Counseling -

What Happens When Women

Stuff Their Unacceptable Feelings

There are feelings that are unacceptable for people, some based on gender, some based on family training. Couples get into real trouble when they begin to critique their mate without understanding where they themselves are coming from.

The most common unacceptable feeling for women is still, after all these years, anger. The old adage about nice girls “not getting angry” remains deeply engrained in the psyche of millions of grown women.

The expression of anger is not nearly as big of a problem for men to communicate as it is for women. As a result, men can many times do a much better job of expressing their anger because their not afraid of getting rejected for doing so.

Unfortunately, many women won’t share their feelings of anger for fear of being seen in a negative light. Instead of sharing their angry feelings, they often try to ignore them and in many cases, stuff them. Stuffing feelings of anger can be one the most destructive coping mechanisms known to humanity.

Efforts to stuff feelings of anger convey a message to the brain that it is wrong to feel such things. When a person, a woman in this case, stuffs down her feelings of anger, they don’t go away but gestate and take on a life of their own. If she has been even remotely honest with a friend or counselor regarding her angry feelings, she knows how powerful they can feel.

For a girl who has not had much practice managing feelings of anger, she can become something of a ticking time bomb in her marriage relationship. Sound relationship counseling strategies can help her to see the impact her repressed anger is having upon her husband and children.

In order to gain the confidence a woman needs to address her feelings of anger, she needs to remind herself that all feelings are in fact neutral. What this means: is that there is no actual value attached to any particular feeling, be it good or bad. Many people have been taught the erroneous belief that some feelings are “good” and some are “bad.”

Dealing with anger successfully requires practice, with the goal of expressing it without blasting other people in the process. The worst thing an angry person can do is to go off half cocked and cause more problems than they could ever hope to solve by sharing their angry feelings in an accusatory manner. Never blame another person for what you’re feeling; your thoughts and feelings belong to you and no other person.