First of all, I am extremely SORRY you're forced to read this article. But life's circumstances are not in our hands. Don't worry you've made a wise decision to read this article. I promise you by the end of this article you'll have the RIGHT tools for dealing with anger and resentment in your married life.
To be honest Anger, Resentment and Fight is the root cause of the EVIL in married couples life.
In fact most married couple already know, if they could control or deal with their anger and resentment issue their destructive fight and ego will turn constructive.
But it's easier said than DONE. No one wants to control and overcome their anger which slowly and eventually kills the marriage.
But you're here to save your marriage from DOOMING. Let's understand in brief how dealing with anger and resentment in marriage will fix your marriage and bring peace and harmony again into your married life.
#1. Dealing With Your Anger
When dealing with anger, it is important to first focus on your own, then focus on how to deal with your spouse’s anger toward you.
As long as you are likely to respond to your spouse’s anger with your own anger, you are at a dead-end.
And as long as you respond to your own sense of threat/hurt, you will only fuel your spouse’s anger.
#2. Dealing With Your Biological Response
Since the biological response to threat is so automatic, it is important for you to have some tools to back off the automatic response.
There are 3 main points you will want to attend to in order to short-circuit this process. As a biological process, you must deal with your biology, your body.
1. Monitor yourself for signs and symptoms of increased response to threat: quickening breathing or heart rate, sweaty palms, muscles tensing, tension headache, or sweating. This is your first sign that your brain is registering a threat.
2) Breathe correctly. There is a natural braking system and accelerator system built right into our body– our breathing!
When our body believes us to be under attack, we begin to breathe through our chest, expanding only the upper part of our lungs. This allows our body to keep the muscles in our abdomen tight, thus protecting our important organs.
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This happens automatically. But if we disrupt that style of breathing by “belly breathing,” we are signaling to our primitive brain that there is no threat.
Practice this: lay down on your back in bed, one hand on your navel, the other on your chest bone. Now, practice breathing so that the only hand that moves is the one on your navel.
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That is how you should be breathing. It is belly breathing, and provides oxygenation, and keeps your body relaxed, anyway. But when you are feeling some threat, consciously moving to belly breathing can short-circuit your brain’s threat response.
3) Focus positively on the DISCUSSION at hand. When you are feeling a threat, it is easy to move into other areas outside the topic of the discussion.
For instance, you may bring other occurrences or tangential issues onto the table that have little to no relevance in discussing the issue at hand. Also, you may find yourself with thoughts of fleeing or dominating. Those fight/flight thoughts can be dealt with by refocusing on the issue at hand.
#3. Dealing With Your Psychological Response
Your psychological response is not unconnected from your biological, but does require another level of intervention. I will tell you at the outset, we all have habits of reacting to anger.
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These habits have been created through our years of life, and have their roots in how our families dealt with anger.
We had good or bad examples of dealing with anger and resentment that is then solidified in our own reactions (good and bad) to anger.
Compound that with the fact that in marriages, couples tend to learn patterns, then take shortcuts. If you know how a conversation, argument, or fight is going to go, why wait?
Just go for the ending. (Or at least that’s what we tell ourselves.) The reason is because we often do anger in damaging and destructive ways.
So if you begin to focus on dealing with your anger and resentment, don’t expect it to change overnight.
You will have some successes and some failures, but if you persist in trying to change your habits, you will get to where you want to be.
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#4 Conscious Choice
Decide what is at threat. Whenever you find yourself angry or getting angry, ask the question, “what is being threatened here?” Sometimes, it will be a clear issue, idea, or decision.
Often, it will be much more abstract. But you MUST ask yourself the question: what is being threatened?
Remember the 3 basic fears: 1) not having enough, 2) not being good enough, 3) not being loved enough. Often, one of these fears gets pricked when we feel a threat and that's when you start to feel angry.
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#5. Having knowledge of your internal dialogue.
If you truly wish to learn how to overcome anger and resentment in marriage then you've to UNDERSTAND your inner dialogue.
Our mind can work for us or against us. More often than not, it works against us. The main reason is because our mind is constantly at work, but we forget it is at work.
Your mind is designed to create thoughts. Some are useful thoughts, some are harmful, and some are neutral. This is not really the problem.
The problem is that we forget that we are thinking. We begin to assume that whatever is going on in our mind is reality.
That conversation with your spouse? It should be “the conversation I wish we would have.” Instead, it becomes “the conversation we will have.” But it is never going to be.
How could our spouse miss the logic, the clear reason that plays so well in our own minds? Because your spouse’s mind is also interpreting and having an internal dialogue, but from a different perspective.
#6. Understand that the OTHER person is trying Hard too
Given the life situation, background, and experiences, people respond to whatever is happening to them in the best way they can.
We may not respond the way we would like, and others may not respond how we would like, but this does not negate the truth of this.
And there are two implications to this. First, we have to let ourselves off the hook.
While we can hold ourselves accountable and responsible, we don’t have to blame ourselves. If I decide to stop blaming myself, I stop being paralyzed.
If I take responsibility for my actions, I then have the power to make some changes.
Second, we have to give our spouses some room. If your spouse is doing the best he/she can (and be careful to manage that internal knee-jerk reaction that makes you want to say “No, he/she can do better”), then he/she deserves a little room, a little grace.
#7. Learn to FORGIVE
Not forgiving and keeping resentments is one of the biggest reasons for DIVORCE around the world.
We have somehow made forgiveness something that is unselfishly done for the other person. That is half the truth.
In reality, a majority of the time, forgiveness does more for the forgiver than the forgiven.
Often, the one who must be forgiven doesn’t even know there is an issue, so in that case, there is no benefit in forgiving for the forgiven.
And even when they know it, they may not even carry around the burden of not being forgiven as much as the forgiver carries the weight.
When you truly forgive, your anger and resentment naturally fall away. You see, resentment is merely anger we have refused to let go of.
For whatever reason, it seems important to hold onto it, even though it works like a weight upon our shoulders and erodes a relationship.
Forgiving lets us move forward. It allows us to start fresh. And for anyone stuck on the myth that forgiveness is giving permission to be hurt again, let that go!
I will STOP here and I believe this 7 powerful points will help you to cope up and deal with anger and resentment issues in your married life.
But before I stop I would love to add ONE CRITICAL point which is: You may think you are just being logical and reasonable. But if you try to convince a spouse to work on your marriage, you will get resistance.
If you are emotional and upset, pleading with a spouse, same thing. Your spouse will resist. Ultimately which leads to anger and resentment issues.
BUT, and this is important: you do NOT have to give up and walk away.
This is a method that addresses the underlying issues and dynamics of a marriage in trouble. And then, it heals the underlying issues of the broken marriage.
Will it work for you? This program has been used by over 71,500 couples throughout the world. There are over 500 reviews on the website, earning it 4.5 out of 5 stars.
It provide guidance on getting started. And you can use it by yourself. You can be the "Lone Ranger" in the process, winning over a spouse without coercion.
Why does it work? Because it addresses a universal factor of humans and what we need. You just have to tap back into it.
If Convincing hasn't worked, and Giving Up is not in your plans, GIVE IT A TRY.
