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When it comes to anger, control is important so that you do not go off the deep end.  This is what it means to stay calm.

Staying calm does not mean that you stop being angry.

What you want to learn is how to both manage and master your anger so that it works for you and you can use the energy it gives you to correct a negative situation.

This is what I mean when I talk about strategically deploying your anger.

Let me give you some background information so you understand what anger is and what happens to you when get angry.  I will then give you some suggestions you can use to help you master your anger so that you can say what you need to and deal with the situation.

Anger is one of the 6 basic emotions (mad, sad, glad, fear, surprise and disgust) that humans have had since time began.  The job of anger is to prepare us to fight off threats that will harm us if not dealt with.  When we were living in caves, these threats were always real and usually were life threatening.  When angry, adrenaline is released into the body and prepares us for battle by giving us the energy we need to overpower our adversary

Fast forward to the 21st century.

Today, anger acts on  you the same way that it did for Mr. Caveman.

Your anger tells you that you perceive a threat to you.  Today, unlike for our ancestors, most threats are not survival based.  They are threats to our ego, our sense of right and wrong, our values and so forth.

I call these psychological threats.

With the above in mind, let’s take a look at what you can do.

• The suggestions I will be making sound simple to do and they are.
• However, they will not be easy to do in the situation when you are angry.
• Consequently, in order to use these suggestions, you will have to practice them.

This is a mistake that many writers make.

• The writer offers a strategy. The reader tries to implement the strategy.  Nothing changes. The reader feels more frustrated.
• I hope this does not happen to you, my readers.

Anger management:

You should practice moving into anger management as soon as you become aware that you are getting angry.

You manage your anger when you create both psychological and physical “space” between you and the person with whom you are interacting.

You create psychological space when you lower your initial arousal level so that you can respond rather than react to your situation. You do this by taking a deep breath as soon as you become aware of your anger.

There are two reasons for taking a deep breath.

1. The first reason is that the deep breath relaxes you physically and lowers your arousal (level of energy).  If you need to take several deep breaths, that is okay.

Most people tend to get over-energized in angry situations.  The deep breath helps to counter this,

2. The second reason is that the breath gives you a few seconds to collect your thoughts.  Your thoughts (perceptions) are what create the anger in the first place.

You create physical space by taking a step back from the other person.

You do this for two reasons.

1. First of all, it gives you some additional safe space if you need it.

2. Secondly, it sends a message to the other person that you are not a threat to them.

This physical space can be a small or a large step back.

Anger Mastery

Anger management involves lowering your level of arousal and most writers talk about anger management as an end goal.

I suggest you move on to anger mastery which involves resolving the situation in which you find yourself by either strategically deploying your anger if the threat is valid or letting go of the anger if you determine that you have misinterpreted the other person’s behavior.

When you master your anger, you attempt to assess the nature of the threat and choose your most adaptive response.

When you are in the middle of an interpersonal interaction the goal of which is to communicate your concerns, there are two assessments to be made:

1. On the one hand, you need to assess the validity of the threat that you perceive in the situation that is leading up to (not causing) your anger.
2. Secondly, if the other person is expressing anger (or its lesser cousin irritation), you should attempt to assess the threat that he (or she) perceives in you.

There are two reasons for assessing the nature of the perceived threat (both yours and theirs).

1. When you think about the threat, you give yourself a few moments to “calm down” a bit further and plan your response.

Note: You are not becoming less angry.  You are simply letting some of the energy go so you can take effective action.

As an analogy, when you are in your car, you slow down just enough to get around the curve.  Too much speed, you get in an accident.  You don’t stop the car, you just drop the level of energy (speed, in this case) to remain effective.

2. Thinking about your adversary’s perception of threat gives you an advantage in that it helps you manage your own anger by giving you some awareness of where their anger is coming from so you don’t take it personally and helps you deal with him or her.

If you can’t figure out what their threat is, this is okay.  You can still master your own anger.

You may decide that there is no real threat and just let go of your anger.

If you decide that the threat is real, you can use all of your energy to effectively deal with it.

As I said above, it is easier for me to make these suggestions then it is for you to implement them when you are angry and over-energized. But you can learn to implement them!

With this in mind, I suggest that you “practice” these strategies.

Here is how…

In the comfort of your own home,

A. Review the strategy in your mind ==>

1. As soon as I become aware of my anger, I will stop and take a deep breath.  If I need to, I’ll take two deep breaths.

2. Once my thoughts are more clear, I will think about the nature of the threat I perceive.  If I can, I’ll try to get a fix on his or her perceived threat.

3. As my thoughts continue to clear and my energy level drops just enough, I’ll engage him or her in conversation.

B. Next, think about the last time you got angry and did something that was not very effective ( like crying or screaming)==>

1.   Let’s say this is point B in the interaction.

2. Try to think back to point A when you first became aware of the anger.

3. Imagine yourself taking a deep breath and successfully implementing the strategy.

4. Do this several times.

C. You can also practice taking a deep breath with other feelings such as stress, anxiety and so forth.

The purpose is to give you a sense that you can do this (YOU CAN) so when you find yourself in the next angry encounter, you are more prepared to take effective action.

I welcome your comments.

You are probably wondering what an “anger” is.  And, rightly so. I am using the emotion of anger as a noun or as an event.  In other words, when you get angry, I am suggesting, for the sake of the discussion, that you are experiencing an “anger”.

In both of my Amazon bestselling books and other posts, I have written about anger  as an emotion that:

• communicates a specific message
• can be mastered
• can be strategically deployed to improve your life and your relationships.

Whenever I write about specific emotions, about emotions in general or about the model of emotions, I talk about all emotions, including anger, as tools.  This is a very useful metaphor because you use tools on a daily basis including your cell phone, your computer, your car, your TV remote and so forth. In the same way that you learn how to get the most out of your cell phone as a useful tool, you can learn how to get the most out of your anger as a useful tool.

While this model of emotions  remains useful, I want you to think about the display of anger as an “event”. In other words, your getting angry at someone is an anger event (or an “anger”) and you can get a better understanding of anger by analyzing this event and learning from it.  This is true whether it is your anger or anger directed at you.

My goal is provide many different ways of understanding anger not because one is better than the other (They are all effective.) but because one metaphor may work  better for you than another.  You pick which model works best for you.

Or use some parts of each model.

Events

Let’s say you are setting up an “event” such as a book promotion, a soft-opening for a new business, a surprise birthday party for a good friend, a plan to study for an upcoming exam or a trip to the store to do grocery shopping.

Every event can be analyzed in terms of at least three elements:

• What is the purpose you wish the event to accomplish?
• What set of actions do you need to complete in order to fulfill the purpose of the event?
• What is the outcome that you can measure to determine whether or not your event was “successful” in fulfilling the purpose?

This “outcome” is what happens after the event has taken place.

Anger as an event.

Purpose

Anger, as an emotion, has two purposes.

• One purpose of anger is to alert you to and prepare you to deal with a perceived threat.  Typically, this threat will involve a specific goal of yours, a basic value such as respect or your view of right and wrong, your finances, your view of “territory” including your personal space, your home, your family and so forth.
• The second purpose of anger is to warn others that you perceive them as a threat, that you are prepared to defend yourself and that you are ready to go to war to eliminate the threat.

Actions needed

When you get angry, you choose the amount of force needed to eliminate the perceived threat.

If the threat is relatively minor (yet important enough to be seen as a threat), you will act accordingly including engaging the other person by expressing your concerns and so forth.

If you perceive a major threat, you may go on “red alert”, fire up your “phasers”, and take your best shot. (Sorry for the Star Trek analogy.)

Measuring the outcome.

Once you have completed your “anger” (remember the event), you can look back on it and decide whether it was successful or not.

This is the step that most anger management approaches miss because they tend to focus on controlling the anger rather than mastering it as a strategic tool.

Your own anger.

Let’s go back to the events listed above and say that the specific event we are looking at is a trip to the store.

You go to the store, do your shopping, get home and realize that

1) you forgot to buy milk,

2) you spontaneously bought some items you really didn’t need (Think about all those goodies beckoning you on the shelves by the check-out counter.)or 3) you purchased some items you already had at home.

When you analyze your shopping event, you realize that you made some mistakes.  You did not make a comprehensive list and you were hungry when you went to the store. So, while you did get many of the items you needed (advantages), you had outcomes you didn’t want (disadvantages).

So, let’s look at your anger.

You get angry and, once you calm down, you look back on your anger event so that you can learn from it for next time.

Did you achieve your purpose in that the threat was eliminated without unnecessary collateral damages?

If you were ignored or criticized for your anger, or you ended up hurting someone physically or emotionally, or the threat was not nullified, then your anger was not completely successful and you will need to make some adjustments the next time you perceive a threat and get angry.

Some relevant questions.

• Did you misperceive the nature of the threat?
• Did you miscalulate the amount of force you needed to deal with the threat?
• Was your message misunderstood, misinterpreted or ignored?

Someone else’s anger

I wrote  three part series of posts entitled “You are the target of someone else’s anger.”  which covered this topic in great detail.  You can get to these posts by clicking the February and March 2017 tabs in the archives.

The short version is that you can get a better understanding of this other individual by analyzing his anger (event).

Some relevant questions to gain understanding.

• What is the nature of the threat that he perceived as he interacted with you?
• Did he correctly interpret something you did?
• Did he misunderstand what you were doing or saying?
• Did he want me to give him some space (put me on notice)?

Some important questions to determine your response.

• What is my goal in this interaction?
• What is the best way to communicate with him in this situation?
• If I was “wrong”, how can I effectively apologize?
• If I did nothing wrong, how can I help him understand what I have done?
• If I can’t directly deal with this person because of his “superior” authority, power, or potential to “harm” me, how can I safely accomplish my goals with “indirect” action?

I think you get the idea.

When you get angry, you set in motion a series of consequences, actions, and reactions that are directly related to your “anger”.  This is inevitable.

Your responsibility, after an anger, is to analyze whether you were effective or ineffective in resolving the situation which elicited your emotion and resulted in (not caused) your anger.

When you learn from your experience, you have the opportunity to change your behavior the next time you perceive a threat, your “anger” becomes more adaptive, and you avoid making the same mistakes.

You can become a better..

• shopper
• event planner
• student
• angerer

I welcome your comments.

 

 

 

 

In my most recent Amazon Best Seller Book, Beyond Anger Management: Master Your Anger as a Strategic Tool, I discuss the Anger Mastery Cycle.

The Anger Mastery Cycle:

By the way, you can download a copy of the Anger Mastery Cycle by scrolling up to the top of the page, looking over to the Right hand side of the page and clicking on the “Anger Mastery Cycle PDF”.

Once you have labelled the emotion you are experiencing as anger and moved into anger management which involves lowering your arousal and creating both physical and psychological distance between you and the perceived threat, you can then move into anger mastery.

You master your anger when you take a moment to assess and validate the nature of the threat.

There are only two options here:

• You are expressing anger and there is a genuine threat.
• You are expressing anger but there is no threat.

If the threat is genuine and your initial perception is accurate, you stay angry and you choose how you will respond to the threat.

If you are angry and there is no threat, there are three possibilities:

1. You have misunderstood or misperceived the situation in which you find yourself
2. You are using anger as a secondary emotion
3. You are using anger as an instrumental emotion

If you have misunderstood or misperceived the situation, you can change your thoughts about what the interaction in which you find yourself. When you do this, the anger goes away because there is no threat.  This is what you want to do when your understanding of an interaction changes.

Secondary and Instrumental Anger

This is the real focus of this post.

Both secondary and instrumental anger look like valid anger but do not function as valid anger.  There are at least three reasons for this.

1. Definition:

Valid anger is an emotion, the function of which is to alert you and prepare you to deal with a threat you believe you can eliminate.

Secondary anger is an emotion that is deployed to substitute for another emotion you would rather not feel

Instrumental anger is deployed as a blunt force instrument designed to manipulate another person into doing what you want them to do.

2. Threat:

With valid anger, there is an observable threat.

With  both secondary and instrumental anger, there may not be an observable threat to your goals, physical integrity, or basic values.

3. Function:

The function of valid anger is to prepare you for battle.

The function of secondary anger is to insulate you from experiencing uncomfortable emotions.

The function of instrumental anger is compensate for inadequate social skills and facilitate you getting your way.

Some explanation:

Anger, by evolutionary design, is a powerful emotion.  This is true in both how we experience anger and in how our anger is experienced by those with whom we interact.

This is the key to understanding secondary and instrumental anger.

Secondary, or substitute, anger.

For men, primarily, emotions such as hurt, anxiety, and guilt are experienced as uncomfortable. With these emotions,  a man can experience himself as vulnerable, exposed and even weak. Vulnerability and exposure, while part of the message of hurt, anxiety and guilt which can be utilized to master these emotions, typically elicits a desire to avoid these uncomfortable emotions. Men are not used to these feelings.

Anger, on the other hand, elicits a feeling of power.  When angry, men are prepared to take on the world and go to war.  In addition, men are socialized to experience and are usually comfortable with anger.

Consequently, a man is motivated to substitute anger for feelings of hurt, anxiety and guilt. Hence, anger as a  secondary emotion.

• The upside of secondary anger is that a man can avoid uncomfortable feelings.
• The downside of secondary anger is that it is dishonest and that it prevents its user from dealing with the issues at hand about which the adaptive emotions of hurt, anxiety and guilt are alerting him and attempting to prepare him to address.

Instrumental, dishonest, or manipulative, anger.

Anger, by evolutionary design, prepared us to deal with a survival based threat. We were set up for fight or flight.

Well, “fighting”, which involves confrontation, can take many forms.  We can go to war and physically engage the aggressor. Or, we can display our superior force and hope the aggressor backs off or disengages.

• You see this in movies where an aggressor assesses the armies of an enemy and decides whether armed aggression will be successful or not.
• You can see it when you look at videos of “aggressive facial expressions of  pacific islanders”.
• And,  you can see it in news stories of people backing away from someone on the street who appears to be angry and aggressive.

Anger, with its accompanying facial and physical expressions, communicates the message that you are a formidable and powerful individual who should not be messed with. Our cave dwelling ancestors may have lived to fight another day if their display of anger “convinced” a marauding predator to leave and go somewhere else.

Based on this function of anger, men, more so than women but women as well, can use a display of anger to manipulate another person to change their behavior and conform in order to avoid the wrath of the “angry” person.

Please note that I am not talking about the display of valid anger.  If there is a valid threat, you experience and display anger, and the threat is neutralized, you have mastered your anger. This is honest, or valid, anger.

However, when you are not angry because there is no valid threat and you display anger because you know the other person will submit to you, then you are using anger to manipulate that person. You are using anger as an instrument to accomplish a specific end.  This is dishonest or manipulative anger.

Hence, it is instrumental anger.

Your next step

If your goal is to master your own anger or the anger of another person, the most important question you can ask, in the presence of anger, is this: “What is the perceived threat?”

If you are using anger as secondary or instrumental emotion, it will become clear to you that there either is no significant threat or that you are experiencing an uncomfortable or unfamiliar feeling informing you that an issue you are facing person needs to be addressed.

• Hurt: Someone has done something that leaves you feeling interpersonally wounded or damaged and you need to address this with them.
• Anxiety: There is a future possible threat that you need to evaluate and possibly prepare to confront.
• Guilt: You have done something wrong that you need to take responsibility for and move to address and make right.
• Manipulation: You are using anger to manipulate another person either because anger seems more efficient in the moment or you lack either the power or the interpersonal skills to interact with this person and facilitate their changing their behavior.

Once you identify your anger that isn’t anger, you can choose to approach the situation in which you find yourself in a different manner.

You might have to acquire some new skill sets to do this.  But, it can be done.

If the secondary or instrumental anger is being displayed by someone elce, questioning the nature of the threat should begin the process of understanding and mastering their anger for your and their benefit.  Just be aware that a man covering up feelings of vulnerability with secondary may not be willing to give up his cover.

I welcome your comments.

 

 

This is an interesting question that was asked on Quora.com. The question presupposes that anger can be “saved”.

For this to occur, anger would have to be a source of energy like electricity that could be stored or it might be an emotional placeholder that could be held in stasis and returned to at a later date much like a document that is “saved” until it is retrieved to be worked on or utilized in some fashion.

The quick answer is that you can’t save anger and chronic anger is unhealthy.

What actually is anger?

• Anger is a primary emotion, the function of which is to alert us to and prepare us to deal with a threat we believe we can eliminate if we throw enough force at it.
• Anger, as an emotion, is a primitive threat detector. This is how anger evolved, how it worked when we lived in caves, and how it continues to operate today.
• Anger prepares us to go to battle. In “cave days”, all threats were survival based (would kill us) so being revved up for war was necessary, appropriate, and life saving.
• Today, our threats tend to be psychological so, while it may initially be useful to prepare for battle, studies show that it is counterproductive and even unhealthy to stay in a constant state of anger.
• Anger is a motivator and, within a specific context, provides us with the energy necessary to confront and overpower a threat.

How does Anger happen and what are its consequences?

The emotion of anger follows a specific cycle.

In my most recent Amazon best selling book Master Your Anger as a Strategic Tool, I discuss the Anger Mastery Cycle which starts with the unconscious scanning of your surroundings for threat, going into fight or flight when a threat is perceived, managing your anger by reducing your arousal and creating both a physical and psychological space between you and the “threat” and then mastering your anger by assessing the nature and validity of the “threat” and choosing an effective response.

By the way, you can download a copy of the anger mastery cycle and the first two chapters of my book by scrolling up to the Welcome post.

Secondly, anger prepares your body for war.

Chemicals are injected into your body which heighten your awareness, reduce your unimportant bodily functions such as digestion, and increase the ability of your blood to clot.  If you were facing a saber toothed tiger who wanted to eat you, you would want to be able to focus your attention on the beast, be protected from blood loss, be able to run away from the danger and so forth.  You wouldn’t care about digesting your lunch if you were about to become his lunch. These chemicals also give you the energy to fight off the threat.

It is important to note that many studies have noted that these physical changes when associated with chronic anger can have severe negative impacts on your body. In other words, chronic anger can make you sick.

Thirdly, you cannot “save” anger.

The emotion of anger is situation specific and is elicited when you perceive a threat. There is no organ in the body which stores anger.

Anger is elicited when you subconsciously perceive a threat or you “recreate” that threat in your mind when you dwell on a previous event. While it may seem like you have “saved” your anger, in fact, you generate “new” anger every time you revisit the threat. And, if you generate new anger often enough, it is experienced as chronic.

So, what can you do?

Well, if you perceive a valid threat, you can use the energy of your immediate anger to develop and execute a plan to deal with the threat. This is how you master and deploy your anger as a strategic tool. This assumes that you are in a position to directly deal with the threat.

Sometimes, however, as I discovered when I asked many professional women about anger, it is not always possible to directly deal with a threat. This is because there may be unwanted consequences to the direct expression of appropriate anger or you do not have the status to directly deal with the threat. If this is the case, you use the energy of your anger to plan an indirect approach to the threat. You are strategically using your anger but you are not directly expressing it. This is not the same as suppressing your anger which would involve invalidating it and pushing it down inside of you. Suppressing your anger can have both unwanted physical and psychological consequences.

If you experience chronic anger, I suggest you take some time to really look at the unresolved threat you keep reliving and develop a plan to either deal with it or accept that there is nothing you can do about it, forgive the person who hurt you, and get on with your life. Forgiving, by the way, is not absolving this person of responsibility for their actions. Rather, forgiving another person only means that you psychologically remove yourself from, or let go of, that person rather than carry them around with you in your head every where you go.

I worked with young women, all of whom had been physically, sexually, and/or emotionally abused. Forgiving was the only way they could grow psychologically and move on. Again, this is not absolving anyone of responsibility for their actions. Nor, is it forgetting any healthy lessons that one needs to remember from past experiences. Nor, is it putting something in the past and not taking any action in the present to prevent any future actions from taking place. Forgiveness only means that you are no longer negatively impacting yourself regarding a situation you can’t change. If you go to March 2017, in the archives above, you can access a post on forgiveness.

When you forgive another individual, you let go of your anger as there is no immediate threat that you can go to war with and eliminate.  However, as you want to remain alert to any future threat, you could become committed and determined. You may choose to experience the emotion of commitment in that you are determined to never submit yourself to the kinds of threats you experienced in the past.  Determination will motivate you just as much as anger will and it is a more effective and sustainable emotion.

In summary, anger, as an emotion, is situation specific and, while anger energizes and motivates you to fight off a threat, the emotion doesn’t act as a “place holder” and the energy that is generated in your body can’t be saved.

I welcome your comments.