Can we talk about anger in relationships?

[Chippychopz]

Currently having counselling following on from a previous 12 year relationship. I have a lot of shame, a lot of guilt going on over the way I behaved at times in that relationship.

We have ascertained so far that he was emotionally abusive. But I did not react in the way that you would expect someone to react when they're being abused. I reacted angrily and with rage at times. I thought I was the abusive one.

He would put me in situations that caused me discomfort or anxiety, sometimes I think as a way of punishing me. I was never allowed to have limits or boundaries. He was the sort of person who would continue speeding on asking him to slow down. I wouldn't cry. I would yell and call him names. I hated myself for it.

He admitted to me once that he would try to intentionally wind me up sometimes.

Will I be angry forever?
Has anyone else experienced this in a relationship before and had a happy relationship afterwards? I'm scared that anger is just me now.

Well no. Your anger was a reaction to his abuse. Part of his abuse was to intentionally make you angry.

If you are in a relationship with someone who doesn't do that, there's nothing to be angry about.

I was always angry with my ex husband. I shouted and felt huge anger at times.

I'm in a very happy relationship now and have not felt angry once. Not at/with him anyway 🤣

My XH was emotionally abusive, coercive and very angry. I would sometimes feel I was losing my mind with how angry he made me. I even slapped him on two occasions. People on mumsnet will say I was also abusive etc but I know I'm not. I never behaved like that before or since. I can count the number of times my DH has made me angry on one hand in 5 years together and I've NEVER raised my voice at him. Being in a relationship like that can make you crazy.

It's one of the most insidious ways to.abuse someone - effectively make it look like she is the abuser by making her so frustrated and angry.

I've seen it on here - with half the posters piling on to tell someone that she is "cile" and "despicable." And I have seen it in real life with someone I love - he was v v good at making.it so that her behaviour wad the focus and whatever he had originally done was swept under the carpet.

He would put me in situations that caused me discomfort or anxiety, sometimes I think as a way of punishing me. I was never allowed to have limits or boundaries. He was the sort of person who would continue speeding on asking him to slow down. I wouldn't cry. I would yell and call him names. I hated myself for it.

This is how it was and when you are in the thick of it you are unable to step back and see the bigger picture and the pattern of behaviour and you end up reacting to try to regain some measure of control over a situation.

It's seems like you recognise this now and would respond very differently. You would recognise someone trying to erode/ignore your boundaries and reinforce them, if this didn't work you would walk away. You don't need anyone's permission to have boundaries.

Perhaps doing some work on assertiveness may help. I understand why you are concerned, it's really easy to find yourself gravitating towards dysfunctional or abusive people if that's what you are familiar with and then when they behave abusively you resume your role as the reactive victim just trying to survive each day.

I don't think you will be angry forever and I think you should give yourself some grace, you have been abused over a lengthy period of time and manipulated into believing you were the problem, I would have thought it's quite natural to feel angry when you realise you've been deceived into hating yourself for so long.

I agree with @FOJN

This sounds is familiar. It feels like with these people once you reveal to them what you like or don't like, they actually use it against you.

My ex was like this. Would drive really dangerously and would mock me for hanging onto the door handle in fear.

Then other times he would be all courteous and say, "I drove really carefully today for you."

I never lost it but I would ask him to slow down rattily.

He would also get tattoos and told his sister he got them because it annoyed me. It didn't at all actually even though I personally thought they were ugly.

Will I be angry forever

You're not like this with everybody, are you. It's just some people who trigger you. So, stay away from people who trigger you. It's not about whose 'fault' it is. Sometimes people rub each other up the wrong way. Keep your distance from people who do that to you. That's your responsibility. So, in staying with someone who triggers you, you are putting yourself, by choice, in a situation that's highly likely to trigger you.

Yes, I was like you. And then I learned to walk away from situations and people who piss me off. And now I feel like an adult, when before, I felt like a child who had tantrums. Does that sound familiar?

Yes @Watchkeys .
I have walked away from him. But feel he put me in situations where I couldn't easily do that.

@WilkinsonM that happened to me once too. He refused to allow me to sleep when I'd been awake with a newborn all week. Continued banging and banging and banging despite my tears and pleas for him to stop and let me sleep. In the end, I physically attacked him. He was left with physical marks on his face and I felt like a monster. He said he felt like Tyrone from Coronation Street being beaten up by his ex wife. I contemplated harming myself that week but didn't want to leave my baby with him so kept going.

That's why I stayed a few years longer than I should have, because i didn't want to spend half the week away from my child. In the end though, I had to leave.

I am happily married now. Never raise my voice or lose my cool with my husband. If I am annoyed by something I will just tell him and vice versa. There is no name calling etc. I feel like me. The real me.

With my ex I honestly thought I was the problem. I questioned if I was losing it etc. Majority of the time I kept my mouth shut when he started on how terrible I am and how everything is my fault. Every now and again I did lose my cool and shout back at him because he twisted things so much and it felt so unfair. I pushed him once during an argument because I couldn't leave the room as he was blocking the door. Even when I was really angry and shouted back there were many things that remained unsaid as I am afraid of saying something that results in him doing something to hurt me or DC. I was always checking myself to make sure I didn’t say anything provocative to him. I never felt like me in that relationship really. More of a shell of a person. I had to do a lot of work on myself to get from that relationship to where I am now.

With my ex husband I was made to feel like I was angry, aggressive, argumentative etc etc. He made me feel like it was all my fault and we argued constantly. One of us was always angry and he purposely used to rile me up so that I was the bad one.

I've been with my DP for 5 years and we've never had a single argument. I get angry with things but never with my DP.
We have 2 young children so a lot more stress than I had with my ex-h, yet not one argument!

Your feelings of anger were totally appropriate and understandable. It was healthy to feel that under the circumstances. Be glad you felt it, because that anger very likely saved you from being totally crushed.

Anger isn't you. And you are allowed to feel it, especially about someone treating you badly, acting dangerously or interfering with your mothering.

Almost exact situation with a friend. He has told everyone that she has hit him, punched him etc. She has said that she has shoved hi a few times and she's mortified....

.... until you hear why and when. He's 6ft and she's 5ft 3. On one occasion, he grabbed her phone and was refusing to give it back to her while trying to unlock it and read her messages. She was trying to get it back but he held it away from her and eventually she grabbed his arm and punched him trying to get it back.

On another occasion, she told him to leave. He refused to leave and was blocking her from leaving the kitchen. eventually she shoved him out of the way.

You won't always be angry. She is soooo much nicer to be around now as she's not constantly on a knife edge.

This is all sounding horrendously close to the old male “she drove me to it” excuse for domestic violence.

Are you talking to me? In my friend's case, I wouldn't call that domestic violence. She "scuffled" with her ex because he was physically restraining her from getting her phone back. She shoved him so that she could get out of the room. He started it in both cases, but yes, he loves to refer to her "hitting" him.

It's really not. It's far more nuanced than that.

I used to get really angry with my twatty XH, and his only emotion was anger. I've been in a relationship now for over four years with a dear man who has never shown any anger to me, and I have shown none to him. I can't imagine either of us raising our voices to each other. In the end it's not what either of us as a person is like. I was only like that in response to my twat of an XH.

It's good to think about these things and to be aware of triggers etc OP, but don't worry - anger is a mask that people put on to cover all sorts of other issues. If the issues aren't there in a loving relationship, neither is the anger.

Sleep deprivation is a form of torture, your ex is an abuser.

It’s normal to react to abuse by sometimes fighting back. Getting angry when someone is deliberately cruel to you is one of several normal reactions.

Which is normally what was claimed when it was used as an excuse in court by men. As a defence it wasn’t (generally) “She asked me twice to pick up my socks so I had to hit her.”, it was a tale of emotional abuse - “She wouldn’t stop, I would walk out and go to bed but she would come in and wake me up, screaming.”, “It went on for weeks/months/years.”, “I kept asking her to stop but she wouldn’t.”, “As soon as I sat down she’d start.”, “Every day she told me how useless I was.”, “She said I’d never see my kids again if I left.“, “I just needed her to stop so I could think.” Etc.

Men are (in general) stronger than women and more physically robust if they get hit, so their violence against women is more deadly and in many, many ways tackling it matters more than when women hit men. But being driven to violence in this way isn’t particularly different for men than women. Other than when physically threatened, this violence isn’t justifiable simply because you are also a recipient of abuse. Walking away, leaving, is hard but that doesn’t mean it isn’t what we should expect rather than turning to violence.

I have felt exactly as you do, and have felt shame at my emotional responses to what I now think were deliberate attempts to goad me.

It's been 5 years and the anger has mostly dissipated. I've experienced triggers and flashbacks that flare up from seemingly nowhere, but these are fewer and further between these days and I now have a lovely partner who I'm never angry with, because he's not out to hurt me and on the odd occasion where we fall out, I recognise it's genuine error and not malicious,

It takes time to stop being hyper vigilant. Therapy helps. And time.

I think it's really important to own that the way you behave (angrily) is yours. Yes, reactive abuse is a thing, but so are couples who just don't get along, aren't nice to each other and generally wind each other up - I think it's probably to think that there's every chance you can go on and have a happy non-angry relationship if you want it. Before my DH I had never had an 'angry' person. They had been moody or sulky, if anything, but DH shouts and escalates verbally very quickly at any perceived slight. Is he abusive? Yes in those moments. Would he say he was reacting to me? Yes. Have I been told on MN to leave him because of his 'anger' problem? Yes! But I honestly see it as part of him and though it's not very healthy in some ways raising his voice ,it's his emotionally immature coping valve. I think of it akin to a toddler having an emotional tantrum. I love him dearly and find in him many many positives and over the years, the anger episodes have subsided to a minimum which burn out in a matter of minutes if not seconds now.

I don't feel threatened by him in any way. If your ex was abusive, then in short, so were you. But that means nothing more than it was not a good workable relationship and now it's ended, which is good for both of you, you can now move forward. Blame him for his part and own your own, not with guilt or with shame, but with recognition and growth.

Anger is a really important emotion and it's not always bad. Good on you for getting away OP.

I definitely think some posters don’t fully understand the dynamics of abuse. The abuser doesn’t feel guilt or shame for their actions. Their actions were always justified. The person they abused carries with them all the guilt and shame for what happened. They take all the blame. Every one else in household lives on eggshells in the hope that if they don’t do or say the wrong thing they can avoid provoking the anger. Of course this doesn’t work. At the very core of it though is that the abuser is not afraid and they are in full control. Their partner and most likely the children are afraid. That fear keeps you in a hyper vigilant state of fight or flight.

I don’t blame my ex for what happened. I just wish I had the courage to leave way sooner. Life is good now but there will always be scars from what happened.

Have you heard of reactive abuse before?

I used to get angry when I felt cornered. My ex would goad me. He would tower over me, with his face inches from mine, shouting insults. He was bigger and stronger and louder than me, and very intimidating. I was afraid of him, but I was also incredibly angry. I always shouted back.

My current partner has never raised his voice at me. Not once. In more than a decade. If either of us gets annoyed with the other we might get very slightly snappy, for a moment or two, and then we discuss it calmly. I think it’s because I know he’s not trying to piss me off on purpose, just like I wouldn’t intentionally annoy him. It makes a big difference.