Deborah Rue Therapy PLLC

Okay all you nice people out there, get ready for an uncomfortable truth.
Anger is a healthy emotion.
That's right. Anger is one of the basic emotions that humans are designed to experience. Too often, anger is mismanaged, and gets a bad rap because of the harm that mismanagement creates. It can be confusing to figure out how to experience anger without causing harm to our relatonships or to ourselves. We often either blast someone with our anger, or we stuff it deep down inside of ourselves. Both of these attempts to manage our anger create problems in our relationships. So we often believe that anger is somehow a bad emotion, and then we feel stuck with how to move through our anger.
In the next several days, we will explore how to move through anger without causing others or ourselves harm.

Civility is rooted in a belief that ALL people have value. That means we can be in relationship with those who think differently than us. It is not a threat to our worth when someone disagrees with us. From the lens of civility, it is more important to show respect for the person than prooving your point. Both your own and the other person's points of view matter. Nobody has to be shut down, minimized or devalued because they think differently than you. Likewise, you get to have your point of view, even if it is unpoplular. Civility creates room to be curious about someone else's ideas.