Managing Anger

Simple Steps to Dealing with Frustration and Threat

Gael Lindenfield

• Publisher: Thorsons
• Year: 2011
• Print ISBN:
  9780007100347
• eBook ISBN:
  9780007404513
• Topic: Medicine
• Subtopic: Psychiatry & Mental Health

Contains images best viewed on a tablet.

Simple Steps to deal positively with anger and frustration.

Anger is a natural emotional response to threat, hurt, frustaration or loss. As such, it's a healthy survival tool – 'Letting off Steam' is a vital means of releasing a build-up of emotional pressure.

But anger is also a dangerous force. Uncontrolled fury can lead to rash words, violence and destructiveness, while repressed rage can result in bitterness, stress, misery and guilt. Both extremes can seriously damage your health.

In 'Managing Anger', Gael Lindenfield clearly explains the effects of anger on our minds and bodies, and suggets ways of dealing both with our own anger and that of other people.

TWO
Managing Our Own Anger

In this part I will outline a six-step self-help programme designed to help you manage your own anger more effectively.

As the programme involves doing some written exercise work, it might be helpful to have the following basic materials to hand as you read:

– an exercise book or notepad

– a pen, pencil and coloured felt tips

– a pocket file for keeping written work and collected papers.

CHAPTER 6
Step 1: Challenge and Change Your Attitudes

This first step is designed to help you to re-programme your mind to think more positively about anger. Think for a moment how comfortable you feel with this statement:

Anger can be a positive force, provided that it is managed sensitively and assertively.

As you have reached this stage in the book, I assume that you are likely to accept such a view. In fact, you may well be thinking that you do not even need to start this programme at Step 1! But, are you sure that your ‘auto-pilot’ is as convinced as your conscious mind? If your handling of anger is still unassertive, I doubt it.

I know only too well from my own personal struggle how difficult it is to shift negative thinking habits, especially if they have been set in our brains in our early days and continue to be reinforced in our current life. Unfortunately conditioned attitudes are very rarely transformed by ‘overnight’ insights; they usually need to be ‘chipped away’ and gradually replaced over an extended period of time. So, even if you have already been converted to ‘the cause’, you could use these exercises to firm up your resolve and motivation.

Establish Your Rights

OUR RIGHTS IN RELATION TO ANGER

In an earlier book, Assert Yourself, I listed 12 basic human rights which I personally felt we should, as assertive people, respect both in ourselves and others. I think it is worth repeating them here:

1. The right to ask for what we want (realizing that the other person has the right to say ‘No.’)
2. The right to have an opinion, feelings and emotions and to express them appropriately.
3. The right to make statements which have no logical basis and which we do not have to justify (e.g. intuitive ideas and comments).
4. The right to make our own decisions and to cope with the consequences.
5. The right to choose whether or not to get involved in the problems of someone else.
6. The right not to know about something and not to understand.
7. The right to make mistakes.
8. The right to be successful.
9. The right to change our mind.
10. The right to privacy.
11. The right to be alone and independent.
12. The right to change ourselves and be assertive people.

This list has proved to be so successful in helping people to counter unassertive habits that I felt a similar one would be a very useful tool with which to fight the negative programming with which most us are burdened in relation to anger.

I must, however, emphasize that the list below is my list and it may not suit your own values and philosophy. If you don’t agree with it, change it, or abandon it completely and rewrite your own! After all, the purpose of this book is not to tell you what ought to kindle your anger, but rather to help you manage your feelings, whatever they may be about. However, I also know that very many people are so cut off from their anger that they are actually unaware of what does, or could, make them angry – in other words, they have often lost sight of some of their own values and have forgotten what rights they actually want to hold for themselves and other people. If you are in any way like this, maybe you could use the following rights list as a working framework of values, at least until you have begun to firm up your own philosophy in relation to anger.

Note that in writing the list I have used the first person. There are two main reasons why I have chosen to do this.

Firstly, it is my experience that the vast majority of people who chose to do this kind of personal development work have more difficulty in respecting their own rights than the rights of others. In fact, very often they can be very adept at expressing their negative feelings on behalf of someone else – for example, they can be observed as parents standing up for ‘fair play’ for their children, while remaining ‘doormats’ in relation to their own needs, or as managers fighting ferociously for better conditions and pay for their staff while burning themselves out for an exploitative organization.

Secondly, I have used the first person because I want to emphasize the importance of ‘getting our own house in order’ before moving on to help or deal with others. I am totally convinced that becoming more aware of our own anger and learning to express it assertively is an essential prerequisite for being able both to handle other people’s anger sensitively and skilfully, and also to help others learn how to manage theirs.

My Assertive Anger Rights

1. I have a right to feel angry when I am frustrated.
2. I have a right to feel angry when I am disheartened.
3. I have a right to feel angry when I am hurt.
4. I have a right to feel angry when I am attacked.
5. I have a right to feel angry when I am oppressed.
6. I have a right to feel angry when I am exploited.
7. I have a right to feel angry when I am manipulated.
8. I have a right to feel angry when I am cheated.
9. I have a right to feel angry when my needs are ignored.
10. I have a right to feel angry when I am let down.
11. I have a right to feel angry when I am rejected.
12. I have a right to feel angry when my health, welfare, happiness or peace is threatened.
13. I have a right to feel angry when my survival is threatened.
14. I have a right to feel angry when I see other people’s rights being abused or threatened.
15. I have a right to feel angry when I see anything which I value being damaged or abused.
16. I have a right to feel angry when I lose someone or something which I value.
17. I have the right to express my anger safely and assertively.
18. I have the right to choose not to express my anger and to accept responsibility for any consequences of my choice.
19. I have the right to encourage others to express their anger safely and assertively.
20. I have the right to protect myself from the passive or aggressive anger of others.

EXERCISE: MY RIGHTS

• Read the list of rights through several times, making notes as you go along. You may want to cross out some or add others.
• Make a list of people whom you observe owning these rights and using their anger in a safe, constructive way. These people could be friends, relatives, colleagues or famous people. Remember that you are not looking for perfect role models but rather people who do, at least in some areas of their life, manage to use their anger effectively. If you can’t think of many examples immediately, spend a week observing and getting ideas on the subject from other people. The start of the list might be as follows:

  – my colleague Jill for standing up for herself at work

  – Nelson Mandela for taking on the South African government

  – Diane Lamplugh using her anger at her daughter’s disappearance/murder to fight for more protection for working women

  – Bob Geldof and others campaigning for the abolition of third world debt

• Mark the rights which you consider are most relevant to you and your life, noting down specific examples whenever possible, for example:

  – having my purse stolen (Right 8)

  – being asked to do much more work than I am paid for (Right 6)

  – pollution and waste of energy (Rights 12, 13, 14)

  – racism and sexism (Rights 12, 13, 14, 15, 16 and 19)

  – my encroaching deafness (1, 2, 3, 12 and 16), etc.

• Select one of these rights to focus on for the next week. You may want, for example, to look at one which you have noticed is being continually threatened or abused. A step-by-step approach is essential – don’t be tempted to set yourself up for failure by taking on too much at once. To aid your memory, you can write it out on a poster and place it in a prominent position at home or at work. Spend as much time as you can thinking, observing and talking around the subject of this right. Note down examples of its being both upheld and abused by yourself or others. Someone working on Right 12 might start their list like this:

  – smoking in public places

  – not being informed fully about cut-backs in services

  – the hi-fi upstairs

  – telephone calls re. work after 10 p.m.

  – someone’s provocative flirting with my partner

  – apathy over the election

  – mobile phones ringing on trains

Analyse your attitudes

ASSESS THE PRICE OF BEING ‘TOO NICE’

Once you have re-evaluated your attitudes to anger, the next step is to give your motivation a boost by reflecting on the price you are paying for holding back on acknowledging or expressing your angry feelings. In Part 1, I discussed how both our physical and mental health can be adversely affected by repressed anger, but there can be other costs as well. Let’s review some of the most common negative consequences of being ‘too nice’.

We Block Our Potential for Personal Growth

If we are seen to be too ‘nice’ a person, we are not likely to receive open and honest feedback from other people. Most of us find it much easier to express hostile feelings to people we are sure ‘can give as good as they get’. I know that I have to summon up all my super-assertive powers to criticize even mildly those smiling paragons of even temper! But many people who haven’t had my advantage of years of assertiveness training may find themselves even more inclined to smile away their irritation.

If people perceive us as ‘too nice’ to hurt or upset, we may be deprived of valuable information about, for example, our behaviour, appearance or work. However self-aware and self-critical we may be, it is not possible to spot some of our own most ingrained bad habits. We all need genuine feedback from other people, both positive and negative, if we are concerned about improving ourselves and developing our potential.

We Block the Potential Growth of Others

If we let others ‘get away with murder’ they will never have the opportunity of learning from their mistakes either! This could be a very tough price to pay if we have the responsibility for helping others grow and develop their potential. The most obvious, and perhaps important, example of this is as parents, and we shall be looking at the importance of managing anger well in this role in a later chapter. But there are many other illustrations of this price being paid in other roles, for example:

– the ‘nice’ bosses who are hopeless at ‘telling people off’, so their staff never improve their performance

– the ‘nice’ doctors who don’t want to offend their patients so they never hear the truth about the damage they are...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• List of Exercises
• Introduction
• ONE Understanding More About Anger
• TWO Managing Our Own Anger
• THREE How to Deal with Other People’s Anger
• FOUR Preventative Strategies
• Further Reading
• Index
• Acknowledgements
• About the author:
• Copyright
• About the Publisher