Anger can be all of these things. But anger is also useful, necessary and even healing. We need our anger. We simply need to learn how to express our anger in appropriate, conscious, supportive ways. On its own, anger is neither good nor bad. It can be used to hurt, or it can be used to heal. It may not be a particularly pleasant emotion, but it's an important one. And anger-or rather skillful use and understanding of anger-is essential to creating healthy relationships.

Guy Williams, a friend of mine who also happens to be a minister of Religious Science offers a tremendously insightful approach for understanding anger. Guy says that anger arises from a communication not delivered or an expectation not met. Anger is actually a tertiary response: our initial responses are grief and fear. First, we grieve death of expectation that was not met. Next, we fear that things will never change. Finally, we experience anger.

So few of us recognize that anger can be a positive, healing response. When we allow ourselves to experience anger, it focuses our minds, and strengthens our resolve. We discover reserves of strength and power. Our anger is what gives us courage and power to confront our fear that things will never change, by creating change.

So many of us equate anger with aggression. We believe that when we experience anger, someone will be hurt. In order to create a more spiritual and skillful relationship with anger, it's helpful to recognize that we can defend ourselves without attacking.

Consider that we each carry a sword. When someone crosses a boundary, we experience anger (because our expectation that our boundaries will be respected was not met). At this point, we have a choice. We can choose to use our sword to attack, lashing out at person who crossed boundary. This will inevitably violate our partner's boundaries, and make our partner feel unsafe and angry. They will, in turn, pull out their sword and begin to attack us in earnest. The result is a classic "lose-lose" scenario, where both participants are wounded and feel less safe than they did at start.

We do have another choice, however. We can choose to use our sword to defend our boundary by simply removing it from its sheath and displaying it. Brandishing our metaphorical weapon is usually more than sufficient to hold attention of person who crossed boundary. Once we have our partner's attention, we can calmly make them aware that they have crossed a boundary, and ask that they take a step back and respect that boundary in future.

Because we are merely defending ourselves and not attacking our partner, we are far less likely to make our partner feel unsafe, which in turn means our partner is far more likely to apologize for having unintentionally crossed a boundary. It's a "win-win" situation because we feel safe once again in expectation that our boundaries will, indeed, be respected, and our partner feels safe because they are now more aware of boundaries in relationship, and no longer need to fear that they will accidentally violate them.

If we choose not to take things personally, and always assume that boundary violation was unintentional, we not only avoid stepping into role of victim, but we also avoid need to forgive our partner, because we never blamed them in first place.

Avoiding blame, by way, is another way that we defend ourselves without attacking. When we blame someone for their actions, we are, in fact, attacking them. We cut them off from flow of our love. This makes them feel less safe, and frequently is interpreted as an attack. More importantly, when we blame someone, we reinforce lie that we are separate from All That Is, and cut ourselves off from universal flow.

So how is anger essential to healthy relationships? Anger is our call to awareness.