Alyssa Luboff, PhD

Many of us were taught as children to hold in our anger and to hide it. We didn’t feel safe to embrace our emotions or to express our truths. Many of us believed – and still do – that our anger is bad and hurts people. So, we hold it in, often to protect those we love. This strategy becomes a sort of self-fulfilling prophecy. We hold in our anger as long as we can—like a balloon that we’re filling with more and more hot air—until it just can’t possibly hold any more.

Here’s a variation on a familiar saying: Life is what happens while you’re trying to get your work done. For many of us, balancing the demands of work and relationships feels impossible. These can be relationships with parents, partners, children, friends, and also ourselves. What we need to do to make a living feels at odds with the art of living itself—that is, the art of cultivating healthy connection with ourselves and others.

You may think from the title that this post is about being selfish or taking advantage of people. It’s actually about learning to love more. And it’s not written for sadists or manipulators; it is for caretakers and codependent types. We each have different styles of loving, and with them comes different healing work to do. This work is for those who love so deeply, so selflessly, at times, it seems, that they cannot bear the thought of hurting those they love the most.