Good question, Stacey, And I may not have covered this anywhere in my papers. There are three principles involved, I think. 1) your health, 2) your partner's capacity ro learn and witess, 3) avoiding building secrecy between you two. 1) For your health's sake you probably need to express the emotions around the issues you are talking about. I did. However, as a kid I was roundly discouraged from such healthy behavior - even told that such a healthy behavior was un-healthy. Wow, were my parents poorly trained in emotional expression and the clash between my normal strongly emotional body and their "parenting" was sad. I think all of us need to learn how to appropriately express our emotions a) to lead us toward health and b) to promote empathic relating in society by not threatening each other. Finding a "teacher" who will support you learning to express your emotions safely may be a challenge. A "good counselor" should be a help. Seek people who celebrate emotions as part of life. (I spent 10 years in Orgone Therapy to help me.) 2) Your partner may be more or less trained at emotional expression. Could be your partner is scared of emotions. Thus he (I'm assuming) will eventually need some re-education about emotions. You may be the person he's brought into his life to open up this training program - i.e. to have a good relationship with you he has to learn. But you may not be the best teacher for him. But learning takes time and doesn't proceed well when people are panicked. And so the principle I have learned is that people do not have to witness your emotional expression if it scares them. You need to do it. They don't have to be present - at least at first and until they want to. Eventually, witnessing your expression, done safely, may become part of their learning path. 3) I believe it best for people to reduce, over time, the stuff they hide or withhold from each other. The goal is to share everything - eventually. And to make progress on this. The goal is more and more trust and more and more intimacy. So, putting it all together, what does it look like if you have a bunch of emotional stuff to express and such expression scares your partner and if you go away to express it then it may appear like secrecy? The solution is to "report" to each other on progress using dialogue. If you get a counselor who helps you express rage or grief, etc., make sure you tell your partner enough about it to make it interesting but not scary. "Hey, hun, I got so mad that I pounded on a pillow for 15 minutes before I got tired. It took that long. I felt so much better afterwards." The goal of all this is to share with each other, in dialogue, everything, while at times taking breaks from each other. This is a bit like one person going to work, a work the other doesn't like, and still coming home and reporting on the work-stuff. No surprises. Hope this helps.