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Comment by 2devnull | Hacker News Reader

The world is nothing but edge cases. Expressing anger requires cooperation. If someone doesn’t want to listen, and you express anger at them anyway, is it not abuse?

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I appreciate you pointing this out. If we force someone to listen to our anger, we can see it as abuse. If we force someone to suppress their anger, we can see it as normal. It's almost as if we might normalize suppression and demonize expression.

And it's not just anger. If I want to express verbal affection towards someone and they don't want to hear it, we often call it abuse. But if they want me to suppress verbal affection towards them and I don't want to, we celebrate it as them having boundaries.

And I think sometimes being forced to not say something can hurt as much as being forced to hear something, yet we don't seem to see how it harms people.

That depends on whether they're a legitimate object of your anger. If someone injures you and then ignores your complaints, no it's not abuse to be angry with them.

I mean I think it depends on how the anger surfaces to determine whether its abuse. Yelling and screaming and throwing things, absolutely. But the reason we're scared of anger is because we don't know how to communicate and express it in a healthy way.

But you can also process anger solo with the right tools, or with a good therapist that doesn't shame anger. It doesn't always have to involve another person.

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