Marriage Undone

There are a million self-help tools out there for dealing with anger, and I’ve tried lots of them. I LOVE Harriet Lerner’s Dance of Anger. The book helped me formulate my own understanding about anger and other strong emotions. Feelings are not wrong. They just are. Negative feelings are your sign that something is not right. Instead of blaming someone else for causing you grief, spend plenty of time thinking about what you can do to make those things that are not right better.

I think part of the problem in separation/divorce is that you think, okay, the marriage sucked, or the separation sucked, if I can just get to the divorce I can get this behind me. It’s just not that simple. Even if you are not staying together, you still have to figure out, to a degree, how to interact with each other, especially if you have children together. And if you can do that before the final papers are signed, or dictated by a judge, then everyone will be better off.

I also used EFT - Emotional Freedom Technique - for one particular problem and it worked fairly well. I haven’t tried it for much of anything else, but there was this one song, on this one cd. I love the cd, and my husband loves it, so we’d listen to it fairly often. But this one song always reminded me of all the YUCK. And it was at the end of the cd, and I never remembered when we first started playing it. That song would come on and I would just lose it. I’d absolutely hate him all over again. Even though I knew deep down he was not trying to hurt me by playing that song, that really, it’s a pretty good song, I just couldn’t disassociate with the emotions it triggered. I tried the EFT after noticing some Tarheel Baseball players using it during a game And it worked. I don’t know why I haven’t used it again! I know I still have some other powerful triggers. 

When you shed the victim mentality and stop letting someone or something MAKE you feel angry, that’s when you are there. There are many ways to get past anger. For me it helps to try to put myself in the other person’s shoes - even if I have to make up scenarios in my mind that are not necessarily true but that do inspire empathy. Other perspectives and tools will help. Research and experiment. Pay attention to your negative feelings, and let them inspire positive change.

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