Chapter 13: The Longcut of
Anger
In 1869, a Christian missionary had no church funds with
which to purchase furniture for the mission. So he bought furniture with his
own money. When he was ready to return home, he took the furniture with him. A
fellow church member accused him of stealing church property, which deeply hurt
his feelings to the point of anger. He thought of ways to retaliate, but
instead wrote words that later became a hymn:
School
thy feelings, O my brother; train thy warm, impulsive soul.
Do not its emotions smother, but let wisdom’s voice control.
School thy feelings; there is power in the cool, collected mind.
Passion shatters reason’s tower, makes the clearest vision blind.
Do not its emotions smother, but let wisdom’s voice control.
School thy feelings; there is power in the cool, collected mind.
Passion shatters reason’s tower, makes the clearest vision blind.
(Text:
Charles W. Penrose, 1832–1925. © 1948 IRI)
How
times have changed from 1869 to today when anger is considered normal and even
entertaining on radio, television, and in movies. Talk show hosts use angry,
inflammatory words to make and exaggerate their point. Sitcoms skillfully use
anger as comedy. Venting anger has
been touted as healthy. But there is no spin on anger in real life. Anger is
like a dagger that hurts and scars; it’s ugly and contagious. Anger is a knife
that wounds the angry person and destroys relationships. Anger stirs emotions.
“The verb stir sounds like a recipe
for disaster. Put tempers on medium heat, stir in a few choice words, and bring
to a boil; continue stirring until thick; cool off, let feelings chill for
several days; serve cold. Lots of leftovers” (Lynn G. Robbins, “Agency and
Anger,” Ensign, May 1998, 80). As
anger builds, reason recedes. Anger is the polar opposite of love. Anger
short-circuits wisdom and sound judgment. Making “a decision while angry is
like a captain [putting] out to sea in a raging storm. Only injury and wreckage
result from wrathful moments” (ElRay L. Christiansen, “Be Slow to Anger,” Ensign, June 1971, 37).
The
rungs of the anger ladder show a pattern of escalating emotion. The higher you
climb up the anger ladder the more at risk you are to losing control and
harming someone. Hopefully, most often you aren’t even near an anger ladder and
if you do start to climb, you realize it quickly and climb down quickly.
However, as you know from personal experience, anger can sneak up on you. You
can feel neutral, perhaps even peaceful and happy. Then something happens. It
may be the smallest, most innocent hint of a challenge, a threat, a rebuke, a
fear, a disappointment. It’s small and at this point, harmless. But you are on
the first rung, feeling slightly annoyed. You probably don’t even realize
you’ve stepped onto the ladder, and no one would know you are on the ladder
because your behavior is normal. Whatever degree of anxiety you are feeling is
manageable. The very best solution is to step off of the ladder now. If you
don’t step off, the next rung is when you feel increasing anxiety.
You are still able to function normally, but your
attention is focused on the person or problem. If you step to the next rung,
you may answer a question impatiently or sarcastically. You find it difficult
to respond in a normal way and may even start looking around for someone to
blame. On the next rung your thinking becomes acting out. You may yell at the
umpire or accuse or blame your husband or wife for whatever you think caused
your anger. If you allow your anger to continue, later you’ll be describing
this situation to someone and you’ll say, “Boy, when I get angry, I get really
angry.” Picture yourself on the anger ladder high above the ground, not
thinking clearly, emotions swirling. If your anger continues to climb, your
thinking becomes irrational. You feel desperate and are completely focused on
your pain. You are a danger to yourself and/or others.
When annoyance, irritation, or frustration turn to rage, violence often becomes
anger’s by-product. The angrier the person becomes, the less human the object of his anger seems. The
object of the anger is dehumanized as an inanimate target. Anger is also
frightening to bystanders who witness the human hurricane, as I felt when the
man who had not caused the accident was pounding on cars and pulling his hair
in chapter four. Anger hijacks your wisdom and common sense.
You’ve
heard it said, “It’s good to let off steam,” supporting the idea that venting
anger is healthy. It’s not true. More harm is done to the angry person if he
expresses his anger than if he represses it, but neither expressing nor
repressing is beneficial. Expressing anger inappropriately is a learned
response. Aggressive actions such as screaming, yelling, swearing, throwing
things, giving the silent treatment, and name-calling are all learned
strategies of ways to express anger. Since these strategies were learned, they
can be unlearned. You can replace old bad habits with new healthy ones. And the
best way to deal with anger is when it’s a spark rather than a blaze, and since
anger feeds on anger, it’s so important to resolve issues in the spark stage
because as you know, anger spreads. You may start out with one angry person and
end up with a mob.
Knowing
where you are on the anger ladder is important. You need to have enough
self-awareness to say: “I know anger is my choice. No one can make me angry. I
don’t want to become angry. I know anger clouds my good sense and wisdom.” It’s
so easy to begin to feel angry without realizing what triggered your anger. You
can, so to speak, kick the dog because you can’t kick your wife, or yell at
your wife because you can’t yell at your boss. You feel slighted at work so you
feel justified in slighting your child. This is called displacement or
projection. You project your anger onto someone or something else. You remove
yourself from taking responsibility for your anger by redirecting or displacing
your anger away from you.
Hopefully,
you will catch yourself justifying your anger, telling yourself lies such as:
“He made me angry.” The truth is you make yourself angry. No one can make you
angry. In reality, that is as inaccurate as saying, “The ice cream made me
fat,” when you are the one who moves the spoon to your mouth. Someone or
something can’t make you angry. Another common excuse is “I can’t help it.”
That’s the same as saying, “I can’t help eating ice cream.” Allowing yourself
to become angry is your choice. That’s why Charles Penrose chose the word school, which means to train, to
educate, and to discipline. You can
learn to control anger.
Anger
is dangerous in that it limits your ability to think rationally. One morning a
friend called me and briefly described a situation which didn’t make a lot of
sense to me. As I learned later, she was withholding essential information.
Anyway, her voice was somewhere between sobbing and yelling. She asked me what
she could do to control the anger she was feeling. I said, “How angry are you?
Are you mad, angry, or feeling rage?”
How
do you define rage?” she asked.
“Rage
is anger intensified to violence,” I said.
“I
just called my husband’s boss and yelled at him” she confessed. “I have never
felt like this before in my life. I feel out of control.”
So
we talked until she felt she could deal with the situation. A month or so
later, she thanked me for helping her that morning and said, “I never want to
get that angry again. My emotions and body seemed separate from my brain. I can
see how I could actually hurt someone. I scared myself. I didn’t know I could
feel such emotion and act so irrationally.”
Most anger is an unintelligent waste of energy, emotion,
and time. The following really happened: A man and his friend were golfing.
Golfing to this man was serious business. At the second tee, he swung. The ball
went farther than he anticipated, and he didn’t see where it landed. A long
string of obscenities and curses polluted the green. A golf course worker who
was standing nearby saw the ball land.”Go look in the cup,” he said to the
angry man. The golfer couldn’t see the ball because he had hit a hole in one!
He could have saved all that negative emotion by simply taking a minute to find
the ball. I hate to imagine the other things this man got angry at if not being
able to see where a golf ball landed caused that level of anger. Becoming angry over not being able to
see a golf ball shows the golfer has a level of anger that lies right under the
surface and is easily, very easily triggered. If he gets that angry over a golf
swing, what’s he like when something major goes wrong. When this degree of
anger is evidenced, anger management classes and or professional help may be
needed to resolve anger tendencies and habits, but it can’t hurt to try simpler
solutions before seeking professional help. Perhaps some of the following ideas
may also help:
· Pray. Catholics have a prayer for this purpose:
“O Lord, must I fear Your wrath?
Retribution is Yours by right!
May I never dishonour Your
Divinity,
My soul seeking to maintain Your
love.
Shape my being into earnest
kindness,
A reflection of Your perfection.
Grant me the grace of
self-control,
That I may not display any anger.
Should I have such an outburst,
Instantly remind me to seek
redress,
For such is offensive to You.
Anger is Yours alone to avenge!”
Or you can express your feelings to God in your
own simple words. “Father in Heaven, Please help me. Help me control my
anger.”
· Speak
softer. “Let husband and wife never speak in loud tones to each other, unless
the house is on fire” (David O. McKay, Stepping
Stones to an Abundant Life, 294). If you turn up the volume on your
voice, it’s just like saying, “I’m losing control. When you feel your anger
and voice simultaneously rising, consciously stop and listen to your own
voice. If what you hear is yelling or screaming, stop. Take a deep breath and
start speaking in a more controlled volume. Many people also start talking
faster when they become angry. Slow down. Your brain will have more chance to
give you helpful ideas if you are thinking more and speaking slower.
(Speaking less is also a good idea. You mother was right again. If you can’t
say something nice, don’t say anything at all.) If someone is becoming angry
at you, lowering the tone of your voice can help. Usually the other person
will match your volume without even noticing it. When voices are in control,
anger is more controlled.
· Use
your smile. From chapter nine, “Feed Your Agency with Happiness,” you know
that the physical act of smiling has a positive effect on brain functions.
Here are a few additional facts. There are two kinds of smiles—Duchenne and
non-Duchenne—genuine and fake. A Duchenne smile not only pulls up the corners
of the mouth but also causes a wrinkling around the eyes, and that’s how you
can tell a real smile from a counterfeit. The non-Duchenne only involves the
mouth. An unattributed proverb says: “You
don't smile because you are happy, you are happy because you smile.” There is
evidence that negative emotions, even grief, are reduced by smiling.
· Listen.
As mentioned above, listen to yourself and your tone of voice. More
importantly, listen to what others are saying. Listen for neutral ground or
commonalities to resolve the issue. Listen for feelings. Listen with empathy.
Listen, and while you are listening, notice that you are quiet. Anger can be
reduced by quiet. Listen while the emotions you are feeling dissipate. Let
your anger out into open space where it can do no harm. A beautiful idea is
found in the Bible, the book of Psalms: “Be still and know that I am God”
(Psalm 42:10).
· Talk
it through. From the talk quoted earlier, ElRay L. Christiansen gave this
little rhyme: “A little explained, a little endured, a little passed over,
and the quarrel is cured.” One way talking things out has helped in my
marriage is when we walk and talk. Somehow the parallel action of moving
side-by-side has been greatly beneficial.
· Ask
for a hug. About ten years ago, I heard Dr. Laura Schlessinger take a call on
her radio talk show from a woman who often became angry at her husband and
children. Dr. Laura suggested a plan. From my memory, it went like this: “The
next time you begin to feel anger, stop the anger midstream and ask someone
to give you a hug. Try it for a few days and report back.” When the woman
called back, she told about the first time she tried using a hug to
neutralize anger. She said she was playing with her three young children and
tending her hyperactive nephew when she started getting angry. She said she
decided to try Dr. Laura’s suggestion and said to her eight-year-old son,
“Mama needs a hug.” The request took the child by surprise. He hesitated. The
mother said that fear struck her as she realized that he might refuse. Then
he ran to her. She said her anger dissolved as she hugged him back? The woman
went on to tell how another time she called a friend for a telephone hug.
Again the anger was calmed.
· Remove
yourself from the situation, if you feel out of control. If you can’t
physically remove yourself, go somewhere in your brain. The old suggestion of
counting to ten is a way to temporarily remove yourself from the trigger, and
that’s often long enough for your good sense to override an out-of-control angry
response. Counting to ten is a very anger-neutral idea and diverts your
attention to something else.
· Refuse
to be detonated by external or internal triggers. Even a bomb can’t explode
without something to ignite it. Pay attention; become more self-aware.
· Use
your justified anger to do something constructive. That’s how MADD, Mothers
Against Drunk Drivers, began. About thirty years ago a mother with a broken
heart vowed to do something about her daughter’s death. She would fight
against the evil that took her daughter—a drunk driver. She began a most
successful grassroots organization. Who can calculate the number of deaths
that didn’t happen because one mother kept her anger focused for a positive
good. Today, no one considers drunk driving as acceptable behavior.
· Get
help. When your angry episodes continue and the self-help ideas suggested here
don’t help, you may need to enroll in an anger management course. You must
learn to control your anger before it controls you. Type “anger management”
into your search engine and different course options taught in your vicinity
will come up.
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Agency-Preserving
Principles
Take wisdom and counsel from those who have
walked the road of life before you.
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“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
“For
every minute you remain angry, you give up sixty seconds of peace of mind.”
Ralph Waldo Emerson |
Never believe you will be the exception to the
laws of nature.
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“According
to a study from Ohio State University, those who had less control over their
anger tended to heal more slowly from wounds. Researchers gave blisters to 98
participants and found that, after 8 days, those who had less control over
their anger also tended to be slower healers. In addition, those participants
also tended to have more cortisol
(a stress hormone)
in their system during the blistering procedure, suggesting that they may be
more stressed by difficult situations as well.
“Another study from Harvard School of
Public Health studied hostility in men and found that those with higher rates
of hostility not only had poorer pulmonary functioning (breathing problems),
but experienced higher rates of decline as they aged”
(http://stress.about.com/od/stresshealth/a/anger_problems.htm).
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Know you will harvest what you sow.
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Anger has been in the
world since Cane killed Abel. They were brothers. The best place to learn
anger management is in the home. The best example is parents who control
their anger and never use anger to control others.
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Learn the lessons of history so you won’t repeat
the mistakes.
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“One
dangerous myth about an ‘anger problem’ is that it only involves aggression,
abuse, hurting people, or destroying property. Such behaviors are merely the
extreme end of the anger spectrum, indicating but one of many kinds of anger
problems.
Though
we associate extreme behaviors with anger, in reality most of the anger we
experience in the course of our lives is unconscious. You are never aware of most of your anger. By
the time you do know that you're resentful or angry, it's already in an
advanced stage, when the techniques taught in anger management classes – ‘managing’ angry feelings and arousal
- run the risk of being too little too late.
“A
more viable target for prevention of anger problems is the subtle types of
anger that lie outside conscious awareness. Subtle anger forms the
undercurrent for the waves of overt anger that cause more infamous acting out
behavior like aggression, abuse, etc. Without the chronic, low-grade ebb and
flow of subtle anger, there would be very little violence and abuse”
(www.psychologytoday.com/blog/anger-in-the-age-entitlement/200901/anger-problems-prevention)
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Find
the power in resisting impulse, persisting, and delaying gratification.
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“One
sure sign of an anger problem, whether hidden or subtle or obvious, is
feeling like all your troubles are the fault of someone else. If it seems
that other people are always trying to put you down or push your buttons, you
may be a reactaholic, in which case your thoughts, feelings, and behavior are
controlled by whomever or whatever you're reacting to at the moment. The more
reactive you are, the more powerless you feel; anger is in many ways a cry of
powerlessness” (www.psychologytoday.com/blog/anger-in-the-age-entitlement/200901/anger-problems-prevention). Resist this thought pattern, and as you do
instead of feeling powerlessness you will feel a power beginning to give you
confidence.
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Develop
personal integrity and make moral decisions.
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Controlling
anger is part of integrity. As you build more integrity into your life, you
will have the ability to address any anger you feel by taking responsibility
for your anger and by resisting the urge to become angry. More integrity will
lead to more power to persist in achieving a level of compassion for others
that will lessen the level of anger you feel. There will be times you will be
legitimately frustrated or sad, but you will not want to hurt others, not
emotionally, not intellectually, not physically. As you resist becoming
angry, you will have more self-control.
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Know
that others see things you don’t and welcome their perspectives.
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If someone tells you that
you have an anger problem, welcome their perspective and do something about
it.
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Work,
Work, Work.
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Don’t try to control your anger. Try
is lazy. Only when you work to control your anger will you be successful.
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Make
goals, write them down, use failure avoidance, prioritize, avoid
procrastination.
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As you become less angry,
less often, you will like yourself better, and you will be more able to make
a difference in others’ lives. The less anger you have inside you, the more
agency you will have. As you make and achieve goals without anger, more
options and more opportunities will open to you.
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Value
yourself. Know you can make a difference. Do good to feel good.
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As you eliminate anger
from your personality, you will feel better about yourself. When your anger
turns into helping someone else, you become an example to others. Use
positive sources of anger to better society, of which Mothers Against Drunk
Drivers is an excellent example.
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Develop
a happy inner core.
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Good
humor helps develop a happy inner core. Mark Twain said: “When angry, count
to four; when very angry, swear.”
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Develop
the backbone to say “NO!”
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“Expressing
anger is a form of public littering” (Willard Gaylin). Say “no” to the first
intimations of anger. Stay off the anger ladder.
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