Anger can be healthy

Apart from having other priorities in my list of things to defeat, I was quite sure I had fully controlled my childhood anger. Let’s face it once you go through the hellish training of staying calm, rational and sweet-tempered while dealing with mutinous teenagers, controlling anger is a snap.

Now I’m told that anger is good. Let me clarify that. Some anger is good.

I know perfectly well that everyone feels angry at times, and we are supposed to know how to express our feelings in a healthy way and how to react calmly when something causes us to feel angry. I thought I had achieved that.

But have I been poisoning my health all these years? Did I get it all wrong?

Researchers have even found a link between unexpressed anger and depression in women. So now I’m depressed about unexpressed anger, another load to pile onto my burden of guilt. Sometimes I think my most constant companion is guilt. Is there a way to get rid of guilt? A pill? A patch?

I’ve just finished reading The Dance of Anger: A Woman’s Guide to Changing the Patterns of Intimate Relationships and now I’m more confused than I was to begin with.

Harriet Lerner has some lessons in this book, lessons for learning how to reclaim your self (and your life) when lost in the ‘dance of anger‘. She includes excellent examples of how to withdraw from entanglement with anger with both your dignity and your humanity in place.

OK, like most women, I’ve spent a lot of time doing things for others and, while not expecting anything in return, still getting angry when no one would lift a finger for me when I needed it. Thanks for telling me where I went wrong, Harriet, but it’s a little late for that now.

Dance of Anger is surprisingly clear in the descriptions of anger in women, I was relieved to find I wasn’t the only one. But I’m still angry.