You Don't Have to Take it Anymore Turn Your Resentful, Angry, or Emotionally Abusive Relationship into a Compassionate, Loving One

Introduction: The Hidden Epidemic This book will teach you how to heal a specific kind of unhappiness that occurs in relationships -- the unhappiness that comes from resentment, anger, or emotional abuse. It will also teach you how to prevent unhappiness. In treating some 4,500 clients over the years, I have been struck by one fact: Even though couples are unhappy for hundreds of different reasons, my primary target of treatment for all of them is more or less the same -- the resentment they all feel. Not depression, anxiety, anger, or abuse -- just plain, ordinary resentment. Because all treatment also aims to prevent relapses, the strategies I use to prevent unhappiness are ultimately the same as those I use to treat advanced stages of it. Whether I am treating an unhappy couple or trying to keep one from veering into chronic unhappiness, whether I am attempting to undo an entrenched pattern of abusive behavior or trying to keep a dangerous one from developing, my primary target is always their resentment. None of the many different kinds of unhappiness can improve in the face of constant resentment. If you suffer from resentment or live with a resentful man, you will one day have an unhappy marriage, if you do not already. If this sounds like your situation, this book is for you. If your partner is resentful, he will almost certainly have occasional angry outbursts and, sooner or later, engage in some form of emotional abuse. Once he crosses that line, you are at a much higher risk of getting pushed, grabbed, shoved, slapped, or worse, especially if he has been violent in the past or if he grew up in a violent family. While it's true that not every resentful person becomes angry, emotionally abusive, or violent, it's also true that every angry, abusive, and violent person starts out with resentment. If this sounds like your husband, the Boot Camp section at the end of this book is for him. Conscious Intention versus Motivation If you live with a resentful, angry, or abusive partner, you know that he often gets worse if you show that you're hurt. "I'm not trying to hurt you," he might say, "I'm just pointing out facts." Although there is some denial of responsibility here, he really is confounded by your normal response to his behavior. He confuses conscious intention with unconscious motivation. Conscious intention is the goal -- what we try to do with a given behavior. For instance, your husband might have a goal of discussing a budget with you. But if he feels devalued in any way, by anything at all -- the bills, the kids, his job -- his unconscious motivation may be to devalue you, by implying that you are stupid or irresponsible for not seeing the issue exactly like he does. It's an unconscious motivation, by which I mean he's not aware of it. So when you react with hurt or defensiveness, he accuses you of evading the facts. Resentful behavior is certainly different from abusiveness, and both differ from just being angry. You can definitely have one or two of these three relationship demons without the others. But the deeper, unconscious motivation of all three emotional states is to devalue -- to lower the value of the other person, either by dismissing, avoiding, or attacking. And the devaluer does this even though he may still love his wife. Examples of devaluing behavior are stonewalling, criticizing, belittling, and implying superiority. And devaluing can be implied by tone even when the words seem to be positive. You can say, "I love you," for instance, with an inflection that implies that, "You're not worthy of the love I'm giving you." Devaluing behavior can often be barely perceptible in the tone of a voice, or a closed-off body posture or facial expression, or a silent disregard. Not surprisingly, all three demons -- resentment, anger, and abuse -- damage theStosny, Steven is the author of 'You Don't Have to Take it Anymore Turn Your Resentful, Angry, or Emotionally Abusive Relationship into a Compassionate, Loving One', published 2005 under ISBN 9780743284691 and ISBN 0743284690.