Walking on Egshells: Living with a Resentful, Angry, or Emotionally Abusive Partner

Writen by Steven Stosny

It’s not breaking the eggs that does the lasting harm; it’s the continual walking eggshells. Emotional damage has a way of lingering in the times between resentful, angry, or abusive flare-ups. The empty, dull ache of unhappiness is most accurately measured in the accumulative effect of these small moments of disconnection, isolation, and dread. Take the

The following quiz reveals what it feels like to walk on eggshells day after day. Read it aloud - the objectivity in hearing your own voice say the words - especially your answers -is the first step toward healing.

If you live with a resentful, angry, or abusive partner, you probably have a vague feeling, at least now and then, that you have lost yourself. In your constant efforts to tiptoe around someone else’s moods in the hope of avoiding blow-ups, put-downs, criticism, sighs of disapproval, or cold shoulders, you constantly edit what you say. You second-guess your own judgment, your own ideas, and your own preferences about how to live. You begin to question what you think is right and wrong. Ultimately, your perceptions of reality and your very sense of self change for the worse.

The cold fact is that it’s hard not to lose yourself in the morass of what you should say or what you need to do (to keep things peaceful) and how you’re supposed to be at any given moment. If you have to be one thing one minute and behave a different way in another (depending on your partner’s moods), your confidence and sense of self can seem to disappear. You begin to feel that you cannot reclaim yourself or begin to feel better until he changes and starts treating you better.

The understandable but tragic expectation that you are dependent on him for your emotional well being is the first thing you must change. You must heal and grow, whether or not he changes. Although our inborn sense of fairness and justice tells you that he ought to be the one to make changes, your pain tells you that you need to become the fully alive person you are meant to be. This means that you have to remove the focus from him and put it squarely on you. Happily, that is also the best thing you can do the help him and your relationship. This book will help you reclaim your true sense of self. That is its primary goal. But it will also help change your relationship.

All the tools you need to heal are in these pages. All the tools that he needs to replace resentment, anger, or abusive behavior with compassion are also in these pages. The first part of the book is about reintegrating your deepest values into your everyday sense of self. This will make you feel more valuable, confident, and powerful, regardless of what your partner — or anyone else — says or does. As you read these pages and reconnect to your deepest values, you will naturally, forcefully, and compassionately demand value and respect from your partner. Your compassionate demand for change is likely to be the only thing that will motivate him to once again be the man you married. But whether or not he changes, you must connect with your enormous inner value, resources, and personal power to stop walking on eggshells and to emerge as the richly creative, beautiful whole person you truly are.

The Worst Things

One of the worst things that can happen to your health and happiness is to live with a resentful, angry, or abusive partner. The worst thing you can do to your soul is become a resentful, angry, or abusive partner. And the worst thing you can develop in a love relationship is an identity as a victim, which destroys your personal power and solid sense of self. The cry I hear over and over again from women who walk on eggshells is, “I don’t like the resentful, angry person he’s made me.”

To stop walking on eggshells, you must overcome abusiveness and victim-identity. Your emphasis must be on healing, growth, and empowerment. The true issue at stake is your core value - the most important things about you as a person - not his behavior or your reaction to it. As you reinforce and reconnect with your core value, you are far less likely to be a victim. As you experience the enormous depth of your core value, the last thing you will want to do is identify with being a victim, i.e. with “damage” or with bad things that have happened to you. In your core value you will identify with your inherent strengths, talents, skills, and power as a unique, ever-growing, competent, and compassionate person. You want to outgrow walking on eggshells, not simply survive it, and you do that only by realizing your fullest value as a person.

You Both Walk on Eggshells

If you feel that you are walking on eggshells, you probably do not realize that your partner is, too, though in a different way. He is so reactive to you and so unable to regulate his reactions that he constantly expects you to say or do something that will “push his buttons” and “make” him withdraw or attack. He feels that you are totally in control of his emotions, and all he can do is pout or shout like a defiant child. He feels that you control him.

The Pendulum of Pain

Please do not make the mistake of thinking that you can heal yourself simply by getting in touch with your understandable resentment and anger and leaving your relationship. Most of the women who leave (or nearly leave) out of resentment and anger end up returning out of guilt, shame, and anxiety, when they see how lost their husbands seem without them. They enjoy a brief honeymoon period following the reunion, until the tension returns and the resentment and anger get overwhelming. So they leave again (or withdraw emotionally from their husbands), only to face renewed guilt, shame, and abandonment anxiety, once the resentment and anger subside. Sometimes economic considerations drive women to return to these relationships, but they are not the most compelling factor. Research shows that women with means return to walking-on-eggshells relationships as often as women who are financially dependent. My own mother, like many of my clients, was the sole support of our family, yet she returned to my unemployed, resentful, angry, and abusive father 13 times in my first 11 years of life.

This pattern of leaving (or nearly leaving) out of anger and resentment, only to return out of guilt, shame, and anxiety is a hallmark of walking on eggshells. I call it a pendulum of pain. It has nothing to do with your “indecisiveness” or your personality. It follows from the strengths of your emotions, from your attachment to your husband, which we’ll explore more in the next chapter. Resentment and anger at loved ones always resolve into guilt, shame, and abandonment anxiety. These painful, completely irrational emotions keep you attached to your husband no matter how bad the relationship is - these emotions developed in our brains at a time when to leave the tribe meant certain death on your own, by starvation or saber tooth tiger.

As long as you love someone, the only way to keep resentment and anger from turning to guilt, shame, and anxiety is to stay resentful and angry all the time. It might be safer if you did stay resentful and angry all the time, but that is probably not your nature. When your resentment subsides and your anger is exhausted, the pain of seeing someone you love in distress can become overwhelming and make you return to your now-remorseful, if not helpless, partner. However, if he does not learn to regulate his resentment, anger, or abusive behavior with compassion for himself and for you, the pendulum will swing back and forth, again and again.

Dr. Steven Stosny has demonstrated his highly successful recovery program on such national television programs as “The Oprah Winfrey Show,” “CBS Sunday Morning,” and CNN’s “Talkback Live” and “Anderson Cooper 360″ and has appeared on numerous radio talk shows. He has been quoted by, or been the subject of articles in, The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Washington Times, Chicago Tribune, U.S. News & World Report, The Wall Street Journal, Esquire, Cosmopolitan, Seventeen, Mademoiselle, Women’s World, O, The Oprah Magazine, Psychology Today, AP, Reuters, and USA Today. His website is http://compassionpower.com

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Is Anger Beating You Up?

Writen by Sonia Brill

On a soft leather couch in a warmly lit room, a middle-aged husband finally says to the counselor, “I pushed her into the wall. I ‘lost it.’ The yelling and constant fighting over small things have to stop.”

An executive from a major telecom company complains that he is tired of the politics and pressures from upper management to make employees meet unreasonable deadlines. His wife says he needs to quit the job and get help because “his job is our life.”

A 40-year-old man is charged with beating his wife.

A 15-year-old girl is asked to seek counseling for making threats to a classmate.

An employee is put on probation for screaming at her boss.

In the movie Anger Management, Jack Nicholson uses a golf club to transform the hood of another driver’s car.

All of us have been hereangryat one point or another. These people are trying to navigate their complex feelings of stress and anger. Anger can be one of the most frightening and complicated emotions we experience. For some, anger can be a seething cauldron that explodes if the conditions are ripe. For others, anger is not a loud, spectacular expression but a chronically irritable and grumpy disposition.

Easily angered people don’t always curse and throw things; sometimes they withdraw socially, sulk, or get physically ill. People who have explosions of anger land themselves in trouble, enough to find themselves behind bars or charged with restraining orders. Others lose their marriage or job over the mismanagement of anger.

It would behoove angry individuals to not seek help. Oftentimes, people only seek counseling or an anger management group once they are mandated to or if they are told to get help. However, with anger management books, CDs, DVDs, and classes popping up everywhere, who knows what works? It’s a multi-million-dollar industry, colorfully packaged for consumers to be served by a host of entrepreneurs and experts who are anxious to teach the secrets of self-control.

George Anderson, president of Anderson & Anderson, a Los Angeles-based anger management firm and consultant for the movie Anger Management, has contracts with court systems, colleges, and hospitals across the country. “It should be a class,” he says.

Anderson, the first global anger management/executive coaching training provider, identifies that there are differences in programs as well as practices.

Today, many “practitioners” call themselves anger management counselors. Some of them hold degrees in psychology, to practice professionally, with varying skilled proficiency; others have business degrees and claim to have the answers to anger management.

Counseling Might Not Work

For many people, though, an anger management group or counseling does not work. Part of the problem is that anger management is a term that has become the panacea and is used to encompass a variety of techniques. Many groups or sessions are based on the group therapy model that uses talk therapy to “talk out anger” or to be more “self-aware.” In this model, the premise is that participants can learn to recognize beforehand that they are about to “lose it.” Counselors also offer classes that draw on principals of meditation and relaxation techniques. Deep breathing is a wonderful way to relax. When angered, however, how do individuals start to breathe in through the nose and breathe out through the mouth if all they want to do is scream?

Anger management is different because it is not a psychiatric problem. Thus, the symptoms cannot be managed with a pill or through counseling. Anger is a primitive emotiona feeling of displeasureand it is accompanied by physical changes in the body. We learn early to respond to anger unconsciously through the dynamics of our families. What we don’t learn is that anger is a secondary emotion, which means a certain feeling or feelings precede anger.

Anger Management Works

If management of anger can be learned, it also can be unlearned. Anger management is a systemic set of skills for re-socialization and deep transformation around the anger. Knowing the Anderson & Anderson methodology and incorporating it into a rich format offers participants a means to an end. It can work and does work. George Anderson discovered that an anger management program has certain components. If tightly woven together, the program offers participants the kernels of knowledge for true anger management.

Most of us know the risks of not getting help. Sometimes, however, we fool ourselves into believing that there won’t be that “next episode.” Anger can be a tricky emotion to manage. We can delude ourselves into thinking that the poor expression of anger was justified.

When It Is Time to Get Help

If it is time to do something about anger, then know the differences in the programs. First, ask questions and find out if your provider is trained, certified, and licensed in a mental health profession. Second, ask the provider if he or she is certified as a trained facilitator of anger management.

If your anger is getting the best of you, consider The 7 R’s of Managing Anger*:

Recognize that you are angry.
Release stress.
Relax.
Remember to take care of yourself.
Recharge yourself by being around people who are positive and loving.
Reshape your perception about the situation that is causing anger.
Rectify your mistakes and forgive the mistakes of others.

* - Copyright pending

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