Photo by Andre Tan

People who are prone to anxiety are nearly always people-pleasers who fear conflict and negative feelings like anger. When you feel upset, you sweep your problems under the rug because you don’t want to upset anyone. You do this so quickly and automatically that you’re not even aware you’re doing it.

David D. Burns, author of Feeling Good~

Anger as a psychological problem

We have seen that anger is not a simple concept but one with a complex history and having implications for your own well­being as well as for your relationships on a personal, social and global level. Wiley Anger Management defines some terms it would be helpful to understand as we proceed.

One diagnosis we have not discussed is intermittent explosive disorder included in the American Psychiatric Association’s Diagnostic and Statistical Manual or DSM5 (5th edition). This is a pattern of exploding emotionally on occasion but not continually. Everyone gets upset at times but not everyone explodes, causing a major scene.

Another diagnosis is post-traumatic stress disorder. This is also a diagnosis from the DSM5 which involves sometimes severe emotional reaction to triggers bringing back memories of past traumatic events. Not only do memories arise but the feelings associated with the trauma return as if it were being re-experienced in the present. Along with the memories and emotions a number of untoward actions may arise as well. Among them are explosive and aggressive outbursts, hostility and making judgmental statements about others.

A third is antisocial personality disorder. Its symptoms include looking angry, lack of cooperation, hostility in group efforts, being disrespectful to authorities and using abusive language to intimidate people. Many of these may be related to feeling under threat as we discussed earlier. Yet people with these disorders look more angry than hurt and often give little clue as to what lies beneath the surface.

Many of the DSM5 diagnoses involve anger, but we are not doing a diagnostic exam or psychotherapy here. The article we are discussing is geared toward therapists, but the goals of therapy can also be adapted for personal consideration of ways to manage your anger. Let’s look at some of the treatment goals and how you might adapt them toward work on your own anger:

• Identify what triggers your anger whether it involves situations in which you find yourself or inner thoughts which bring your anger to the fore. This is what we talked about in Chapter 2. If you want to control your anger, it is a good start to figure out what triggers it and learn to make an appropriate connection to what happened before.
• Find out whether any medical conditions might be contributing to your anger such as neurological problems like seizures, tumors or hormone irregularities. Unless you are a physician, this is a hard one to figure out on your own. You can research physical conditions related to anger and then discuss it with your doctor. If research is not your thing, you can start by talking with your doctor about the possibilities.
• Consider evaluation for the appropriateness and usefulness of psychiatric medications. Again this is not an approach to try on your own. Your doctor will work with you to find appropriate medication when indicated or refer you to a specialist.
• Learn appropriate ways to think about your anger and how to manage it through experimentation, self examination and sharing what you learn with people you trust to help you with the process. Your family and friends might know you as well as you know yourself, perhaps even better. They can be helpful with their observations of what makes life difficult for you and also help you see patterns of your behavior of which you might not be aware.
• Keep track of anger triggers, how they make you feel and how you react to them. You can do this in a journal as I mentioned earlier. Once you know what triggers your anger, write down the feelings which emerge and the ways you react to your anger being summoned.
• Talk with others who might help you identify patterns of anger, how they affect your inner life and your relationships with others. Those close to you can be helpful in your search for ways you can change your response to anger. After all they most likely bear the brunt of your anger and are likely to want to help you become an easier person to live with.
• Learn ways to calm your emotions through approaches such as focused breathing, meditation, and yoga. There are many videos, books and classes on how to use these calming techniques. We will discuss these more in Chapter 7.
• Learn to replace inappropriate ways of thinking about your anger and react to it with healthier approaches. You can experiment with viewing a situation and your consequent anger in a different light. Those close to you or a therapist can also help you expand your view of a situation beyond what you see with your own eyes and mind.
• Learn to stop the process of upsetting thoughts. You first need to listen to your thoughts leading to anger. Then you need to see whether they make any sense. You can simply tell yourself not to attend to them or find something more constructive to think about. More about this in the next chapter.
• Learn assertive and healthy ways of expressing your anger and ways to solve problems rather than allowing them to continue upsetting you. Stopping your anger by not expressing it or by blasting someone will not do you or anyone else much good. There are alternatives as we shall soon see.
• Look in the psychological mirror. Learn to recognize what you look and sound like to others. Again, what you show might not be immediately obvious to you. Listen to what others say about how they see you.

These are healthier approaches to try in approaching your anger than you might have tried in the past. Let’s look more closely at how you react to others’ anger. A.M. Tadas suggests that the best way to deal with other people’s anger is to work on your own anger. Tadas decided to try this approach for himself when he realized that he was allowing others to upset him and in that way controlling him.

With this realization, he began to examine the root causes of his anger and then took responsibility for it. He found that this put him in a better position to manage his reaction to others’ anger. Tadas offers some deceptively simple techniques to help you stay in control of your own emotions while dealing with others’ anger:

• Breathe deeply. As your muscles contract when you experience difficult emotions, your breathing also becomes strained. Maybe you feel you have lost your breath for a moment. You can reverse this by concentrating on deep breathing, feeling, and listening to your breath go out of you and return with fresh air. We will look at this closer in the next chapter under the topic of meditation.
• You don’t need to stay paralyzed after an upsetting incident. You can put the anger process on hold by taking time to yourself before reacting at all. This way you will save yourself from actions you will later regret.
• Explore your state of mind. In a difficult situation, identify your feelings by name and consider your feelings without passing judgment on them or on yourself. Consider what caused you to be angry, where you feel anger in your body, and, if you lost control of your anger, what prompted this.
• Consider what prompts the behavior of the people who occasioned your anger? What did they do and what is behind their actions. Are they struggling with their own emotions? Are they troubled about something you said or did? What might be going on in their lives which caused their outburst? Maybe their anger has nothing to do with you and you have no practical reason to respond to it other than with kindness.
• Engage your sense of humor. It’s easy to respond to another’s anger by retaliating with your own anger. It’s hard to imagine how this response might be helpful. If you think back to situations when you did react this way, how often did the interaction end well? The most likely result is escalation of the conflict between you and another person. Seeing humor in this situation is not easy and takes practice. Sharing what you see as funny does not always go over well either. If you can just smile inside, it might be worth learning the skill.
• Give yourself credit. If any of these approaches helps you de-escalate an angry and tense situation, congratulate yourself on your power to follow through. Keep refining your skills.

Going deeper

The techniques suggested by Tadas are good initial ways of dealing with anger directly but none of them help you heal from the hurt you experience when caught in the tangle of angry emotions. He suggests some deeper techniques to help you recover from feeling hurt by another’s anger. These are approaches for you to try changing your reaction in the face of anger and not ways to change the other person. Let’s look at them next:

• Face your demons. List times you experienced a considerable disruption in your life. Think of times when your health, relationships or possibly professional standing took a hit because of anger. How would your life have been different then without that disruption? How would it be different now? Be honest with yourself. Resolve to develop new habits so these events do not keep happening and disrupting your life.
• Identify situations that create your stress. You have your own particular triggers for stress which can easily lead you to a feeling of anger. You can make plans to avoid or manage these situations in a way which does not inevitably lead you to anger.
• Make an inventory of your weaknesses. Pay attention to what propels your anger to spin out of control. Maybe it’s your tendency to judge other people, insisting that others do things the way you think they should, or taking what others say or do personally. They might have their own motivations which have nothing to do with you. If you start to see a pattern which gets you into trouble, make a point of trying to changing it.
• Do whatever it takes to soften your heart. Many people find that they feel chronically depressed or resentful toward others for some reason. Anger is more likely to boil over with these mental and emotional states in the background. One way to work your way out from under these dark clouds is to do some nice things for yourself and for others. Kindness toward others helps you redirect your thoughts and feelings in a more peaceful and positive direction.
• Practice giving people the benefit of the doubt. Ruiz suggests in one of his four agreements with yourself to always do you best. Another way to decrease your anger toward others is to assume that they are doing their best as well. Their best might look better or worse than you would like and might also vary from day to day. If you follow your own efforts to do your best, you will notice that your best varies with your mood, what is going on around you, and your physical condition. Be accepting of your own varying success as well as that of others.
• Learn to quiet your mind. Many spiritual traditions including Christianity suggest reducing the noise in your head and giving your mind a chance to be at peace for a while. Constant TV, radio, cell phones ringing or other noise can fill you with distraction and prevent you from communing with nature and listening to your own inner dialogue. Earlier, I mentioned concentrating on your breathing. This is a good start. You can also pay attention to feelings in various parts of your body or perhaps to the sounds of nature such as a breeze, the trickle of a brook, or passing clouds. You don’t have to do anything about these things but just enjoy and commune with them.
• Contemplate impermanence. Reflect on the delicate balance of your life as well as of all other life. You won’t be here on earth forever. Although it might not feel like it, your days are numbered and one day you won’t be here any longer. Remember that all things pass. The joy you find in life will pass but so will your trials and tribulations. Keeping your life in perspective makes it easier to deal with passing upsets like anger.
• Practice gratitude. This is another way to keep things in perspective. I start every day writing down five things for which I am grateful that day before writing the rest of my journal. Focusing on the good things makes the difficult things easier to bear. Others who have encouraged this practice include Oprah Winfrey and Henry David Thoreau.
• Watch what you eat. Everybody deals with food a little differently. Allergies to food can put you in a foul mood when you eat them. Some foods can be harder to digest than others. If you think about what you eat and how you feel later, you will have a better understanding of how your body works and how your eating affects your mind and emotions. Drugs, legal and illegal, can upset your nervous system and keep your emotions off kilter. Pay attention to how they affect you if you use them.
• Establish your why. If you are reading this because you want to make some positive changes in your life, think about what prompted you to consider making these changes. You might want to write down what you would like to change in your life and the reasons why. Then post them were you can see them on a regular basis.
• Start a diary to track your progress. If you wanted to lose weight but never wrote down your starting weight or kept track of your progress over time, how would you know how well you are doing with your goal? In my diary, I keep track of my gratitudes but also my challenges, questions about life and little accomplishments. When I look back over my diary from past years, I can see the progress I have made with my life goals as well as places where I need to improve. It might work for you as well.

Anger at Bay

The American Psychological Association suggests some ways to limit the effect of anger on you. These are mostly ways of changing how you approach situations which might otherwise lead to anger. These are ways you can head off becoming angry.

• Relaxation–I mentioned paying attention to your breathing as one way of clearing your mind of concentration on emotions such as anger. Shallow breathing from your chest won’t do the trick. The way to do deep breathing is called diaphragmatic breathing. Your diaphragm separates your heart and lungs from the rest of your organs. Think of yourself as breathing with your belly. You can watch your belly rise and fall as you practice this approach.

  A related way to relax is to repeat a word or syllable while breathing deeply. Oriental traditions use a syllable such as “om” repeated continuously as you breathe and clear your mind. Imagining yourself in a relaxing setting or practicing gentle yoga are other variations.

• Cognitive restructuring–This is a fancy psychological term which means changing the pattern of your thinking. Think of how you sound when you are angry. You use dramatic, forceful words and often include swear words which might not be part of your ordinary vocabulary. What you think might be worse than what you actually say. In the next chapter we will look at “awfulizing” or telling yourself that things are much worse than they really are. Work on getting your emotions, thoughts and speech to a more realistic level. Events which produced your anger might be unfortunate but are not always terrible. The psychologist Albert Ellis has quite a bit to say about this. We will hear more of his ideas later.
• Problem solving–Anger represents a feeling of being stuck in a bad situation. Sometimes there is no easy solution to a vexing problem. Sometimes there is a solution but you are too upset to see it clearly. While you might not have an immediate solution at hand, you can start working on an approach to resolving the situation. You can learn how to cope with it even if you can’t make it go away. Finding a constructive path is often the best way out of feeling lost in your anger.
• Better Communication–If you have examined your own anger and how it affects you, it is likely that you have discovered how hard it is to resolve anything while you stay focused on your anger. If your anger centers on a conflict with someone, try to slow down and listen to what he or she has to say. It may be that you have a misunderstanding rather than a real difference. It may also be that the other person’s reason for being upset has nothing to do with you and there is no reason for you to become upset in return. Listening carefully will help you choose appropriate responses.
• Using humor–We talked a little about this earlier. What if you imagine the person who is angry at you as a raging bull and what he or she would look like in his or her daily life as a bull pawing the ground? Can you imagine yourself as literally tied up in knots and then trying to go about the rest of your day carrying the ropes which bind you? If you can bring yourself to share the humor you see in a tense situation with the other person, all the better.
• Changing your environment–I once worked with a fellow psychologist who on occasion wrote in his appointment book, “John alone.” When I asked him about this, he told me that he needs his own help to keep his life in perspective as much as his clients did. Often, changing the circumstances which lead you to anger can help you reframe the situation into one which does not invoke your anger and is more manageable.

What to do when you are the target of anger

So far in this chapter we have been looking at your anger directed at yourself or at someone else. In addition, you will probably find occasion to face someone else’s anger toward you. Now what do you do? Gary Vassar suggests some possibilities. He concentrates on the choices available to you:

• Do you have an exit strategy? You might not know the other person well. The first decision to make is how to get away from this situation should it become necessary. You don’t want to wait until you are under threat of being harmed. This is not something to be taken lightly or to be dismissed easily. Anger can quickly escalate. The circumstances change as another’s anger increases. Keep in mind that it might become necessary to escape at any moment.
• Are you in imminent danger? You should be able to tell this by the intensity of the anger you face. If the other person is becoming out of control, you have several options. Remove yourself from the situation if possible before you get hurt. If escaping is not possible you have several other choices. Do whatever you can to prevent the situation from becoming more intense. You might even agree with the other person’s point of view at least on the surface until you have a chance to escape. It’s hard for people to argue with you when you agree with them.
• Use statements that de-escalate the tension. If you are not in danger, look for things in the other person’s line of thinking with which you might agree and turn the conversation to those. Apologize for anything you think might have been interpreted by the other person as provoking their anger. Try to let the other person know that you understand how he or she feels and try to turn the conversation toward what you can do together to resolve the issue rather than continuing under a cloud of angry emotions.

Understanding someone else’s anger

We have been talking about things you can do to settle down someone else’s anger. Tadas suggests that understanding what is behind another’s anger might help resolve it and head you both in a more positive direction.

If you are both angry, it might be hard to make much progress. Understanding your own anger as we discussed previously should be helpful in settling down your emotions. Then you might consider what is going on inside another’s mind. Tadas sees angry people as full of resentment and discontent which they tend to take out on others. He sees such people as “driven by a sense of shame and inferiority.” He also sees them as possibly overwhelmed by the demands of their life and becoming lost in the associated feelings.

You might find it helpful to put yourself in the other person’s position to the extent that it is possible. If you listen carefully you might begin to hear what is behind the other person’s anger. If not, perhaps you can give the other person the benefit of the doubt and consider the possibility that he or she is overwhelmed by things to which you are not privy. We will look more closely at understanding what lies beneath anger in the next chapter.

More ways to keep cool under the stress of anger

Nina Sidell suggests more strategies to keep you from becoming embroiled in others’ turmoil:

• Do what you can to stay calm, centered, and at peace. Just because another person is raging does not mean you have respond in kind. This might not always be easy but it is not impossible. Even if it is hard at first, you will improve with practice.
• Utilize healthy outlets when you feel stressed. The more your stress is under control, the easier it will be to control your emotions in the face of someone who is out of control with anger. Healthy eating, exercise and periods of relaxation can all help you prepare to deal with stress and minimize its effect on you as we have seen.
• Surround yourself with healthy people who can manage their emotions and impulses. Related to this is avoiding the company of people who are likely to blow their tops frequently. If you are with a group of more even tempered friends, you will not need to face an angry person alone.
• Set limits or walk away as soon as someone unloads on you inappropriately. You don’t have to stand there and take it. You might not be able to get in a word of reason. In this case why stay there and put up with abuse?
• Get support from your loved ones, close friends, and helping professionals if necessary. They can be more detached and unemotional in talking with you about how to react in an angry situation that does not directly affect them. You never know who might have a great idea for you.
• Sit in the position of observer. Try pretending that you are just watching what happens between you and the angry person rather than being in the middle of it. That might help you see what you both contribute to the problem. This would probably work better if you do it after rather than during an argument.

Do what keeps you balanced. Make sure you meet your own needs and do not find yourself in a position of vulnerability. Taking care of yourself is the best way to prepare for any challenge. Anger can be very challenging to you even over minor issues. Make sure you are always functioning at your best level possible.