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.

I recently started watching _Boston Legal_ on Sunday nights, because Candice Bergen had joined cast. (She joined cast so that more people like me would start watching _Boston Legal_ on Sunday nights.) Like most Candice Bergen fans, I mainly associate her with her character on _Murphy Brown:_ tough, smart, funny, sharp, no-punches-pulled, slightly over-the-top, and definitely not someone you want to have angry with you. Even _Vogue_ editor she played for a few episodes of _Sex and City_ fit this mold.

While I'm certainly enjoying watching her on _Boston Legal,_ it's been an interesting challenge for me, because character she plays, Shirley Schmidt, is different from Murphy Brown. I expected her to be playing a larger-than-life version of her usually type. Instead, we're shown a very different Candice Bergen, and I'm noticing that even after three episodes, I'm still having to adjust my expectations.

Shirley Schmidt does embody all of strong qualities that Candice Bergen's characters are famous for: brilliant, no-nonsense, sharp and canny. But she's also much softer and more compassionate than I expect from her characters. This new character is still Candice Bergen, but she's a far more subtle and nuanced Candice Bergen than I expected.

I realized this after first episode. And yet, I still expect her to behave in way she did in Murphy Brown. I expect her confrontation scenes to be bigger and louder and broader, and I don't expect to see her character as a layered and multi-faceted person.

This is creating a certain amount of strain on my relationship with Candice Bergen. I'm having to alter my expectations of how she behaves, and who she appears to be as a person.

Sadly, I don't actually have a personal relationship with Candice Bergen. I simply have same relationship to her that millions of other television fans do. But even in this one-sided relationship, I still have safety and validation needs, and this change in her character is disrupting those needs. The fact that she has evolved, that she is playing a different character requires me to adjust my expectations and redefine my relationship with her, and this makes me feel less safe in our relationship.

(At this point, in interest of avoiding a restraining order, let me state that I am only using Candice Bergen as an illustration.)

In Hollywood, actors are, often arbitrarily, assigned a "type." We see an actor in a certain role, and identify her with that role. The stronger identification, harder it is for us to accept her in different roles. Actors constantly struggle against "typecasting," because once they're seen as a certain "type," they find it more difficult to be cast in roles that differ from this "type."

Jim Carrey, for example, is a fine dramatic actor; however, it's taken him many years (and a number of baby steps) to be able to be accepted in more serious roles, and audiences still relate to him best when he's being a clown.

But typecasting doesn't just happen in Hollywood. We also encounter typecasting in our family relationships.

For most of us, we first experience typecasting because we're ones being typecast. Our families have an uncanny knack for not recognizing how much we've evolved and matured as individuals. No matter what our accomplishments, no matter how much we've achieved, our parents and siblings invariably remember us as we were in our most memorable (and usually our least favorite) role from our childhood.

When we spend time with our families as adults, we struggle against this typecasting. We try, in increasingly less subtle ways, to get our families to recognize and relate to us for who we are, rather than for who we were. It's an ongoing struggle--one that we seem to lose more often than we win, reverting to type and playing out our well-established roles in family drama long after we believe we've outgrown them.

What we rarely notice while we're feeling typecast ourselves, is that we're making same typecasting assumptions about our family members. We're so concerned that our family members notice how much we've changed and evolved that we don't take time to notice how our family members have also grown.