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→Anger and its consequences
*'''Anger is easy:''' For people who are emotionally bottled up, the emotions involved in the grieving process can be extremely challenging to process. Both sadness and love can be difficult to acknowledge and deal with, particularly when feeling those emotions is associated with a sense of vulnerability or a loss of face. As a result, anger can be the easiest emotion to deal with. It's certainly a lot less painful to experience.
Apart from slowing down the grieving process, anger inevitably delays the resolution of the legal issues that come from the end of a relationship. An enraged person isn't going to be able to negotiate since negotiation involves making concessions; an enraged person is mostly going to want to litigate. People in this state of mind make threats like "I'm going to take you for everything you've got," or "you'll never see the children again." They will 'll also tell their lawyers that "it doesn't matter what it <span class="noglossary">costs</span> or whether I'm likely to lose, it's the principle of the thing!"
Sometimes these threats come true, and the consequences to both parties can be enormous.
*Someone who takes an unreasonable position out of anger will almost certainly lose, but in carrying out their crusade they risk draining all of the family's assets to fund the litigation.*Rage can permanently impair a couple's relationship with one another. Where there are no children, this may not be a problem, but where there are children this can be disastrous. If you are both going to remain meaningfully involved in your children's lives, you ''must'' be able to develop a civil relationship with each other. !
*People can jump to ridiculous conclusions by expecting the worst from their former partner, leading to conflict after conflict, and court application after court application. Redness on the buttocks of a toddler becomes evidence of molestation, rather than simple diaper rash.
*Rage can trigger "affidavit wars," in which each person makes overly-inflated claims about the purported evils of the other. Minor events are exaggerated beyond all proportion. The costly "war" is triggered because the other party is put to the burden of addressing each inflated bizarre claim. Very Making things worse, people are rarely is a party able to refrain from making reciprocal claims about the misconduct of the other: in retaliation. "You said I drink all the time? Actually, I only drink socially, but you smoked pot when you were pregnant." What is 's a judge to make of claims like these?*Anger can strip you of your ability to see common sense and lead you to adopt positions that are objectively unreasonable and doomed to fail. In the process of failing, however, you can expect to spend a lot of money and further in in worsen your relationship with your former partner.
Rage, as Dr. Emery and others observe, is a symptom of unresolved grief. Whatever the <span class="noglossary">cause</span>, failing to move beyond anger can be poisonous to you, to your former partner, to your children, and to your relationship with your children. Some counselling, whether by yourself or with your former partner, can be critical in moving forward and out of anger.
