How We Let Anger Sabotage Our Intimate Relationships

The first time I watched my Relational Life Therapy teacher, Terry Real, work with a couple, something he said stopped me in my tracks and changed how I look at couples work forever. "You know," he said to the woman, leaning back in his office armchair with a practiced nonchalance, "Angry complaint will never, ever get you more of what you want."

She paused. The room went quiet as we waited to see what would happen next. I had never seen a practitioner be so direct. Apparently, given the long moment of silence, neither had she.

Then she answered, "I just get so angry. How else am I supposed to get what I need?"

Terry softened, settled, and said, "Let me help you with that." And he did.

That exchange transformed how I view anger towards our partners. It’s a strategy we use to try to get our needs met. It might feel uncontrolled or uncontrollable in the moment, but underneath it’s trying to express an urgent need.

This doesn’t make raging okay in relationships. It doesn’t excuse outbursts of anger and complaint directed at our partners. And it certainly doesn’t minimize when anger expresses physically and becomes very serious abuse.

Seeing anger as a strategy gives us space to work with it as more than an emotion to be restrained and controlled. It can feel futile to wrestle with strong feelings, especially when we feel that we’re doing it “wrong.”

Instead, we can see anger as a strategy. Strategies have impact on our partners and our relationships. And strategies can be adapted and improved.

Like I said, this new understanding of anger and complaint as a strategy changed how I work with rage in relationships, with others and in my own life. It allowed me to unlock new levels of confidence and possibility in the moments we need them most.

The Purpose of Anger and Complaining in Relationships

Most of us get angry when we feel unheard. The anger amplifies our expressions, raising our temperature and tone of voice so that we communicate urgency and threat to those around us. Our anger activates their stress response, biologically compelling them to respond.

Anger likes to find logical reasons why we’re angry. Those reasons are often directed at our intimate partners because they’re the closest targets. We also might feel we can get away with behavior that wouldn’t work in our friendships or professional relationships.

Here’s what we need to do differently.

We must learn skills to metabolize and direct our anger, when we feel upset and unheard. Instead of unleashing our self-righteous rage on our partners, we need to temper our intensity into better strategies that actually get us what we want. Instead of our beloved partners going stoic and silent in the face of our fury, or trying unsuccessfully to placate us, they learn how to firmly and lovingly stand up for themselves and our relationships, and bring us back into connected, collaborative care.

How Anger Creates Entitlement and Grandiosity in Intimate Relationships

Anger is a potent messenger, pointing us towards unmet needs or places we’re overstepping our boundaries. It pushes us to speak up and take action for what we want. When we don't listen, everything around us starts to catch fire until the blaze of our fury is impossible to contain or ignore.

We minimize and dismiss our anger at our own peril, maybe bottling it up until it erupts without warning and struggling to take responsibility for the outburst and the damage done.

Or we give ourselves free reign to verbalize our discontent and externalize our rage, targeting our intimate partners because they're the ones standing closest.

We might even justify our unrestrained outbursts by telling ourselves that this is what intimacy means, that we're just "sharing our truth," and that enduring our angry complaining is part of their job in our relationships.

Anger always has information it needs us to act on. But how we act on it is our responsibility. Unless we're aware and accountable, able to speak for our anger and not from it, we risk sabotaging our intimate relationships.

The truth is that the aftermath of angry complaint is hard to heal from. Our partners might pretend like they're not hurt, self-protecting behind walls of silence, but real damage is done. Every time we take aim at them, and let loose our discontent, we rupture our relationships.

And we're often oblivious to the impact or their need for repair.

Part of the grandiosity unrestrained anger and complaint creates is a sense of entitlement. "I'm just telling you what I think," we might rationalize, after we have spewed angry and pointed words at our beloved in the heat of anger. We might apologize but avoid the real accountability to change so it stops happening.

Over time, with this pattern on repeat, we force our partners behind walls and then rage at them for being there. We complain that they're not emotionally available or physically affectionate enough, when it's us who have pushed them into bracing numbness because of the way our raging floods their nervous system.

Our partners want us to be happy. Angrily complaining how they and what they're doing is wrong communicates that they're not good enough. It shames them with no way out but to endure more angry complaint. If they try to explain or fight, our anger gets worse. If they collapse into shutdown, we rage that they're not feeling anything.

Either way, we pour fuel on our own fire until we are both exhausted and demoralized. And about as far away from intimacy as we can get.

We need to learn a different way to work with our anger.

How to Work with Anger and Rage in Intimate Relationships

Healthy relationships are based on negotiation and repair. Happy couples dance a repeating cycle of harmony, disharmony, and resolution. Repair is required to heal, but we can't get there until we understand the lasting negative impact of uncontained rage.

Here are some steps for how to work with this.

1. Take responsibility for your feelings and needs.

Anger and rage often feel unheard. These feelings have often been shamed, minimized, and dismissed in the past — to our great detriment. It's natural for anger to come on strong when it's used to not being heard. Learning how to own our anger without it taking over or flooding us is crucial work and extremely rewarding. Anger is a powerful fuel, when we know how to work with it.

2. Commit to speaking for and not from your anger.

Anger points to our needs and boundaries. It's our job, as adults, to get clear on what those are, without trying to change or fix ourselves. Often, needs and boundaries can be socially inconvenient (for example, "I don't want that person to hug me."). It's our job to take responsibility for what we need and to advocate for ourselves. Only this way will our anger actually metabolize and feel met. People-pleasing cycles will only feed our inner fury.

3. Practice relational integrity.

How we communicate about our needs and boundaries, in relationships, is essential. Our intimate relationships are our ecosystems, our homes, the air we breathe and the water we drink. If we set the forest on fire, we're the ones who will have to regenerate it. It's in our best interests to learn how to communicate with integrity in our relationships, making requests instead of complaining, and learning other effective negotiation and repair skills.

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If uncontained rage is something that gets in the way in your relationship, I encourage you to get help and work on shifting the pattern. This behavior is immediately and effectively changeable when you're ready to see and shift it. The path doesn't involve long deep dives into the past or a complex understanding of your motives. It just means looking at the part of you who's so angry and starting to listen to them and give them what they need, speaking for and not from them in your intimate relationship.

If you're curious about this, I encourage you to reach out.

Thank you for being willing to explore how anger and rage can sabotage the places we most rely on to feel safe and loved. Here's to changing the patterns that no longer serve us.