but I think it comes up more than people realize. I think women, moms not all the women that I meet with are moms. It feels like a really hard topic to talk about.
Brad Aldrich:
I get that there are so many negative stigmas around anger and I hear men all the time who more or less get sent to coaching or counseling because somebody in their life is saying they’ve got an anger issue and so that happens. Yeah. And so that happens, yeah. And then I see the other side where I can see anger kind of right under the surface but they honestly don’t even see it.
Kate Aldrich:
That’s interesting. I mean, you don’t usually work with women alone. Sometimes you do, but with couples.
Brad Aldrich:
Do see women like bringing it to the absolutely to talk about yeah, absolutely that they’ll come to the table and talk about them being angry. They’ll talk about their spouse being angry, being scared of, of their spouse’s anger that kind of stuff. So I’ve certainly seen those things. Um, and I guess why I started with we don’t see it enough is I don’t want to give any illusions that anger is like good to express or to scare your spouse or anything like that, but I think we all have a relationship with anger.
Kate Aldrich:
Yeah, I would push back on your first comment.
Brad Aldrich:
On the word good.
Kate Aldrich:
I don’t think it’s what you meant.
Brad Aldrich:
Right. But you said like I don’t want to give the impression that anger is good to express it actually is good to express, but you know I I would more say it’s not good to like use as a way of controlling or manipulating your spouse.
Kate Aldrich:
Of course, of course. But anger gets a bad rap because it is outward. There’s evidence of it. We can have a lot of emotions inside and kind of cover them and, as you said, you can sometimes see anger on like brimming, like boiling kind of thing. But for most people anger is an outward expression and so therefore easy for us to identify. But the reality about anger is it is there are no good or bad emotions. We’ve said that many times here. That includes anger. There are no good or bad emotions. We’ve said that many times here. That includes anger it is not good or bad.
Kate Aldrich:
It is an emotion, however, what we do with it that matters what I share, yep, with all of my clients that I’m working with is it’s what we do with the anger. That can be good or bad yeah and it’s not always bad.
Kate Aldrich:
You can choose good things to do with your anger and I find that’s so eye-opening and helpful to the women that I sit with and in my own journey it’s been really helpful Because, I will be honest, I had an anger issue, not just in our marriage but in general. Anger was kind of how my family easily communicated. It was an emotion that was easy for people to access, which is not uncommon, and so it was something I quickly learned Like if I was going to be seen and heard well, I kind of had to be just as intense and angry as everybody else. And so, of course, like once Brad and I are married for a while and you know there are other parts of my story happening, my anger is coming out, and so, you know, learning about anger has been really really helpful. So just to like put that out there and kind of mull over that it really is what you’re choosing to do with the anger. That’s the issue.
Brad Aldrich:
Yeah, I think that’s really good, because I think this is an emotion that most people kind of put in a black and or white category. It’s either on or off. Right, I’m either angry or I’m not. And I’m angry means I’m yelling, I’m fuming, I’m pushing people away. I have an anger problem. I’m not means I’m pushing it down, I’m containing it. I’m means I’m pushing it down, I’m containing it, I’m managing it.
Brad Aldrich:
And it’s not somehow affecting other people, and I would kind of say that I think people have something to learn on both sides of that fence.
Kate Aldrich:
Oh, absolutely.
Speaker 3:
That it’s not just a good thing to just swallow all of the anger not just a good thing to just swallow all of the anger.
Brad Aldrich:
But also it’s probably not a good thing to use anger in a way to push people away, right? Like so we’ve got to learn on both sides. Sure. And it starts by knowing what your tendency is.
Kate Aldrich:
Well, I would actually push back too. I think if you struggle with anger a lot like it’s, you know it’s a common thing, for you probably do both sure because you’ve learned to try to stuff it right, like when you feel like you’re having a victory over your anger.
Kate Aldrich:
That is what you’re doing. So you’re probably having times of explosiveness and then times of like, well, I did good because I just packed it in there like crazy Right. So I would think that is the case, but I also know that I’ve worked with people who have learned as adults, like this is not OK, so now I just stuff it all the time. Yeah.
Kate Aldrich:
And then when does it come out? And all of those kinds of things, or I just let it. I hear what you’re saying, that you might have a tendency one way or the other, but I think if anger is a struggle of yours which you should not feel shame and guilt about, let’s just look at it for what it is. You know you’re going to be doing some of both.
Brad Aldrich:
Yeah, and I think this is where we kind of wanted to go in general is we need to look at it as an emotion, not good or bad, and figure out where it’s coming from and what it’s trying to tell you you, because there are reasons that anger exists in a system and there are reasons that you are experiencing that anger, whether you are experiencing it out or in there are reasons for it and if we just ignore it or then tell you you’re not supposed to be, you don’t be angry, that’s it’s going to leak out somewhere, it’s going to go somewhere and it’s not going to be healthy well, telling anyone to not feel an emotion is kind of, um, it doesn’t.
Kate Aldrich:
What you’re saying is I’m uncomfortable with your emotion, so please just stop which. That’s not how emotions work. So we’re asking them to then figure out some unhealthy way to stifle it, to turn it inward, to whatever.
Brad Aldrich:
Right, so let’s start with somebody who is maybe listening and going. You know, I don’t yell, I don’t use anger towards other people. What do I need to learn about anger?
Kate Aldrich:
So are you then saying they don’t have anger? Oh no.
Brad Aldrich:
No, I’m definitely not saying that. I think that’s probably what I went through for a long time of like I don’t have anger because I was not allowed to experience anger in my family growing up. It was not an acceptable emotion. It was something you had to stuff. And yet when I look back I actually see a lot of anger just under the surface. It just came out in control, in passive, aggressive ways, you know kind of thing. So nobody acknowledged the anger, they just either avoided it or used other methods to deal with it.
Brad Aldrich:
So when I left the home I did not have a healthy relationship with anger, but I partially didn’t feel like I had any right. I just didn’t know what that emotion was. So part of it was learning it.
Kate Aldrich:
Yeah, sorry, I was just yeah. That’s interesting because I think your family and I don’t mean this in a judging way, but would sort of pridefully say they don’t have anger.
Brad Aldrich:
Yes, they would.
Kate Aldrich:
And you were, if I’m assuming right.
Brad Aldrich:
You’re saying you’re kind of walking in that when you left home 100% I would say I was not angry and what I recognized eventually was that there was a lot of places where I was stuffing anger and it was coming out in other ways, right? Look, one of the things that I learned is that anger is an emotion that expresses injustice. Right. So it is a natural emotion to express injustice. If something is not right, if something’s not going right towards you or towards others, anger is a natural emotion. About that.
Kate Aldrich:
I’m glad you brought that up, because it is like there are certain things in life, guys. There are certain things in life, guys, that we should not appreciate. We should be angry at the injustice of those things. I believe that is modeled for us in Scripture when Jesus is turning over the tables yeah Right, because there’s an injustice going on there and it’s directly related to him and his father’s house and all of these things. So those things should make us mad.
Brad Aldrich:
It is clear that Jesus turned over the tables of the people who were cheating the foreigners.
Kate Aldrich:
The aliens and the poor. Yeah.
Brad Aldrich:
So he was saying you cannot do this in my father’s house. You are not being just You’re not acting justly. So that’s where this expression of anger happened, without sin, which I think does challenge a lot of people, because if any of you went in on Easter and flipped over tables in your church and drove people out with a whip, I think your pastor probably would say you had an anger issue.
Kate Aldrich:
We need to sit down and talk Like what’s happening, what’s going on?
Brad Aldrich:
So I’m not suggesting anyone do that, but Jesus did, and did so without sin. So we have this place where there is sometimes even expression of anger in an appropriate way.
Kate Aldrich:
Well, and our good, dear friend who is a pastor at our church also brought up the point which I thought was so profound of like. But it also really hit a personal note for Jesus, because they’re cheating the poor and the people who can’t buy the sacrifices, and that would have been Jesus’s family growing up Like for him being able to buy those um the doves, yeah.
Kate Aldrich:
Instead of a ram or instead of a sheep, yeah it would have been difficult, and so like not only the injustice he’s seeing happening to others, there’s a part of story work there, right. There’s the feeling of injustice that he experienced as a child being discriminated against due to his status, so like we have multiple layers of anger there.
Brad Aldrich:
And Kate’s specifically talking about that. The verse says very specifically that he turned over the tables of the money changers and chased out the sellers of doves. Well, the money changers are only there to facilitate people who are from out of town, who are aliens, who are coming to give sacrifices. They need to change money into a different form of form of, and they were cheating people and the sellers of doves. If you relate this back to Deuteronomy, where it talks about giving the sacrifices that they’re supposed to give, they are supposed to be giving a newborn lamb sacrifice. It’s just that’s an expensive sacrifice. So there is an exception in Deuteronomy that says if you cannot afford that, you can sacrifice a dove instead. And so the people who are selling the doves were also cheating people out of that money.
Brad Aldrich:
So that’s what Jesus got mad at. So there was this place of understanding that injustice is something that should elicit some anger. That is normal. So that would be one I think I had to learn. The other thing that just blew my mind was this reality that anger escalates in any system, whether it be a family, whether it be a work, any system that’s not telling the truth. Anger is going to escalate somewhere.
Kate Aldrich:
Say more about that.
Brad Aldrich:
So there’s often times where we are putting on a good appearance in a family that maybe other things are actually going on. So a family’s going to look one way and act a different way, and anger is a natural outcome of that not telling the truth.
Kate Aldrich:
That’s interesting.
Brad Aldrich:
So I think those are things that we recognize. I needed to recognize and go. Oh wait, I actually have to understand my anger in a healthy way and start to see some of the deeper things under its surface. Otherwise it’s going to leak out in unhealthy ways.
Kate Aldrich:
That’s interesting. I hadn’t thought about it in those terms because mine was so outward.
Brad Aldrich:
Right.
Kate Aldrich:
But that doesn’t make mine, as you know. I mean, it doesn’t make it healthy.
Brad Aldrich:
No, I think this is the thing Anger is going to exist in every person in every marriage. It’s an emotion, absolutely. The question is for you does it go in or does it come out?
Kate Aldrich:
Right and, as I said, I think there’ll be some of both. There, probably is there’s probably one main way yeah.
Brad Aldrich:
I mean for me, almost always, anger goes in Right and it becomes self-deprecating. It becomes, you know, just towards me anger. That that’s what I had to start changing and recognizing the system’s involvement in it and going oh wait, some of these feelings are coming from other things. Right, and trying to understand that better.
Kate Aldrich:
I think honestly because I want people to be able to relate and think for me.
Kate Aldrich:
I think it, as I tried to make adjustments and move towards health for myself, it did move inward yeah, but then it it moving inward, wasn’t actually dealing with it, so then you can only move it inward for so long before it comes outward. But I think the same thing is true, like I would really internalize even if I was expressing anger outward. There’s still this self-deprecating self-condemnation like right, nobody has an expression of anger and usually, unless you’ve worked through it, no one has an expression of anger and then feels good about themselves, like oh that was so justified. You might tell yourself that, but inward you don’t believe it and yeah, so I think it’s.
Kate Aldrich:
it is complex, it’s not always. Maybe it’s more for the people who express it outward.
Brad Aldrich:
There’s kind of this back and forth, and we have to be able to recognize that how it’s coming out is an outcome of this whole wrestling with what they believe about themselves.
Kate Aldrich:
I think that’s a piece of it. I think how it comes out is very much of what was acceptable in your family. Also, I think there’s a huge piece which I always talk about with my clients if we’re talking about anger, If they are believers, go to church. You cannot talk about anger without talking about how the church deals with it, Because unfortunately, the church as a whole again, I’m not talking about any specific church doesn’t know what to do with anger and therefore just tells people you shouldn’t be angry and therefore just tells people you shouldn’t be angry. Whether they say that those actual words or not is not really the point, but they don’t know what to do with it. So that’s what they, that’s what they express and want people to figure out their own anger. Like, go to a counselor. If you’re angry, you need to figure this out because they don’t know what to do with it.
Brad Aldrich:
Right.
Kate Aldrich:
So and they’re not comfortable with it. So, unfortunately, when we live in a system like that, it’s really hard to heal. I just have to stop.
Brad Aldrich:
Yeah, I just have to stop being angry. And this is where I think there is a lot of work to do is a lot of work to do and I often use the language around this very similar things that I do with unwanted sexual behavior is when this shows up in your life, when you’re finding yourself getting angry. Instead of ignoring it, instead of just allowing yourself to explode, start going. What is it that I really want right now?
Kate Aldrich:
What is it that I’m?
Brad Aldrich:
really feeling right now? What is it that’s really going on? Because, as we’ve talked about many times, anger is this blanket emotion that is sometimes more acceptable to express Maybe acceptable is the wrong word sometimes easier to access and express than it is the vulnerable emotions underneath it.
Kate Aldrich:
True. I also think many of us grow up with no one walking alongside of us saying, hey, I see anger let’s talk about, like. With kids this is tough, right, because building vocabulary around this is difficult, sure, but with adults I say let’s stop for a minute and mainly women, of course and just say, like, what is under the anger right? Anger is an easy emotion to point to, but for most of us there is something else under it that is much more vulnerable, right, and feels very we may not even identify it there.
Kate Aldrich:
There’s that, or we just can’t share it because it feels so much more vulnerable than the anger.
Brad Aldrich:
And this goes into the concept that I’m sure some people have heard of before that John Gottman titled the angry iceberg. That anger is the thing that is showing on the top. It is a real emotion, it is part of it. But if we really want to deal with that anger, if we want to have a different relationship with that anger, we’re going to have to dig down below the surface and try and figure out what’s there, and it just simply comes down to if we can recognize that we felt rejected in a conversation in a situation.
Brad Aldrich:
If we can recognize that feeling of rejection, we can then start to go. Okay, there probably were other, harder, more vulnerable ways to express rejection other than fighting back with anger.
Kate Aldrich:
Sure.
Brad Aldrich:
And so we get into those places where we need to do that. Now, here’s the challenge. I have seen lots of times where men are using anger to end a conflict cycle that they feel out of control in.
Kate Aldrich:
To end a conflict cycle, I need more.
Brad Aldrich:
So this is complex a little bit, but, right, a conflict happens in a relationship, right, where he’s doing something, she’s doing something. It goes back and forth and they’re kind of for lack of a better word triggering each other in this place and at some point, both of them usually want to just let it cool down, and I think sometimes, at least in these relationships, right. So this is not a male-female thing.
Brad Aldrich:
In these relationships, where this happens, what’s happening is she is sensing his wanting to step away, sensing his wanting to leave, you know, have some space, and that makes her scared. So she keeps pursuing him, keeps the argument going to the point that he escalates to a pretty severe anger to get it to stop. Because if she then stops pursuing. He can get that space in order to cool down.
Kate Aldrich:
That’s interesting. I don’t know that I’ve identified that before.
Brad Aldrich:
I have multiple men on my caseload that that’s the situation with their anger problem. Okay, and part of it is helping them to identify when they need that break, before it gets to a volatile state, so that they can vulnerably ask for a break, not just kind of give this signal and sometimes even say like I’m leaving All those words that escalate her like crazy, know, trying to then put up healthy boundaries so that they aren’t going to that place.
Kate Aldrich:
Right, I’m trying to think with my own anger. If, like, that was a pattern that I did, I could see where that could be. Yeah, it’s just, it’s interesting to think about it like that’s the, as you said, the complexity is like so much is going on behind what we’re actually aware of from our stories, exactly what’s activated from all this stuff, and it is so much deeper than anger, it’s hurt, it’s fear, it’s all these different things and it just yeah, so that’s an interesting point I think we need to.
Brad Aldrich:
this would be my encouragement. Just out of this is one have a conversation with how did we see anger in our household? How was it used? And what was our body’s response to it? As a kid, did we hide? Did we ignore it? Did we work to manage other people’s anger? Did? We participate Did we participate in it? Were we part of the system of anger? Right Like so, just having those conversations of what did you see and what were your responses to it?
Kate Aldrich:
Well, you just said now were we part of the system.
Brad Aldrich:
You were always part of the system.
Kate Aldrich:
yeah, yeah but just clarity. You’re a kid. You’re not responsible for the system, Like if you’re participating in it. That’s because for some reason, you have learned that’s the only safe option.
Brad Aldrich:
Right.
Kate Aldrich:
So don’t hear that as like oh right, Well, I was causing this in my family as a kid. No, Right.
Brad Aldrich:
So then right, but that leads us to the next one, like, start with, what was it as your family? And then like, how did you learn to use anger as a tool? What happened when you got angry? What changed when you got angry? Because we’re doing it for a reason and sometimes it feels very out of control and, yes, sometimes it is, but I would say, a lot of times we are. We are using anger as a way to communicate, sometimes things that we can’t communicate in other ways right, right, yeah.
Kate Aldrich:
So thinking about that, I think, also trying to go to the place of like. It can be different in every situation, but think through a couple of times when you were really angry, what was underneath the anger?
Brad Aldrich:
Yeah, that’s the third.
Kate Aldrich:
And you know, yeah, thinking through that, I also think having some ways that are acceptable for you when you get angry, like what can it look like for you? Well, right, cause we don’t want to do the things that hurt other people, we don’t want to do destructive behaviors, your anger needs a place and it’s okay. So what does it look like for you?
Brad Aldrich:
That’s a great question.
Kate Aldrich:
Um, and that can be many, many different. Like the sky’s the limit of what that could be. It could be, you know, some things that I talk with people about going for a walk. It could be like just to give you some things to think about. Yeah.
Brad Aldrich:
I love that. I think that’s super important. I think you know, we need to think through what is this anger doing, like Kate said, what’s underneath it, and take the risk, if we can, to go more vulnerably, to communicate more vulnerably what you’re feeling, because I think that actually leads us to a deeper place of relationship.
Brad Aldrich:
However, here’s my asterisk in that, if we have already had that place where we’re out of our window of tolerance, where we are feeling that fight or flight, we’ve already had our bodies dump adrenaline into our body out of anger, then there is not going to be any of that deeper emotional work until you do something about that adrenaline, and adrenaline needs to be used in our muscles. So that’s where you have to get up and go for a walk. You have to get up and do something to move your body in order to process all of the stuff that got you going.
Kate Aldrich:
Yeah, yeah, I think there can be other things, but you’re not wrong. Like those are some, moving your body are going to be some of the best to be able to bring yourself into a place where you can bring yourself into a place where you can process it differently. I also think, remembering, as you start to try and figure out this puzzle, you’re not always going to be able to express to your spouse right away like, oh, I was feeling this right, it takes time, it takes practice, it takes understanding your story, and so there are going to be times where you’re like I need to think about this and I will come back to you because I’m not really sure what was going on right now. And that’s okay, like that’s actually a really normal part of the process. Just because we ask ourselves the questions, the good questions, doesn’t mean we automatically have an answer.
Brad Aldrich:
I would totally agree. It’s a start and we have to be able to do some of what we’re talking about in the repair phase after something’s happened, which is hard right If you have been the target of somebody else’s anger for a long time it can feel really hard to let them come back and repair and just feel like, oh, here we go again.
Brad Aldrich:
And we do want to say there needs to be healthy boundaries, where you’re feeling safe, where certainly there is not violence going on. Those are not okay expressions of anger. So we do know that there’s some limits to this, but we do know it also takes time for people to figure out what’s really going on.
Kate Aldrich:
Yeah, it’s a process just like anything else, and there needs to be space for you to actually figure that process out. And so talking to the spouse who maybe isn’t one who anger is an issue. If you see your spouse trying to figure this out, trying to make an effort, kindness and grace, that doesn’t mean you’re excusing the behavior, it doesn’t mean you’re saying it’s okay. But if you see them trying to break the patterns and need to go for a walk or need to journal it down before they can really talk to you about what was going on, that’s good.
Kate Aldrich:
Trying to be patient with that. Because, just like anything in our lives, we all have things that drive us. Because, just like anything in our lives, we all have things that drive us and anger can be very destructive. But we also weigh anger like it’s the worst and yet you might have a spouse who’s passive aggressive. It’s just a different way of expressing hard emotions, right, and it may look less destructive on.
Brad Aldrich:
the it’s not.
Kate Aldrich:
No, it’s absolutely not. But unfortunately in this world, in the United States and in the church, it is more acceptable to be passive-aggressive than to be angry. And because it does, on the outside, look like it does less destruction.
Brad Aldrich:
Yeah.
Kate Aldrich:
And we just need to remember that’s really not the case. Passive aggressive can be so hurtful to people, right, it’s more of that silent hurt where you’re like, oh, wow, okay, that person just said that, really Right, whereas anger is just, it can be very loud, it can be explosive and those things are not okay. Right, we can’t have that. But the thing we need to remember as a passive-aggressive person, you don’t have to repair and apologize for the explosion, but the hurt is still there. So just trying to like, remember and remind ourselves that anger isn’t really any different. It’s just the fact that it has the explosive potential and the harm that that brings. We don’t want to downplay it.
Brad Aldrich:
That’s really good. Yeah, that’s really important, and I think we all need to have a different relationship with this important emotion of anger.
Kate Aldrich:
Right, because we actually all have it.
Brad Aldrich:
Yep.
Kate Aldrich:
And if it’s just not very often.
Brad Aldrich:
Nope, that’s really good and I hope it gives you something to think about and process from this. So I hope you have some good discussions. We would love to hear from some of you. If you have more questions about anger or your story or your relationship, reach out to us at help at stillbecomingonecom and we would love to chat. Yeah, so that’s all for this week on Still Becoming One, until next time. I’m Brad Aldrich.
Kate Aldrich:
I’m Kate Aldrich. Be kind and take care of each other.
