In a relationship, anger can have destructive effects. A relationship expert especially a marriage counselor must look for effective techniques to deal with anger to help married couples to build and strengthen a caring, fulfilling and enduring relationship. Rage can have negative repercussions whether it is repressed anger or expressed. In repressed anger, it could have devastating results and could pave the way to an empty, relationship. Whenever a person’s resentment is turned within, it manifests as depression. For illustration purposes, we’ll give one example. Imagine that a person has an elder brother or sister that was so antagonistic and violent during their younger days and as an effect, was consistently being punished harshly.

The person associated expressing anger with being punished and so he developed repressed anger and try to hide it from their families and in their latter life, from their spouses. This same person ended up playing "the good child" role during their childhood who never really raised a ruckus or fuss about anything and everything. Although this may serve a purpose during childhood, later in life this condition would become so harmful and produce negative results in a relationship. On the other hand, in expressed anger, it could make the person on the receiving end feeling devastated although there is no actual physical harm inflicted.

An intriguing occurrence is that the individual who demonstrated the outburst automatically feels hurt. For that reason when we cause pain on our partners, we too, hurt ourselves in the process. This is due to the happenings of our unconscious thoughts that discern our actions as directed toward ourselves. Consequently, married partners have a tough time developing intimacy simply because their safety may feel threatened. Then, it shows that rage has a crucial negative result on a partnership. The persistent repressing of antagonism may stretch and extend itself to the individual feeling and thinking that they will also restrain their forms of excitement like their sexuality because this elevated energy and activity felt threatening.

The antagonism, if turned inward and resulted to depression may left the person’s partner feeling under appreciated, not satisfied and may probably look for fulfillment of desires outside the relationship. An expert like a marriage counselor can save a troubled marriage to assist the person with repressed anger get in touch and deal with their pain and resentment, and express it in a harmless way in a supportive environment. For the majority of us, we learned during our younger days that it is a bad thing to be angry and we were criticized and punished for expressing it. We were left with the alternative to keep it inside where it would not do us or anybody harm or let it loose, express our resentment and face the music.

However, if we choose to diminish our fury, we also choose to diminish our ability to love because love and anger are twin sides of the same coin. Containment is a series of steps that lets us release our anger without afflicting our loved ones. A therapist could help someone to let go of anger in small controlled amounts to help turn it back to its positive life-giving form.