There are 8 faces in my Many Faces of Anger. Of these there is only two that I call genuine anger. One of these is Righteous Anger.
 
Righteous Anger teaches you to find the power of your own truth. I also call this justified anger. It is anger that is grounded in our personal truth. Many people are not aware that they carry personal truths within them. In my classes many participants didn’t know their own truths until these truths were crossed, and became angry at themselves because they didn’t stand up for them.
 
Personal truths are part of who we are and who we have always been. They arise naturally in us in childhood when our truth is denied by those around us. You can say a child’s first experience of real rage is in defense of their own truth. Later we may think about our personal truth as bottom lines.
 
The important things to know about bottom lines are:

• We all have them. They are based in our individual experiences and our earliest sense of Justice
• We may not know that we have them until someone crosses one
• When a person crosses our bottom line it usually changes the relationship we have with them in some way. Some people experience that a betrayal or a death has happened. Unless the subject is raised and dealt with, these feelings don’t go away. They go underground and manifest in subtle or overt ways that may not seem to have anything to do with the original event
• We always punish the person who crosses our bottom line although we may not be aware that is what we are doing. Punishment may look like passive aggression, or chronic disappointment, or unexplained rage
• Because of this it is important to get to know our bottom lines and to make them explicit both to ourselves and those in our circles. I call the explicit bottom line: a Righteous Anger statement.

 
When our truth is not acknowledged we develop self-doubt. This creates what I call a “moving” bottom line: we give someone an “ultimatum” and then don’t follow through. “Do this one more time and you’re out!” is one of those lines that get repeated so many times it loses meaning. This does not mean there is no truth underneath it — our words acknowledge that a threshold has been crossed. Whether we are conscious of it or not, we all have bottom lines.
 
And whether or not we express it, once someone has crossed one of our bottom lines, something changes inside of us towards that person which we can never seem to repair. That is because bottom lines have their roots in our early development. They showed up when we observed behaviors in the people around us that we vowed to never accept within ourselves or in our world. They emerge as core values which we carry throughout our life. They are reflected in the way we treat the people around us, as if we were signaling to others the way we desire to be treated.
 
For example a child who experiences the pain of being lied to can make an inner vow to never tolerate dishonesty. In later years they discover a friend has concealed something and they feel a serious breach of trust. In fact their friend might not consider what they did to be that serious, and so they might be shocked at the degree of the response.
 
Once I saw a client who as a child of nine had been kept waiting outside the schoolyard for a half day before someone remembered to pick him up. That day their father had died and no one remembered the child. I only learned this because I arrived late to a session. At the time I apologized and they said not to worry. But the following session my client said to me: “After you were late last session I almost never came back to see you.” It was then they told me this story and I understood I had crossed a bottom line. Both of us had underestimated the impact of my lateness. Fortunately there was a chance to rebuild faith, to negotiate clear contracts around lateness and communication should that occur again.
 
In my counseling practice I meet couples who cannot seem to forgive one another no matter how much they appear motivated to do so. Something may have happened years before and one partner believed it was resolved while the other could not gain back the feelings of love or trust. This is why I call these the non-negotiables. A bottom line was crossed. These are the things that no matter how much therapy or personal growth we do, and no matter how much we love someone, we cannot give them up.
 
As long as there is love, most of the other things that couples fight about are negotiable. As humans we are far more flexible than we like to think. The hidden minefield in relationships are the things we rarely make explicit and known until it is too late and someone has crossed the point of no return with us. In long-term relationships it is possible to forgive one another if we agree that the bottom lines that were crossed were not made explicit in the beginning. The agreements begin with a new “now.”
 
Making bottom lines explicit is a kind of contract and it depends upon letting go of the past. This means building new faith and trust in one another, based on consistency and communication. I counsel couples to be up front with their bottom lines, to each make a list of those things that – if they occur – could end this relationship. Then I ask them to share their lists and discuss them. Not always will one person be happy or tolerant with the bottom lines of another, but with good will the most creative solutions are found.
 
Sometimes my students think that telling someone you have bottom lines is the same as asking them to sacrifice their needs for yours which is something they never want to do. I say it depends entirely on the way you tell them. My old friend Jack Schwartz used to say that a relationship is like a flowerpot where you plant two seeds. Some time later these grow and suddenly you have a sunflower and a marigold – not the same flower at all. After a while the sunflower says to the marigold “Why are you so small?” and the marigold says to the sunflower “You’re so stuck up!” Whether you are the sunflower or the marigold can you support one another to be the best sunflower and the best marigold you can be?
 
Creating a Righteous Anger Statement
I teach this to my students in order for them to be able to make their bottom lines explicit, first of all to themselves, secondly to others. A Righteous Anger statement will help you to connect with your bottom line and enable you to feel the power of anger to shift you out of feeling like a victim.
 
You create your Righteous Anger statements using the following format:
“If you want to be my friend (or variations such as “to work with me” or “to be with me.”) there is something you have to know. Don’t ever (place the bottom line such as “don’t talk about me behind my back” here) because that was done to me in childhood. And I don’t want it anymore.”
 
Write down as many of these as you can think of. Say them out loud. Notice how you feel as you say one? Set a challenge for yourself to express at least one of these to a close friend or colleague. Make sure to stick around for their response. Any surprises?
 
Copyright 2016 Jay Tropianskaia