Using Anger's Power Safely

 

 
Rage-a-holic reproduced from Art of Healing with the permission of the copyright owner, Linda Ness.  
 

Anger's Awesome Power 

Most of us have had the experience of hearing ourselves say things in anger only to later wonder where those monsters that came out of our mouths came from! Or worse, we've done things in anger that we later regretted. 

As discussed last week, feelings of anger are natural and offer us a valuable source of power to help us heal or make other accomplishments and our responses to anger (losing control or harnessing the anger to accomplish something worthwhile, for example) are learned responses. Because our responses are learned, we can learn new responses if our current responses leave us feeling ashamed, guilty or unhappy, cause the destruction of our relationships, jeopardize our employment or otherwise cause problems for us.

The first step to leashing these monsters inside and harnessing their power is identifying when, in fact we feel angry. Have you identified the physical signs of your own anger that we talked about in Anger - Part I: Identifying Anger? If not, take the time to do so now.

In addition to the physical signs of anger, there are behavioral signs to help us identify when we feel angry. They include speaking louder or faster, becoming sarcastic, rationalizing our behavior, being argumentative, withdrawing, having fantasies about revenge, becoming violent, and engaging in or thoughts about engaging in addictive behavior (this can include compulsive gambling, sex, cleaning, drinking, drugging, eating, self-harm behaviors, shopping, etc.) What are your behavioral symptoms of anger? You can post a message about these on the Message Forum, talk about this with close friends or your therapist, or write about it in your journal.

Once you have learned to identify the physical signs and behavioral symptoms of your anger, the next step is learning to identify the cause of your anger so that you can decide what to do about the anger you are feeling. Of course, all of this requires that you learn to keep your cool so you can avoid making the situation worse and can think about these issues objectively!

Keeping Your Cool:

There are a number of strategies to help you keep your cool when you feel angry. My favorites are re-thinking, breathing deeply, taking a time out and using humor:

Rethinking the Situation - Sometimes, your anger is the result of a perceived threat to your safety or physical or emotional well-being rather than an actual threat. The problem may be because you misunderstood another person's intentions or misinterpreted their actions. Occasionally, you may think something happened or someone said something and feel angry about that only to find out later than what you thought happened or was said was untrue. When you are angry about something in a situation where you are not sure you know all the facts, it is helpful to remind yourself that you may be reacting to a situation that does not really exist. Also, when people are angry, they tend to think in highly exaggerated ways (e.g., "He always keeps me waiting!" -- is that really true? every single time?) The words "never" or "always" are excellent clues that can tip you off when you are thinking in an exaggerated way. Few things are "always" or "never" anything. If you focus on your feeling and express your own ownership of it (e.g., saying "I feel angry that he is late!", you may feel greater control over it.

Breathing Deeply - You can breathe deeply anywhere including in Court (where I often get very angry!) Deep breathing takes almost no special training or instruction and its completely free. See Breathing by Mediconsult.com, Better Health through Abdominal Breathing by Dennis Lewis, and Proper Breathing by Swami Vishnu-devananda for guidance on how to improve your breathing.

Taking a Time Out - Time outs are not just for children. Most parents and professionals who work with children are familiar with the use of a time out period to help children gain perspective and control when they are very angry or misbehaving. It is rather common today to find time out used in day care centers and other places that care for young children to help manage the children's behavior. Time out is every bit as an effective strategy for adults, too! My husband and I use time out when were are discussing something we disagree about if either of us feels that the situation is becoming too hostile. When one of us calls time out, we stop talking about that subject and, if at all possible, go to separate parts of the house for awhile. It is part of our agreement that we will talk about the subject again within 24 hours so that calling time out is not used as a method of avoiding a subject indefinitely. Sometimes, you are not in a situation where you can call "time out". In Getting Through the Day - Strategies for Adults Hurt as Children, Nancy J. Napier suggests:

A strategy that is particularly helpful when you get triggered and you can't go home and hide, when you simply have to keep working on whatever the day has required of you, is to excuse yourself to go to the bathroom. Rarely will anyone give you a hard time for "taking a bathroom break." Getting away by yourself can be just the thing you need to pull yourself together.

Napier states that the break can be used by survivors to help them reorient themselves into the present, nurture their inner child, calm themselves, and recenter.

Humor - Humor can be a great way of helping you keep your cool when you are so angry you are afraid you are going to lose it. Often, you can find something very funny in your thoughts or feelings or the situation.

'Silly humor' can help defuse rage in a number of ways. For one thing, it can help you get a more balanced perspective. When you get angry and call someone a name or refer to them in some imaginative phrase, stop and picture what that word would literally look like. if you're at work and you think of a co-worker as a 'dirt-bag' or a 'single-cell life form,' for example, picture a large bag full of dirt (or an amoeba) sitting at your colleagues desk, talking on the phone, going to meetings. Do this whenever a name comes into your head about another person. If you can, draw a picture of what the actual thing might look like. This will take a lot of the edge off your fury; and humor can always be relied on to help un-knot a tense situation...There are two cautions in using humor. First, don't try to just 'laugh off' your problems; rather, use humor to help yourself face them more constructively. Second, don't give in to harsh, sarcastic humor; that's just another form of unhealthy anger expression.
Controlling Anger -- Before it Controls You by the American Psychological Association

For more ideas on using humor to reduce stress and cope with anger, you may want to read Don't Get Mad, Get Funny! by Leigh Anne Jasheway and "Humor: an Antidote for Stress" by Patty Wooten, RN BSN CCRN.
 

Identifying the Reason(s) You Feel Anger:

In order to decide what to do about the anger you are feeling, it is important to know why you are feeling angry. In many cases, the reason why you are angry may be perfectly obvious: your boss just blamed you for someone else's mistake or a stranger just bumped into you knocking your groceries to the ground. However, in many cases, the reason for your anger (or the level of anger that is out of proportion to the present situation) is less obvious. For example, you may be tired, irritable, worried, afraid or under some other form of stress and find yourself reacting in a rage to something your child or significant other said that ordinarily would not have triggered your anger. I call this redirected anger.

Survivors are usually very familiar with redirected anger. Many survivors of domestic violence, for example, have been the target of an abuser's redirected anger and rage. Many survivors also have had the experience of reacting to a situation far more intensely than the situation warranted only to later realize that the situation reminded them of past abuse. The anger about the past abuse is sometimes too difficult to face directly and it gets redirected to a situation in the present.

Following are some questions from Anger Management in Sobriety by Thomas P. Hollander, Ph.D. to help you identify the cause of your anger:

  • What is the situation?
  • Who is involved?
  • Is this the first time or is this a pattern?
  • What other feelings are you experiencing?
  • Are you too stressed? Tired? Hungry? Lonely? Scared?

Some additional questions you can ask yourself are:

  • Do my feelings feel out of proportion to the current situation?
  • Does the present situation remind me of something else?
  • Before I became angry, did I feel something else (fear is the most common feeling that anger masks)? If so, what was that feeling?
  • Was I already annoyed or irritable before this situation developed?

After asking yourself these questions, you may have a much better idea of what is really causing you to feel angry. Once you know the cause of your anger, you can then think about proactive steps you might be able to take to change the situation that is causing you to feel the threat that led to the feelings of anger.

Deciding What to Do:

Now that you have identified your anger and why you are angry and kept your cool, it is time to decide what to do about the situation that made you angry. This is the key to using the power of anger safely and to using it in a way that helps you improve your life.

Stress Reduction, Relaxation, Meditation, and Exercise to Manage Misplaced or Redirected Anger - If the reasons why you are angry are chronic stress or worry or anger about past abuse, the best approach for managing the resulting anger is to use stress reduction, relaxation, mediation and exercise to prevent outbursts of anger or escalation of appropriate anger that is out of proportion to the situation. For a Free stress Quiz, take the Quiz For more information about stress management, see:

  1. Stress Management and Emotional Wellness Links
  2. How to Survive Unbearable Stress
  3. Behavioral Institute of Boston's On-Line Stress Workshop
  4. Stress Assess (additional stress evaluation tools)
  5. Stress Free Net
  6. Stress Management and Emotional Wellness Links
  7. Stress Management: A Review of Principles
  8. Virtual Psych

Writing a Letter - Another approach for dealing with anger about past abuse is to write a letter to the abuser telling him or her that you are angry and why you are angry. This letter could be once that is never sent (a strategy that is often necessary where the abuser is dead, his or her location is unknown or sending the letter would jeopardize the survivor's safety or well-being or the safety or well-being of others (e.g., a sibling or non-offending parent) that the survivor wishes to protect.

Avoiding or Escaping - If you get angry every time you drive to work because the traffic frustrates you, then consider riding with someone else, leaving earlier for work, or using public transportation. If the reason for your anger is the abusive conduct of another, the best solution may be to end that relationship.

Problem-Solving

Sometimes, our anger and frustration are caused by very real and inescapable problems in our lives. Not all anger is misplaced, and often it's a healthy, natural response to these difficulties. There is also a cultural belief that every problem has a solution, and it adds to our frustration to find out that this isn't always the case. The best attitude to bring such a situation, then, is not to focus on finding the solution but rather on how you handle and face the problem.

Make a plan, and check your progress along the way. (People who have trouble with planning might find a good guide to organizing or time management helpful.) Resolve to give it your best, but also not to punish yourself if an answer doesn't come right away. If you can approach it with your best intentions and efforts, and make a serious attempt to face it head-on, you will be less likely to lose patience and fall into all-or-nothing thinking, even if the problem does not get solved right away.

Controlling Anger -- Before it Controls You by the American Psychological Association

Assertive Confrontation - If a particular person's conduct is making you angry, an assertive confrontation may be precisely what you need to do to solve the problem. In her book, Kids are Worth it! Giving Your Child the Gift of Inner Discipline, Barbara Coloroso suggest the following steps for appropriately and effectively confronting someone in an assertive (but not aggressive) way:

  1. Say what you are feeling in a firm voice...neither whispering nor screaming.

  2. State your belief out loud but without "killer statements". For example, instead of accusatory remarks like "You are such a slob!" say something like "I believe each one of us needs to pick up our own dirty clothes and put them in the laundry basket."

  3. Close the time gap between the hurt and the expression of that hurt. For example, tell your child that you are angry because you have had to pick up her clothes every day that week rather than telling her she has always thrown her clothes around or that she did something that annoyed you three months ago.

  4. State what you want from the other person (e.g., "I want you to pick up your clothes and put them in the laundry basket.") Avoid ultimatums or threats.

  5. Be open to the other person's perspective on the situation. Give the other person a chance to talk and listen to what he or she has to say. You may believe your husband is doing something to annoy you only to find out he was doing it that way because he thought doing it another way would annoy you. Or, you may be asking for a change that the other person cannot make or is not willing to make. It is much better to know that now than to think the change will happen and be disappointed later. Knowing the other person's limitations now can help you both negotiate an agreement both of you can accept.

  6. Negotiate an agreement you can both accept. If the other person is unwilling or unable to comply with your statement about what you want, you will need to negotiate a solution that you both can accept. The solution can be as creative as your imaginations. My husband and I have come up with many negotiated solutions over the years. For example, there are some problems where we explore which one of us feels more strongly about the situation and follow that person's way of handling the situation (e.g., we ask each other to rate how we feel about the situation from 1-10 and if he rates his feelings at an 8 and I rate mine at a 2, we do things his way and vice versa). In other situations, we make a trade (if you do this, I'll do that). Sometimes, our solution is to involve a third person (e.g., hiring someone to help us clean our office because neither of us wanted to do it.).

  7. A Word About Saying "No" and Buying Time - When you are negotiating solutions, it is common for survivors to get in the habit of complying with the demands of others only to later discover feelings of resentment about their decision to comply. It is important to remember that you have a right to choose to comply or not comply with any request that is made of you. It is up to you to exercise that right!  However, if you lived with an abusive parent or significant other, you had no choice but to comply. You learned that saying "no" was dangerous and you may feel terrified to say "no" now. Sometimes, it is helpful to practice saying "no" and force yourself to live with the feelings of guilt or fear that causes until your entire self grasps the concept that you really do have the right to say "no". It is also important to give yourself the time to decide if you want to comply or not comply with a request. Survivors are often out of touch with their own feelings because they suppressed their own feelings for years just to make living with the abuser tolerable. Now that they have choices, they often find that they cannot make them because they are just used to going along with the demands of others. Unfortunately, when the subconscious "wakes up" later, it reacts in anger, frustration or rage! That is why it is so important for survivors to get some distance when demands or suggestions are made so that they can sort out their true feelings, wants and needs.

    A good way to buy time for yourself is to respond to most requests with comments such as: "I need to think about it and get back to you," "I need to sleep on it," "Ill get back to you later." Without being rude, you have given yourself some space within which to bring your adult self to the fore, instead of responding automatically in ways you had to as a child. The sense of control that comes when you are able to buy time is very satisfying, even thought it may be accompanied -- at first -- by guilt or fear.
    In Getting Through the Day - Strategies for Adults Hurt as Children by Nancy J. Napier

Improving Communications - Often, the cause of your anger is a failure to communicate something that needed to be communicated. For example, I got angry recently when one of my clients did not show up for a court-ordered evaluation because I first discovered that she had not gone to the evaluation the next time I went to court and the judge gave me a hard time because I had no idea why she had not gone. When I later got a chance to speak with her, I learned that she had not gone because she never got the notice telling her when to be there. Usually, when the court orders an evaluation that is scheduled by the evaluator, I tell my clients to contact me if they do not receive the notice within a given number of days or weeks. In this case, I had been busy and forgot to tell my client that she should contact me if she did not hear anything in the appropriate period of time. I failed to communicate my expectations to her. When I realized was angry because my expectations were disappointed and my expectations were disappointed because I did not communicate my expectations to my client, I realized that the solution to my problem was to be more diligent about communicating my expectations to my clients in the future.

More Formal Conflict Resolution Methods - If the source of your anger is a conflict with someone else that you cannot resolve through an assertive confrontation, you may need to consider other methods of resolving the conflict:

  • Formalized Negotiation - Sometimes, a conflict can be resolved effectively by having your attorney (or someone else acting as your representative) contact the other person to discuss the situation. Of course, once you consult your attorney about a problem, you may also end up feeling empowered by having a greater understanding of your legal rights and might decide to try (or try again) an assertive confrontation.
  • Mediation - A mediation takes place when the parties experiencing a conflict sit down with a neutral person or team of people who help them work cooperatively with one another to reach a mutually acceptable agreement for resolving the conflict. Mediation is a very effective means of resolving conflicts that is particularly helpful if the conflict is with a co-worker, neighbor or family member. The mediator can be a mutually-acceptable family member or friend who volunteers to act as mediator or a professional (often a mental health professional or lawyer). In many communities, free mediation services are available to help people resolve conflicts. Mediation is usually a more private method for resolving a conflict and it is almost always faster and more flexible than litigation because parties can schedule the timing of the mediation sessions at their convenience rather than as directed by a court and they can agree upon a resolution that involves an agreement to do or not do things that could not be court ordered as part of a litigated resolution. For more information about mediation, read What is Mediation? at ADR Resources and When Mediation Can Help by Peter Lovenheim.
  • Arbitration and Litigation - These are more formal processes for resolving conflicts and usually require the help of an attorney. These are very effective methods if you cannot get the other person to participate in any other method of conflict resolution or you want to make a statement to other people. Many survivors are beginning to consider the use of litigation to make a statement to the person who abused them or the community. Others use litigation to compel the government to respect the rights of its citizens. Litigation can also be used to obtain compensation for damages that were suffered by harm another person caused (e.g., getting the driver of a car who hit you to pay your medical bills and your lost wages or forcing the abuser to pay the costs for medical or mental health services you needed as a result of the abuse.)

When You Need Help:

Do not be afraid to ask for help if you are having trouble coping with anger. Talk to a friend. Join a support group. See a counselor. If you are feeling suicidal or homicidal, seeking professional help is particularly important. If your anger threatens your ability to control addictive behaviors (e.g., eating disorders, substance abuse, compulsive gambling, etc.), professional assistance in coping with your anger could help you stop your addictive behaviors. If you are not sure whether you need to seek help, ask yourself if anger is giving you the energy to make positive changes in your life or draining what energy you have. If anger is draining your energy or if you feel like anger is controlling you rather than the other way around, it is probably time to seek the advice of a professional.
 

For more information about anger and anger management...

Visit the following websites:

For additional reading, following are some books about anger management:

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