Coping With Anger

Anger is a killing thing: it kills the man who angers, for each rage leaves him less than he had been before - it takes something from him. ~Louis L'Armour

Coping Strategies For Chronic Anger

1. Be open to the possibility that you might be overvaluing the importance of your own emotional states and not placing enough importance on your responsibility to act like a mature, reasonable adult. Place an image in your mind of how you should act in emotional situations, and try to use it as a guide.

2. Ask yourself if you are using anger as a way of coping with basic anxiety. If latent, or repressed, anxiety plays a role in your chronic anger, consider applying some of the coping suggestion on anxiety.

3. Impose a delay between a situation that aggravates you and your actions to it. It has been standard to advise people prone to excessive, quick anger to "count to ten". Although the advice is trite, it has value.

4. Think of a self-imposed delay as a "time-out". During the time-out, challenge the anger-inducing ideas going through your mind; for example, if you are thinking, "Susan always keeps me waiting like this" ask yourself, "Am I right? Does she always do it?" You may realize that you are overgeneralizing and being unfair to Susan.

5. Even if a tendency to be more aggressive than others is an inborn trait of your personality, you do not want to cling to the attitude that you are the trait's helpless victim. Instead, develop the attitude that you can work around the trait, that you can effectively diminish its influence with your intelligence and your will.

6. Perhaps you are imitating the angry behaviour that, as a child, you witnessed in your parents or older siblings. If so, ask yourself these questions, "Am I just a copycat? Do I have to do something just because I saw less thoughtful people do it as a child? Am I a programmed robot or a human being?" Reflective answers to these questions may help to set you free from the bondage of observational learning.

7. Perhaps being a psychological bully helps you get your way. An alternative is to look for ways to negotiate, to exchange agreements, with important people in your life. This will be better for your relationships in the long run than the raw use of hostile power.

8. If you think that you are perhaps somewhat hyperactive, you need some way to lower physiological arousal. This is why some chronically angry people abuse alcohol and sedatives. Alcohol depresses central nervous system activity. Dependence on drugs is an ineffective coping strategy. There are other methods to lower arousal. Depending on individual differences, those methods might be listening to music that you find soothing, taking a warm bath, having a snack and so forth. Some individuals have found that taking a course of instruction in meditation techniques is useful in lowering arousal.

9. If you feel that you must let anger out or else explode, try hitting a pillow or a punching bag. The physical movement will help you release some of the anger and may reduce its intensity.

10. Remember that acting in an angry manner is a choice you make. Refuse to think,"I can't help myself". Instead think,"I'm in the driver's seat. And negative emotional displays are not in my own best interests."

If you find that you cannot cope adequately with chronic anger, there are a number of ways in which the professions of psychiatry and clinical psychology can help you. For example, a therapist can help you explore the unconscious motives behind your anger. It is possible that you are retaining psychological grudges held against your parents. It is possible that during your childhood they were abusive, unloving, insensitive to your feelings, or overcontrolling. The anger you continue to feel toward them is "unfinished business" and it is generalized to almost anyone who attempts to exert the slightest authority over you, including a partner, a teacher, or an employer. Although it is generally held that insight into unconscious motives is of value, it is also generally held that such insight is insufficient therapy in and of itself. You must act on an insight in a constructive way.



Holding on to anger is like grasping a hot coal with the intent of throwing it at someone else; you are the one who gets burned. ~Buddha

Causes Of Anger

For every minute you are angry, you lose sixty seconds of happiness.

Chronic anger may have roots in early childhood experiences. In classical psychoanalysis, the id, the primitive, inborn self, is the source of aggressiveness. The superego, the moral self, comes into being as a result of socializing experiences. The moral self may not develop adequately because of ineffective parenting. In such a case, the id has too much influence on the adult personality and expresses itself too readily. Thus, the individual who manifests chronic anger is sometimes seen in psychoanalysis as a case of arrested emotional development. This is evidenced in familiar commonsense statements such as "He's just a big baby" or "I wish she'd grow up" or "She's just a brat".

The psychoanalyst Karen Horney theorized that victims of chronic anger may not have had their emotional needs met in infancy and toddlerhood. This led them to suffer from an underlying condition called basic anxiety, the unverbalized impression that the world is unsafe and threatening. One way an adult can defend against basic anxiety is by repressing it and converting it to anger. Threats are anticipated and dealt with while they are still far away on the psychological horizon. Thus, Horney looks on much chronic anger as a defense against emotional insecurity.

Longitudinal studies by developmental psychologists on traits of temperament suggest that these traits are to some extent inborn and relatively stable. Some children are more aggressive than others, and this is just their basic disposition. Although this is not an explanation of chronic anger, such a trait of temperament, if present, may interact with other causes and amplify chronic anger.

If a child grows up in a family that allows itself frequent irrational outbursts of anger, then observational learning can play a role in a tendency toward chronic anger. The adult may be imitating the behaviour of parents or older siblings. The individual was given tacit permission as a child to express aggressive impulses without sufficient restraint.

It is possible that the angry adult was a verbal or physical bully as a child or adolescent. Such behaviour often intimidates others and may bring short-term psychological payoffs. If so, the behaviour is reinforced and tends to become a trait of personality.

The aggressive adult may have been a hyperactive child. (Aggressiveness and hyperactivity are often linked in children.) One factor that appears to play an important role in childhood hyperactivity is minimal brain dysfunction (MBD). MBD is not gross damage, nor does it impair basic intelligence. However, it appears to be related to a problem in the brain center that controls arousal. Although it is commonplace to say that hyperactivity is something that will be outgrown in adulthood, it is possible that hyperactive tendencies carry over to some extent in some persons, and in turn, magnify normal anger into chronic anger.

Chronic anger may be aggravated by interpersonal problems. Here is an example. Mabel is married to a man who is a whining, clinging, sorry-for-himself individual. His constant self-indulgent laments leave her feeling frustrated. Mabel has an aggressive temperament. Consequently, it is not much of a wonder that she makes her husband the target of hostile remarks. She is angry, in a constant state of emotional irritation, and she expresses herself accordingly.

A basic way to understand anger is to refer to the frustration-aggression hypothesis, which states that aggression is a natural response to frustration. Frustration is a state that occurs when the motivated individual is unable to
1. attain a desirable goal or
2. to escape from , or avoid, an unpleasant situation.

If you intensely desire a promotion and it goes to someone else, you will be frustrated and in turn angry. If you feel trapped in an unhappy relationship, again you will be frustrated and in turn , angry. Chronic anger may result when an individual believes, correctly or incorrectly, that life presents a constant stream of frustrating events.

The psychiatrist William Glasser, father of reality therapy, makes the point that anger is, to a large extent, self-induced. It is not only a reaction to a situation, it is a voluntary action. A person creates anger by his or her evaluations and choices, and thus needs to take responsibility for the anger.



People, like pins, are useless if they lose their heads.

Anger

Pause before you become angry. Try channeling your anger constructively.

Mark is an angry man. He growls at his wife for little or nothing. He is short-tempered with his children and is quickly critical of the slightest infraction of his rules. He is convinced that he is underpaid and overworked. Although he believes that his employer is a hard-hearted Scrooge, Mark himself barks orders unfeelingly to workers beneath him. His wife complains to her sister, "Even when you're pleasant to Mark, you're likely to get an angry response. He seems to see red even when the light is green." In short, Mark lives in a state of perpetual resentment, exasperation, indignation and borderline rage. There appears to be little or no objective provocation for his constant emotional agitation.

Anger is an unpleasant emotional state characterized by high physiological arousal. The pulse quickens, the respirations increase, the pupils of the eyes constrict, blood rushes to the striated muscles of the body, and the adrenal glands pump out hormones. At the conscious level, there are commonly to be found ideas such as, "She shouldn't have said that to me," or "Who does he think he is ?" or "I can't take anymore of this," or "That bastard is always taking advantage of me." From the primitive biological point of view, the angry person is demonstrating a well-known response pattern called the fight-or-flight reaction. In a civilized setting, the angry person can seldom engage in a physical fight or run away. Therefore, an individual such as Mark is often forced to stew in his own emotional juice.

A distinction can be made between manifest anger and latent anger. Manifest anger is evident, and the individual is aware of it. Latent anger is repressed to an unconsicous level, and the individual is not aware of it. Latent anger pays a role in chronic depression. The kind of anger being discussed here is manifest anger.

Manifest anger can be transient or chronic. Everyone is familiar with transient anger. It is normal, appropriate emotion. It is usually a natural reaction to a frustration and tends to spontaneously evaporate in a short time. On the other hand, chronic anger represents a real problem in personal adjustment. It has three key attributes. First, it is pathological. It tends to poison the person's life and may even contribute to physical illness. Second, it is excessive. The anger expressed is out-of-bounds as a response to the frustration experienced. Third, it is irrational. Usually, an idea that is neither logical or reasonable is linked with it.

Other signs and symptoms frequently associated with the principal symptom of chronic anger are:

• impatience
• constant hurrying
• speaking in a harsh, abrupt manner
• egotistical and self-centered behaviour
• inability to relax readily
• high blood pressure
• inability to play or enjoy vacations
• verbal aggressiveness
• free-floating hostility

Some of these signs and symptoms merit comment. Impatience and constant hurrying are both aspects of a general attitude that is called time urgency. It is as if the chronically angry person is in a time pressure cooker. High blood pressure is common in angry people because the body is always on the alert, always ready for action.

Free-floating hostility is characterized by being mad at everybody and everything. The chronically angry person is ready to hurl negative psychological thunderbolts at the slightest provocation. Thus, others are constantly discounted, abused or even insulted. Privately, people are given such labels as stupid, incompetent and lazy.

There is obviously a strong similarity between these signs and symptoms and a pattern of behaviour that was first designated Type A behaviour by the cardiologists Meyer Friedman and Ray H. Rosenman in the 1970s. Research suggests that one of the most serious components of Type A behaviour is chronic anger!



People who fly into a rage overheat their engines and make bad landings.

Coping With Anxiety

Anxiety is essential to the human condition. The confrontation with anxiety can relieve us from boredom, sharpen the sensitivity and assure the presence of tension that is necessary to preserve human existence.

Pathological anxiety is an irrational emotional response to an imagined threat. Free-floating anxiety is like a cloud that follows the person everywhere as if on a string, casting a long shadow over existence.

Practical Coping Strategies For Anxiety

1. Ask yourself if you are denying to yourself the existence of strong forbidden sexual and aggressive urges. Try to become more well acquainted with the unconscious level of your personality. Of course, if the unconscious level is really unconscious, how can you know what is there? The unconscious level reveals itself in many ways -- through dreams, conscious fantasies, idle thoughts, traits of character, and slips of the tongue. A personal journal of thoughts and reflections helps you to become more aware of your hidden self. The purpose of making contact with the darker side of your nature is not to act on it in an irresponsible way. On the contrary, the idea is to integrate your forbidden urges into consciousness in order to bring them under rational control. An understood impulse is less threatening than an incomprehensible one.

2. Suppose that, in the near future, you will need to deal with a threatening situation such as a job interview, a party where you will know almost no one, or an important examination. Use a method called stress-inoculation training. Imagine yourself in the situation and run a mental movie. Try to make the images as vivid as possible. You will feel your anxiety rising. But each time you run the mental movie, your anxiety will diminish. You will find that the reduction of anxiety associated with the imagined situation will transfer to some extent to the real situation.

3. It has been found that relaxation of the muscles is incompatible with anxiety. A warm bath will relax your muscles. You can also use a method known as progressive relaxation. Sit in a comfortable chair or a recliner. You cannot relax a set of muscles at will, but you can tighten them up at will. So consciously tighten the muscles in one of your legs for 10 to 15 seconds. Then you will find that it is easy to let go, and they will automatically relax. Then progress to the muscles in the other leg. Working upward, relax your abdomen, each arm, each shoulder, and your neck. In this manner, you will be able to systematically relax your whole body.

4. Examine your ideas about anticipated events. What are you thinking? Are your thoughts rational or irrational? Suppose you have been asked to give a talk or presentation before a group. Are you thinking "My mind will go blank", "I'll probably make a fool of myself", "They'll all laugh at me" , or something similar? If you are, challenge these thoughts with more realistic ones such as, "I'll get through it, even if I'm not perfect", "I'll probably do as well as most of the others would do", "This whole thing really isn't that serious" or something similar.

5. Do you have an overactive imagination? Anxiety-prone people often make good creative writers and love to read fiction. Their ability to conjure up images makes them see the worst in the mind's eye, and they hypersensitize themselves to anticipated events. You can't "fight fire with fire" by willing yourself to imagine pleasant, successful outcomes. In this manner you desensitize yourself to anticipated events.

6. Learn the art of meditation. This does not have to be an esoteric eastern technique in which you should try to become a yogi. You can simply sit in a comfortable chair, close your eyes, think the word relax in rhythm with your respirations. Think "re-" as you breath in, and think "-lax" as you breath out. Three or four minutes of this will induce a relaxation response. The relaxation response was studied by Herbert Benson of the Harvard Medical School, and it is antagonistic to the fight- or-flight reaction associated with anxiety.

7. If you think that hypoglycemia or low blood sugar, might be contributing to chronic anxiety, avoid highly processed foods and foods that contain large amounts of sugars. Concentrate instead on foods high in proteins and complex carbohydrates.

8. Keep in mind that a certain amount of background anxiety is normal. This existential anxiety described by the philosopher Kierkegaard is simply one of the burdens of life and must be accepted with a certain amount of courage and serenity. Everyone feels this kind of anxiety.

If you find that you cannot cope adequately with chronic anxiety, there are a number of ways in which the professions of psychiatry and clinical psychology can help you. For example, a therapist can help you to develop greater insight into the unconscious level of your personality. The interpretation of dreams, painful memories, slips of the tongue, and traits of character can all lead to greater self-understanding. This general approach, often called a psychodynamic approach in therapy, was inspired by the early work of Freud. It is assumed that greater self-understanding tends to reduce the overall level of pathological anxiety because the troubled person is no longer completely at the mercy of unknown forces.

A common approach used in contemporary psychotherapy is to focus on irrational thoughts and explore the ways in which these inflame anxiety. The therapist points out specific ways to modify irrational thoughts, thus sprinkling some cool psychological water on the fires of fear. This general avenue goes by several names including rational-emotive therapy, cognitive-behaviour modification, and cognitive therapy. The therapist will train you to modify your own thoughts when they are unrealistic or irrational.

The therapist may use guided fantasies with positive, safe outcomes as a way of defusing the anxiety associated with anticipated disasters, emotional or physical. This technique is called systematic desensitization, and it has been found to be one of the most effective ways to diminish chronic anxiety.

A psychiatrist may prescribe an antianxiety agent, also known as a minor tranquilizer. These drugs are of great value in the treatment of chronic pathological anxiety. However, keep in mind that there is a reason they are prescription, not over-the-counter drugs. In some cases, they may have adverse side effects, and benefits always have to be weighed against biological and psychological costs. Some individuals may abuse these drugs, and this will undermine the value of the drugs as therapeutic agents. Used properly, the drugs have a place in the treatment of anxiety.