Anger Management

6 Critical Steps to a Calmer Life

Peter Favaro

• Publisher: RWW New Page Books
• Year: 2005
• ISBN:
  9781601637048
• Topic: Personal Development
• Subtopic: Mental Health & Wellbeing

Identify what's setting you off and why. Find the calm while navigating the (inevitable) storm. And relinquish toxic anger in your life—for good! Anger Management is a practical and down-to-earth program that will teach you not only to understand your own anger, but, perhaps just as importantly, how to deal with the angry behavior of others. It details the role anger and conflict play in day-to-day interactions at home, at work and in social environments. Real-life examples discuss anger that erupts in intimate relationships, on the road, on the job with coworkers, or when dealing with people who are rude, irritating or intimidating. Anger Management also provides two unique sections. The first describes the psychology and behavior of predatory people; the other teaches you how to deal with situations where remaining cool under pressure can be a vital survival tactic. Anger Management is one of the most comprehensive and easy-to-follow anger-management programs available today. It is the ultimate self-help guide, but also an invaluable resource for corporate human resources departments in any business where tension and conflict occur during negotiations or in customer-service interactions.

Chapter 1
What Makes People so Angry?
Frustration-Driven Anger

In creating this program I struggled with the idea of how deeply I should go into the psychology of anger. There has been so much written on it and so many different points of view that I did not want to run the risk of getting you bogged down in theory. I want to keep this program practical and focused. What I will present in theory I will try to present as much in everyday terms as possible.

The Angry Lifestyle

Anger isn’t always a toxic and sick human emotion. Anger is a perfectly normal human emotion and it is a normal reaction to events that are unpleasant to us. As a matter of fact, if you have ever observed a newborn baby, you might easily conclude that anger is the first reaction we seem to have as we are introduced to the world! This book is about how to manage what I refer to as “the angry lifestyle.” A person has an angry lifestyle when the normal, natural way they look at life is pessimistic, aggressive, critical, nasty, and confrontational. All of us get grumpy from time to time, but the person who has problems with anger is angry almost all of the time. I will sometimes refer to the type of angry person who will benefit most from this program as the “chronically angry” person. The chronically angry person has forgotten that there is a more gentle, reasonable, and calm way of approaching the world and the conflicts we all face on a day-to-day basis. They simply lose track of the fact that there is more than one way to approach a difficult situation. Chronically angry people are angry when they wake up, drive, interact with others at work, and when they come home. They are angry at people they know and people they don’t know. They are angry for things that people have done to them, and angry at people who didn’t do anything to them. They are angry because anger is the most comfortable emotion for them to express almost constantly.

Check Point

The chronically angry person is angry almost all the time. It appears as though this is the emotion they feel most comfortable expressing.

The grandpappy of all shrinks, Sigmund Freud, spent a lot of time and effort trying to understand human aggression, and pinpointing its place as a natural instinct that man must work hard at trying to suppress. The suppression of aggression, Freud thought, was essential because without suppressing our natural tendencies to fight, kill, and compete, we could not live in a civilized society. Civilization does have its advantages. After all, killing our own food before putting on a three-piece suit and going to the office can interfere with one’s productivity at work.

Unfortunately there is a downside to suppressing our anger. Freud reasoned that suppressing what is naturally aggressive places us in a state of conflict and turmoil, and screws us up in so many countless other ways that maybe we would be better off hunting a boar first thing after the clock radio goes off. The suppression of aggression, according to Freud, doesn’t make the aggression go away, it just redirects it enough so that we don’t destroy ourselves. Understand that I have taken great liberties in this interpretation of Freud’s work. I pared it down substantially so that you would not fall asleep reading the first pages of the first chapter of my book. The main idea is that human beings are naturally aggressive animals, and learning how to control aggression is an important part of life. It requires hard work and keeping a lid on our naturally hostile and competitive tendencies.

Discussing Freud, even briefly, points at the problems with psychology from a technical point of view—lot’s of good ideas, but so many building blocks of theoretical ideas, funky terms, and leaps of faith that it is hard to extract anything practical out of it. I had the same problem going through my professional education in psychology. I didn’t want to memorize all of the terms and theories, I just wanted to know what made people tick. The next few sections will try to provide you with the two most meaty parts of what it takes to understand anger, which are:

1. What role does anger have in our emotional makeup?

2. Why does it become a problem for people?

Anger Is a Function of Two Main Emotional Systems

How many emotions do people have anyway? The number and type of emotions humans have, like every notion about human behavior, is subject to tremendous debate. For the sake of this book, and for my anger management program, there are only two main emotional responses: pleasure and displeasure. What we commonly describe as shades of many emotions such as fear, ambivalence, annoyance, rage, jealousy, elation, and joy, are really not different emotions. Instead, these emotional words and the thousands that I did not list, are functions of how human beings communicate pleasure or displeasure in response to their surroundings. An even simpler way of stating this is that life makes us feel “good” or “bad.” The things that make us feel bad reflect a state of displeasure, and angry responses are a way of communicating that we are in a state of displeasure. The things that make us feel good, we do not have to concern ourselves with.

When someone cuts you off on the highway and you spill lava-hot coffee all over your private parts, that produces a state of displeasure. (All that wasted coffee!) Your immediate response might be to speed up to the offending driver and scream out something about one of his or her close family members, while pumping your middle finger wildly in the air. I choose this as an example because this is how we communicate displeasure while motoring in the greater five boroughs of New York as well as some of the surrounding geographic areas.

We do not always do things like this. Even the grumpiest of us will sometimes let an indiscretion like this slide. In other words, sometimes we are very motivated to let others know when they are displeasing us, and sometimes we are not so interested. We express anger when we are bothered enough to let someone “have it.” Those who have problems with anger want to let people “have it,” too often for their own good. What, then, determines how bothered we are and exactly when the “anger switch” is turned on? When do we let people “have it,” and when do we show tolerance for the ignorance or bad behavior of others?

Fill-Hold-Release

“I’ve had it up to here! I’m going to blow my top!” These very familiar statements imply that there is only so much room a person has in the imaginary container that holds their displeasure, before that container is too full to hold any more unpleasant feelings, and those feelings spill out. I’m trying very hard to keep the number of psychobabble concepts down to a bare minimum, but I have to throw in one more at this point. I have already said that there are two main emotional systems: pleasure and displeasure. Pleasure is usually something we strive to attain, and displeasure is something we strive to avoid. Another way of talking about displeasure is to say that displeasure occurs not only when something bad happens, but when our attempts to attain pleasure are blocked or frustrated.

Check Point

Anything unpleasant can fill up the imaginary container that manages and holds frustration. Too much displeasure can cause the mental equivalent of what happens when your car radiator overheats. That container can also fill up when our attempts to seek pleasure are blocked or frustrated.

Frustration is an interesting emotional commodity. It does not dissipate as quickly as it grows. It is also not always compensated for by success in other areas. In other words, finally getting a break after many frustrating experiences is often not enough to remove all of the aggravation the original frustrating event caused. After 60 attempts at trying to set the time on the VCR, success at finally doing so may not remove all of the irritability that you have just previously experienced. If you burn that soufflé, all of the compliments you have received about the roast may not resolve your frustration and disappointment at wanting everything to be just perfect.

The fact that frustration does not go away as quickly as it comes on, and the additional fact that it is not necessarily relieved by a corresponding amount of pleasure or satisfaction, makes it cumulative. As frustrating events build, the imaginary container fills up until it can no longer hold any more. When it reaches a point of absolute fullness, people start to voice their displeasure in a way that human beings typically describe as “angry.” Hold on, my explanation isn’t over yet. We know that anger is a way of communicating displeasure. We also know that people communicate displeasure as anger when they experience an accumulation of displeasure that they can no longer contain. So far I have not exactly split the atom in terms of human psychology. We need just a little more background.

Some Containers Are Already Half Filled

We need to understand why some people’s containers seem to overflow so quickly and so violently while some people’s containers never seem to fill at all. Some people are always ready to blow, while some are perpetually calm and easygoing. The answer to that has to do with what types of things are in that container aside from the events that are happening around a person at the present time. Let’s take a look at a vignette (a fancy French word for “anecdote,” which is a fancy English word for “story”) that describes two people with two totally different containers.

Bill, Bob, and the Electric Company

Bill and Bob are two honest, hardworking guys who, for the sake of this example, live in parallel universes; meaning whatever happens to Bob happens to Bill and vice versa. Everything is the same about them except for one thing—their view of the world. Bill looks at the world as a very disappointing place. He is mostly upset because he has not gotten what he feels he is “owed.” You don’t want to be around Bill when the newspaper prints a story about the latest big-money lottery winner. “Why do idiots always win the lottery? It’s rigged I tell you. The people who really need the money, like me, never win.” To Bill, waiters in restaurants are always incompetent. When you go shopping at the mall with Bill you can set your watch by the number of minutes that will transpire before Bill will look around and say, “Gee, there’s no shortage of ugly people here today!”

Bob, on the other hand, is not as wound up as his otherworldly counterpart. He is more likely to say “good morning” to strangers, not give anyone an undo amount of grief, and is not likely to criticize or even notice the little tufts of hair that come out of his boss’s nostrils.

On a day last week in both Bill and Bob’s universes, they woke up to find their apartments engulfed in total darkness. None of their neighbor’s apartments were blacked out. A call to the electric company was most certainly in order. The phones in the apartment did not work because they were powered by electricity. Being thoroughly modern individuals, cell phones were the next line of communication. Whoops, the cell phone batteries went dead because the electricity to the battery chargers went out during the night. Lugging a pocketfull of change to the corner pay phone, the Electric Company was finally contacted. After listening to a half hour of electronic prompts by the “automated customer service system,” a representative told both Bill and Bob that the electricity was turned off because the bill had not been paid. “Is that so? I distinctly recall having paid that bill,” said Bob. “No way, you guys must be morons. I paid that bill,” said Bill.

“Billing errors are handled by another department,” said the customer service representative, who transferred the call, which was then immediately disconnected. More change and a half hour later, Bill and Bob were both informed that due to a computer software upgrade their accounts were both mistakenly listed as unpaid. Unfortunately, the fact that the accounts were shut down for any reason automatically took up to 12 hours to be restored. Both Bill and Bob were annoyed. Check that. Bob was annoyed. Bill was screaming as loud as one would scream after accidentally stapling their thumb to the desk.

Upon returning home from the pay phones, Bill and Bob noticed that their collections of exotic tropical fish were having difficulties breathing. No electricity, no pump. No pump, no air. No air, a thousand dollars’ worth of upside down navigating fish. More grief for Bob, and more agony and excruciating yelping from Bill.

At the end of the day, Bill was arrested for carrying a bazooka into the lobby of the Electric Company customer service area. Bob was home making funeral arrangements for his lost fish.

Why did Bill dust off that trusty bazooka? Why was his container full enough to overflow? The answer is that Bill’s container was almost already full with all of the displeasure he receives just from living in the world and carrying along with him a suitcase full of angry attitude...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Acknowledments
• Contents
• Preface
• Introduction
• Chapter 1 What Makes People so Angry? Frustration-Driven Anger
• Chapter 2 What Makes People so Angry? Predatory Anger
• Chapter 3 People Perception: Increasing Anger Awareness, Your First Critical Path (Part I)
• Chapter 4 People Perception: Increasing Anger Awareness, Your First Critical Path (Part II)
• Chapter 5 Further Down the First Critical Path
• Chapter 6 Consequence Forecasting, the Second Critical Path
• Chapter 7 De-escalation, the Third Critical Path (Part I)
• Chapter 8 De-escalation, the Third Critical Path (Part II)
• Chapter 9 Overcoming Angry Themes by Conquering Personalization, the Fourth Critical Path
• Chapter 10 Controlling Predatory Anger, the Fifth Critical Path
• Chapter 11 Cool Under Pressure, the Sixth Critical Path
• Conclusion
• Index
• About the Author