Manage Your Anger: Teach Yourself

Sandi Mann

• Publisher: Teach Yourself
• Year: 2012
• ISBN:
  9781444177039
• Topic: Personal Development
• Subtopic: Mental Health & Wellbeing

If people perceive you to have an anger management problem, it's likely you spend most of your time dealing with the consequences of this, rather than the causes. This practical book, full of diagnostic questionnaires and immediately applicable advice, will help you to understand the causes of your angry reactions, and instead channel your emotions into directions which will enable you to have more successful relationships in your business and personal life.

1

The nature of anger

How do you feel?

Answer yes or no to the following questions.

• Do you feel that you understand what anger is?

• Do you feel that you get angry too often?

• Do you feel that you express your anger inappropriately?

• Do you feel that there is any point in getting angry?

• Do you know what sorts of incidents cause you to get angry?

The aim of these questions is to stimulate some thought about the nature of anger; this chapter aims to answer these questions.

What exactly is anger?

‘Anybody can become angry – that is easy, but to be angry with the right person and to the right degree and at the right time and for the right purpose, and in the right way – that is not within everybody’s power and is not easy.’

Aristotle

Most of us are familiar with anger – whether our own or that of other people. It is a rare person who does not know what it is to feel angry. In fact, according to a recent poll by the Mental Health Foundation (in their report Boiling Point: Problem anger and what we can do about it, 2008), more than a quarter of people worry about just how angry they sometimes feel. Various terms are used to describe feeling angry such as furious, in a rage, flipping out, in a temper, losing my temper, annoyed, freaking out, going crazy, mad, at the end of my tether/rope, flying off the handle, cheesed off, enraged, fuming and many others less repeatable here!

There might be many ways to describe anger but they all reflect the same thing – an emotion. Like most human emotions, anger is actually a healthy part of our emotional repertoire; it is our body and brain’s way of signalling that all is not right in our world and that action is needed to rectify a wrong. Most emotions have an evolutionary purpose; that is, they exist to aid our survival. Our cave-dwelling ancestors in the past would have experienced anger when a rival stole their food or prized possessions; this strong emotion would have stimulated them into action to fight for their rights. Without anger, our ancestors would have lazily allowed all their food to be stolen from under their noses and would not have survived long.

Point to remember

Anger has a valuable adaptive purpose and can play an important role in our lives.

Today, anger can be used for the same purpose – perhaps not to stop our dinner being stolen, but to galvanize us into action when we feel our rights are being threatened (more on this later in this chapter). The issue here is that many of us experience too much anger for too much of the time; this is when anger becomes a problem. Anger researchers such as Dahlen and Deffenbacher (2001) believe that the most comprehensive explanation of anger is one that includes four separate elements and that we only experience real anger when all four facets are present. These are:

1 the feeling of being angry

This feeling can range in intensity from mild annoyance to over-powering rage or fury.

2 some sort of bodily change, called physiological arousal

This is often caused by the release of adrenalin, which causes a range of reactions in our body (such as increased heart rate and blood pressure); more on this in chapter 2.

3 a mental or cognitive awareness that an event has occurred that threatens us in some way

Without being able to interpret an event in this way, we would not feel anger (which is why different people can witness the same event but only some would be angered by it).

4 an effect on our behaviour

To really feel anger, we need to express it in some way – for example by hitting someone or shouting (aggressive and inappropriate expression of anger) or writing a letter of complaint (a more appropriate expression of anger); more on these in chapters 3 and 4.

Myth buster

Some people believe that ‘anger is all in the mind’. This is not true; the mind plays only one part in the anger process. It is true that, to feel anger, we must have some sort of mind process going on, but real anger is felt throughout the body – sometimes before our minds have even labelled what we are experiencing as ‘anger’.

How anger differs from frustration, aggression and rage

Anger is often confused with rage, frustration and aggression. It is useful to separate these terms to help understand them and their relationship to anger.

• Frustration or irritability is often a precursor to anger; it is the feeling we experience when we don’t get what we want, when obstacles are put in our way or when someone else interferes (deliberately or not) with our attempts at achieving our goals.

• Aggression, on the other hand, is the action that can result from being very angry. It is usually intended to cause physical or emotional harm to others, perhaps with verbal insults, threats, sarcasm or raised voices. When aggression becomes so extreme that we lose self-control, it is said that we are in a rage; such a person is typically very loud (perhaps shouting), may be red in the face, threatening and perhaps even physically abusive.

CASE STUDY

Max’s story

Max arrives at work late after a traffic accident delays his commute. He is frustrated because he just wants to get on with his day but can’t. To add to his frustration, his lateness means that there are no spaces left in his usual car park so he has to drive around for 20 minutes. His sense of frustration at not being able to start work is building even before he sets foot in his office.

Once at his desk – in an open-plan office – Max is constantly interrupted by phone calls, emails and colleagues. He has two reports to complete and did expect to have enough time to do them, but the constant interruptions delay him considerably. His irritability is growing. Then his wife rings to say that their child is ill and Max will have to go and fetch him from school because she is in clinic all day. At this, Max’s frustration boils over into anger and he snarls and swears at his wife, telling her that she will have to make the arrangements for their child herself.

He has only just put the phone down when an email arrives from his boss asking where Max’s report is. Although it isn’t due in till the end of the day, his boss wants to check it first, so needs it earlier. Trying to suppress his anger, Max works on it quickly, ignoring phone calls, emails and even texts from his wife. By 2 p.m., his hunger is too distracting and he is forced to abandon his work for a sprint to the coffee shop around the corner. The long queue there does nothing to dampen his feelings of frustration, irritability and suppressed anger. Then, someone cuts in front of him, claiming that they have been in front all along. That does it: Max explodes with rage, shouting and swearing at the customer and jabbing his finger aggressively towards him. He is asked to leave the shop, but he just gets angrier. The customer finally lets him go in front, he gets his sandwich and goes back to work – and now he can’t help wondering what on earth got into him t...