Blog – Page 24 – The Emotions Doctor

Forgiveness

In a recent series of 3 posts, I discussed a six step process for mastering anger that is directed at you by another person. Step 4 in that process involves forgiving the other person. As the concept of forgiveness is often misunderstood, I’d like to elaborate on it in this post.

Generally speaking, there are two perspectives you can take to assess and give meaning to the actions of another that:

hurt you (or has hurt you in the past)
you believe are not right for them to do
you view as inconsiderate and unnecessary
you believe call for retaliation.

Perhaps, you have a history of physical or sexual abuse that you can’t stop thinking about. Or, someone has done something to you that continues to upset you and ruin your relationship with that person eventhough they may have apologized.

Why is perspective important?

The perspective you adopt regarding what the other person has done will act as a filter through which you assess both the nature of their behavior and the options you choose regarding what you will do about that behavior.

One perspective involves subjectively viewing and assessing the interaction from a personal point of view. When you are being subjective, you look at what is going on through the lens of your own emotions, prior beliefs and experiences, and prejudices. The subjective perspective tends to distort how you view your situation.

In other words: They did something wrong and you continue to be righteously pissed off about it.

It is important to note that emotions by their nature, are highly subjective.

As I discuss in both of my most recent Amazon best seller books Beyond Anger Management: Master Your Anger as a Strategic Tool, the message of anger is that you perceive a current threat that you believe you can eliminate if you throw enough force at it. You perceive a threat, the threat, in your mind, truly exists, and your anger is valid.

The problem is that the behavior is in the past and can’t be changed and your anger, in the present, can have negative impacts on your body and your relationships.

The second perspective involves objectively assessing what is going on. You are being objective when you, to the degree that you can, attempt to assess what is going on with you from the point of view of an unbiased observer. You temporarily put your emotions aside and try to understand how this observer is viewing the situation, how you might be overreacting or misunderstanding what is happening, and how your initial subjective emotional reaction might be inaccurate.

In other words: What is going on with me that I am still pissed off with them?

The Anger Mastery Cycle, a copy of which is available above, calls for us to move into anger management after the initial emotional reaction. Anger management involves reducing our emotional arousal.

Anger Mastery is the next step after anger management and entails assessing the nature of the threat. It is in this step that forgiveness becomes relevant.

Here is the reasoning connecting forgiveness, objectivity and mastering the anger that someone directs at you:

In order to be able to effectively interact with another person you need to keep your own arousal level down and accurately assess what is going on. This is an important part of anger mastery and involves taking a deep breath and taking a step back from the situation.

Forgiveness moves the process of mastering the anger at another person one step forward.

Regarding forgiveness, most therapists and people in general do not understand what forgiveness is. You and most other people

believe that forgiving someone involves absolving them of any bame or responsibility for their actions. This is what happens when your past debts are “forgiven”. They are erased. Or, when in the Bible (Disclaimer: I am not a biblical expert.) when Christ forgave someone’s sins and that person was “born again”..

When I suggested to the young women I worked with in the California Department of Corrections-Juvenile Division that they forgive the men who abused them (often their fathers) or the women who abandoned them (or worse), they often refused stating that these men (women) did not deserve to be forgiven for what they did.

Psychologically, people do not want to forgive others because it doesn’t feel right that the other person should be “let off the hook” for what they did. It just doesn’t feel like justice has been served.

And, maybe it hasn’t. But, psychologically, this is not the point.

There is an old joke about a guy who comes home very late from a round of golf. His wife questions him and he says. “It’s all Harry’s fault.” After additional questioning, the guy explains that Harry died on the second hole and they had to carry him for the rest of the 16 holes of golf.

When someone holds on to feelings about what someone has done in the past, they carry that person (Harry) with them everywhere they go. One’s feelings about the past can color the perception of threat in such a way that one may see a current threat where none exists and remain angry.

As I am using the word, forgiveness means (psychologically) “letting go”. When you forgive another person for what they have done to you, you are choosing to disengage emotionally from that person and their actions. This letting go frees you up to decide the best way for you to deal with this individual and their behavior in your current context.

There is no absolution of guilt or responsibility. Rather, you decide that you can’t change the past and you will move on with your life. Psychological forgiveness is for (and exclusively about) you and has

nothing to do with the person (or people) you are forgiving. In fact, they may never know you’ve forgiven them.

Forgiveness allows you to be more objective about the interaction between you and the other person. In being objective, you have the opportunity to use the energy of your feelings about the situation to both choose and implement your best option to resolve the issues you are facing. Two options you have include resolving issues with this person (if the person is available and willing), or seeing your situation as an I.W.B.N.I (We will talk about this in a future post.) and doing nothing more.

So, forgive them for you so that you can let go of the emotional baggage (your Harry) and get on with your life.

I welcome your comments.

Motivation: Master Your emotions to move you forward.

Motivation is the energy which moves you forward to start, work-on, and complete a project. The word emotion comes from the Latin word emovere which means to move out, stir up, agitate. When you feel motivated, you are energized, excited, or driven to accomplish a specific task.

You can be “motivated” by someone or something outside of (or external to) yourself. External motivation “pushes” you to accomplish a task. An example is your boss giving you a deadline.

You can also be motivated by an internal desire to accomplish a task because it is important to you for whatever reason. In this case, you can think of yourself as being pulled toward a future desirable “payoff”.

In some ways, being pushed is easier. However, being pulled is often more rewarding.

When I schedule an exam for my students and they study for it, the motivation can be external if their focus in on the deadline of the test and the negative consequences of not doing well or internal if their focus is on doing well because it is important to them to maintain a good grade point average (GPA).

External motivation can be negatively impacted if it is extreme and elicits resistance or resignation or disinterest if it is viewed as too difficult to obtain as in a poorly developed incentive system.

Internal motivation can also be negatively impacted.

On the one hand, the power of internal motivation can be negatively impacted or sabotaged by anxiety.

Secondly, the energy of internal motivation can increase or decrease. This fluctuation in the power of internal motivation can happen over time or it can happen if the task becomes more difficult then initially anticipated.

Here are three scenarios:

You get this great idea and, as you think about taking action and start to focus on all the possible things that could go wrong, you lose your motivation to act, get stuck, and procrastinate.
You have begun a project about which you are all excited and, at some point during the process, the level of your excitement begins to waver and you want to put the project aside.
You are motivated and working on a task and things are going very well. At some point, you encounter difficulties you did not anticipate. While you know you can get the job done, you begin to wonder if it is worth the effort.

Scenario #1

When you think about

asking your boss for a raise,
asking someone out on a date,
bringing up a sensitive topic of discussion with a spouse or a friend, assertively dealing with a vendor,
turning down an invitation to do something,
and so forth

and you find yourself hesitating because you are worried about the outcome, you are experiencing anxiety as “distress”.

As I discuss in my book Emotions as Tools: A Self Help Guide to Controlling Your Life not Your Feelings, anxiety is a future based emotion which informs you that you are thinking about a threat that might happen and are acting as if that threat will happen.

So, you get all excited because you believe you deserve a raise, have gathered all the facts you need, and have set a date on which you will go to your boss and ask for what you want. The closer you get to the date, the more you begin to think about all the possible bad outcomes that could occur and your motivation to act noticeably declines.

Not only that, but you may begin to focus only on the worst things that could happen. This is called catastrophising.

And, based on your desire to avoid experiencing these clearly negative outcomes, you decide not to ask for the raise.

Your anxiety about the future has stopped you in your tracks and it doesn’t occur to you that there might be a positive outcome and your boss will give you the raise.

There are two antidotes to anxiety as distress.

The first antidote is to use anxiety as eutress. When you use the nervous energy of the emotion as a motivator, you engage the sister emotion of anxiety which is the emotion of anticipation. The message of anticipation is that there MAY be a desirable outcome that would benefit me. With anticipation you act as if the positive outcome will occur and you get excited about (or motivated by) that possibility. Think about how excited you get when you are anticipating an upcoming vacation.

The second antidote to anxiety is to approach your emotion from a different point of view. Your anxiety stems from the implicit question “What if everything goes wrong and the result “kills” me? Note that I am not talking about physical death here but rather about a possible catastrophic death from which it will be difficult to recover.

Instead of this typical question, ask yourself, ” If the worst possible outcome does occur, can I survive it?” In nearly every case, the answer will be “yes”. If you know you can survive the worst possible outcome, you no longer need to be overwhelmed by it. Getting out from “overwhelm” frees you up to continue with the task you are working on. Your motivation can come back.

Scenario #2

Excitement is an emotion. Understanding an emotion is the beginning of mastering it.

All feelings, by their nature, tend to be temporary in that they happen, move you to take action and then subside. This process takes place physiologically.

But, it also takes place psychologically. It is natural for your interest level in a project to lessen over time as you are working on the project. If you don’t understand this, then you may mistake your fluctuating interest level and the associated level of motivation as indicating that you no longer believe the project to be important, relevant, or desirable and stop working on the project.

You don’t want to confuse your fluctuating excitement for disinterest.

The antidote to fluctuating motivational energy is to take a break from the project, get a good night’s rest (or a few days) and then go back to the project and do an “assessment”. What you want to ask yourself is whether you still believe the project is worthwhile and whether the original elements of the project which so excited you when you began are still relevant. If they are, your motivation will come back and you can get back to work on the project.

Scenario #3

You are humming along on your project and you hit a snag. Perhaps, you get “writer’s bloc”, your imagination isn’t giving you any good material, you need to do more research than you anticipated, and so forth. When this happens, you may become frustrated and find that your motivational energy tank feels like it is “empty”.

As in scenario #2, you don’t want to assume that you no longer interested in (or motivated to complete) the task at hand.

The antidote to frustration is to take a break, acknowledge your frustration, make a plan to get the information you need and continue to work on (take action) your project. In time, because the project is worthwhile, your motivation will return.

Please let me know if the above has been helpful.

I welcome your comments.

You are the target of someone’s anger: Part 3 of 3

This is the third and final post in my 3 part series discussing six steps you can take when someone directs their anger at you.

This is the scenario I have been using:

You are at _____ (work, home, walking the dog) and someone interacts with you in such a way that it seems clear to you that this person is angry with you. He (or she) might be yelling at you, talking fast, accusing you of having done something and so forth. It is not immediately clear why they are angry.

In my first post, I discussed Steps 1 and 2 which focused on insuring your safety in the interaction

In my last post, I covered Steps 3 and 4 which focused on lowering the energy level of the interaction.

Steps 5 and 6 involve choosing a response.

Here is the overview:

Step 1: Prepare to engage. Sub-steps: a. Calm yourself b. Take a physical step back

Step 2: Insure your safety. Sub-steps: a. assess personal threat level b.Assess need for immediate action.

Step 3: Validate their anger. Sub-steps: a. Assume their anger is valid. b. Calm them down.

Step 4: Forgiveness. Sub-steps: a. understand what forgiveness is. b. Don’t take their anger personally.

Step 5: Empathize with and attempt to understand the other person’s anger. Sub-steps: a. Seek first to understand. b. Address 7 general issues.

Step 6: Decide how to respond. Sub-steps: a. If you did something. b. The issue is in their head.

Step 5 involves empathizing with and attempting to understand the other person’s anger. As you know that the message of anger involves the perception of threat, you need to know what those perceptions are so that you can tailor your response so as to move the interaction in the direction of a win-win resolution, if possible.

Sub-step (a) is taken from Steven Covey’s book Seven Habits of Highly Effective People and suggests that you seek first to understand and then to be understood. Your goal here is to gain some knowledge of what it is in you, or the situation, that has resulted in his seeing you as a threat.

Focusing your attention on the other person first gives you the opportunity to learn about him so that you can later develop a response which may let you get both your and his needs met.

Sub-step (b) involves addressing 7 general issues and will help focus your attention on the information you need.

Here are the 7 general issues that I originally addressed in my book Beyond Anger Mastery: Master Your Anger as a Strategic Tool.

What is the nature of the threat the other person perceives?
Are they telling you that you have done something wrong? If so, what is it? Is is something you did recently, are currently doing, or something you did in the past?
Are they just venting and you just happened to be in the way?
Is the threat, or the implied threat, that they perceive in the present and something you may be able to resolve?
Is the threat they perceive, or the implied threat, in the present but totally unrelated to you?
Are they using their anger to “manipulate” you in some way or get you to do something specific like back-off (anger as a communicator) or give in (instrumental anger)?
If there is no obvious threat, what else might be going on? Could they be using their anger to cover over some other feeling (secondary anger)? Or, if they are attacking you or demeaning your character, could they be attempting to divert attention away from issues you have raised and onto you as an individual?

With the information you get from addressing these 7 general areas, you can move onto Step 6 in which you choose a response.

In choosing how you will respond, there are two basic issues which are summarized by the two Sub-steps. Either you did something (Sub-step (a)) or the issue is in their head (Sub-step (b)).

When it is clear that you have done something about which this person is angry, the best you can do is to accept responsibility for your actions, sincerely apologize, address their concerns as well as you can, and ask what you can do to “make it right”. You do not need to make excuses or justify your behavior (although you can offer an explanation if you choose) and you want to be assertive and seek a win-win resolution if possible.

If the threat is a figment of their imagination, you are only marginally involved or if you are a “target” and the anger has little to do with you, the best you can do is ask for clarification (I’m not really sure what I might have done. Can you tell me what you are angry about?) and attempt to address their concerns.

If, as can happen with Professional Women appropriately expressing anger in a work setting, the anger is a cover for the other person’s feeling of vulnerability, the best course of action is to take a “Project manager’s” approach to the interaction. I have a whole chapter on Professional Women and Anger in my book Beyond Anger Management: Master Your Anger as a Strategic Tool.

What you do not want to do is argue with the other person as getting into an argument, even if you are “right”, will most likely just escalate their anger and elicit an attempt to defend and justify their perceptions.

Remember that your goal is to reduce the energy level of the interaction so that you can seek a win-win resolution if possible, or a compromise, rather than to prove that you are right.

If appropriate, apologize for any misunderstandings. Note that you are not apologizing here for anything you’ve done just for any misunderstanding.

If nothing works and they are still angry at you, you may have to offer to get back with them at a later date and walk away.

Has this series of three posts been helpful to you? Is there any topic you would like addressed further?

As always, I welcome your comments.

You are the target of someone’s anger: Part 2 of 3

This is the second of 3 posts which discuss what you can do when someone gets angry with you. Put another way, I am suggesting that you learn to master the anger of another person and use your knowledge to make the most out of the situation in which you find yourself.

There are 6 steps involved in dealing with the anger of another person. In my last post, I discussed step 1 and step 2 and the sub-steps of each.

Steps 1 and 2 were all about you, preparing yourself to engage the other person and insuring your own safety.

In this post, I will discuss steps 3 and step 4 and their sub-steps.

Steps 3 and 4 are also preparing to engage the other person but the emphasis in these steps shifts from you to them.

For review, here are the 6 steps and sub-steps.

Here is an overview:

Step 1: Prepare to engage. Sub-steps: a. Calm yourself b. Take a physical step back

Step 2: Insure your safety. Sub-steps: a. assess personal threat level b. Assess need for immediate action.

Step 3: Validate their anger. Sub-steps: a. Assume their anger is valid. b. Calm them down.

Step 4: Forgiveness. Sub-steps: a. understand what forgiveness is. b. Don’t take their anger personally.

Step 5: Empathize with and attempt to understand the other person’s anger. Sub-steps: a. Seek first to understand. b. Address 7 general issues.

Step 6: Decide how to respond. Sub-steps: a. If you did something. b. The issue is in their head.

Again, let me set the stage (from the first post):

Step 3 involves validating their anger and has two sub-steps. Sub-step (a) reminds you of the assumption you need to make regarding their anger and Sub-step (b) reminds you that your goal here is to calm them down by defusing their anger as much as you can.

When I suggest validating the anger of another person, the response that I get usually involves two separate focal points: the anger and the person who is angry. My audience will raise two issues. On the one hand, they do not like the implication that validating the anger is acknowledging the anger as both appropriate and acceptable (when is probably is not). Secondly, they do not like the implication that validating the person’s anger is rewarding this individual for both his inappropriate anger and, possibly his inappropriate behavior.

I am not suggesting that you either accept his anger as appropriate nor that you reward his behavior although I do acknowledge that he may think this is what you are doing.

Indeed, while it is true that the definition of “to validate” is to authenticate the authenticity of”, when you validate his (or her) anger, you are only saying that the anger is valid for him and that you agree he has a right to be angry based on how he perceives the situation. Your focus is totally on the other person and the perceptions which have elicited his anger not on the anger, per se.

This is an important distinction.

To put it another way, if his perceptions of what is going on are completely correct, then his anger both makes total sense and is valid. This is the underlying logic for validating his anger.

As you do not yet know what his perceptions are, you cannot say whether that the anger directed at you is either valid or correct for the situation.

Two points to keep in mind here:

Our emotions are always valid (appropriate) for us in that they are elicited by how we see the world.
The message of his anger is that he perceives a threat or a challenge to his values, goals, beliefs, ego, sense of self, identity and so forth.

In light of these two points, if you immediately question or challenge him or his anger, you may increase his perception of you as a threat and he will escalate his anger. Acknowledging that he is angry and that you would like to understand what he is angry about communicates to him that you want to work with him and that you may not be as much of a threat as he originally thought.

To the extent that you are successful in validating his anger, you move on to Sub-step 2 as he will begin to calm down.

Once you have validated the other person’s anger as authentic and appropriate for them given their perception of the situation, you can move on to step #4 which is forgiveness.

This is tough one for many people especially if the other person, fueled by their anger has said or done things that have hurt you.

So, let me explain how I am conceptualizing forgiveness.

Most people think that forgiveness means letting the person off the hook for what they did or absolving them of blame and responsiblity. This is what happens when your past debts are “forgiven”. They are erased. Or, when in the Bible (Disclaimer: I am not a biblical expert.) when Christ forgave someone’s sins and that person was “born again”.

As I am using the word, forgiveness means “letting go”. When you forgive another person for what they have done to you, you are choosing to disengage emotionally from that person and their actions. This letting go frees you up to decide the best way for you to deal with this individual and their behavior in your current context.

Forgiveness is all about you not about them.

So, now that you have taken steps to insure your safety (Steps 1 and 2) and to initiate the process of lowering the energy level of the interaction (Steps 3 and 4), you are now ready to move toward and choose a response (Steps 5 and 6).

I will discuss these Steps in the next post.

I welcome your comments.

You are the target of someone’s anger: Part 1 of 3

In most of my earlier posts, I have discussed how to master your own anger. And, in the vast majority of situations, it is your own anger that you will be dealing with.

However, in the course of dealing with other people, it is quite likely that someone has gotten angry at you and you have become a target. Recognizing this, I included a chapter in my book Beyond Anger Management: Master Your Anger as a Strategic Tool, entitled Dealing with Someone Else’s Anger Directed at You.

As I would like to cover this topic in more depth and as I do not want each post to be too long, I will address mastering the anger of another person in the next three posts.

Mastering the anger of another person directed at you involves 6 steps each of which has two substeps. All 6 steps parallel the Anger Mastery Cycle and how you master your own anger. (You can download a copy of the Anger Mastery Cycle by scrolling up to the top and clicking on the tab on the right side of the page.)

Here is an overview:

Prepare to engage. Sub-steps: a. Calm yourself b. Take a physical step back
Insure your safety. Sub-steps: a. assess personal threat level b.Assess need for immediate action.
Validate their anger. Sub-steps: a. Assume their anger is valid. b.Calm them down.
Forgiveness. Sub-steps: a. understand what forgiveness is. b. Don’t take their anger personally.
Empathize with and attempt to understand the other person’s anger. Sub-steps: a. Seek first to understand. b. Address 7 general issues.
Decide how to respond. Sub-steps: a. If you did something. b. The issue is in their head.

I will address steps 1 and 2 in this post, steps 3 and 4 in the next post, and steps 5 and 6 in the third post.

Let me set the stage…

Steps 1 and 2 go together and involve preparing to engage the other person and insuring your own safety.

Remember from the Anger Mastery Cycle that all of us are constantly and subconsciously scanning our surroundings for any threat that might hurt us. Anger tells us that we perceive a threat that we believe we can overpower if we throw enough force at it. This is the message of anger.

The other person’s anger informs you that he sees you as a threat. As you don’t know what it is that he perceives or if you are at risk, you need to think about your own safety first.

Steps 1 and 2 are about your safety.

Step 1 (Prepare to engage) involves two substeps. First, you need to take a deep breath and second, you need to take a physical step back from the other person.

Taking a deep breath performs two functions for you.

Taking a deep breath calms you down just enough so that you can choose what you do next. This will inhibit you from reacting to the person and possibly escalating the interaction. Taking a breath also gives you some psychological distance between you and the other person.

Taking a step back from the person also performs two functions.

When you step back from the person, you provide yourself some physical distance between you and the other person. You also signal to them that you are not an immediate threat to them.

Step 1 and its sub-steps can happen very quickly. But, they are not automatic and must be “practiced”. More likely than not, when someone “angers” (my word) all over you, you will want to react and “anger” back on them. This is never a good idea.

Even if you are “justified” in reacting aggressively toward this person, the actions you take will most likely escalate, or aggravate, the interaction and will not move you and the other person toward resolving whatever issue is eliciting (not causing) the anger. While this is not necessarily an issue if the other person is a stranger, it may be a very important point if the other person is a colleague, a boss, a co-worker, or a customer talking to you on a help line or at your business.

You “practice” your response to the anger of another person by rehearsing, in your mind’s eye, the actions you will take if you are ever in this situation. Actors, preparing for a part, rehearse, or practice their actions. Maybe, you have rehearsed what you would do prior to a job interview or a meeting with your boss during which you plan to ask for a raise. Same idea. Think about someone getting angry with you and yelling at you. When you do this, you might feel yourself reacting as if this situation were actually occurring. If this happens to you, relax, this is normal. The mind often reacts the same to a vividly imagined event as it does to the event itself. Have you ever gotten scared or cried at a movie?

So, create an angry interaction in your mind and then “see” yourself taking a deep breath and taking a step back. You should do this several times for a week or so. While rehearsing makes it more likely that you will do as you plan, I have to tell you that there is no guarantee. The more you rehearse, the more likely the new action is to occur.

Step 2 (Insure your safety) also involves two sub-steps. First, you need to assess your personal risk and second you need to assess the need for any immediate action.

Assessing your personal risk involves looking at the other person, their tone of voice, the actions they are taking (moving toward you as you move away), what they are saying (any threats) and so forth. If your “gut” tells you that you are at risk, then your best course of action is to act as if you are at risk. This gut feeling is your Amygdala sending you a message. Honor it.

Sub-step 2 involves deciding what you need to do in the moment based on what you feel following sub-step 1. If you sense that you are in danger, leave. If you have to, just walk away. If you need to excuse yourself before you walk away, make an excuse and leave. If you do not sense that you are in danger, then you can move on to step 3 and step 4 which we will discuss next week.

I welcome your comments.

It’s an emotional world: 3 rules for living in it with others.

If you are alive or you interact with others, you come into contact with emotions on a regular (even daily) basis.

In the course of living your daily life, you may get angry, anxious, sad, doubtful, jealous or envious.

In your interactions with others such as your boss, your spouse, a customer, or your kid, you may experience someone who gets mad at or impatient with you or who is sad or anxious.

How well do you deal with emotions (and the behavior that goes along with emotions) in yourself and others?

Information about what emotions are and how to master them is available both on the internet and from me in my books and my blogposts.

In my first book (Emotions as Tools: Control Your Life not Your Feelings), I discuss what emotions are, why we have them, and the Emotions as Tools Model. I also discuss specific emotions of anger, sadness, anxiety, fear, guilt and shame.

In my second book (Beyond Anger Management: Master Your Anger as a Strategic Tool) I focus specifically on anger including the Anger Mastery Cycle, anger management verses anger mastery, the anger myths, what to do when it feels like anger but isn’t and both how to deal with other’s anger and when other’s won’t let you be angry.

Both books are Amazon best sellers and you download the first two chapters of each book for free with no log-in required by scrolling up to the top of the page.

With that being said, let’s look at 3 general rules which will help you deal with another person who is emotional with you.

Rule #1: Assume that everyone (including you) does the best they can in the situation given a) what they know about what is going on, b) the assumptions they make and c) the skills they have to deal with what is going on.

My guess is that this rule doesn’t sit well with you as you know that much of the behavior you have seen in others (and in yourself) doesn’t qualify as either good or “best”.

True. In fact, what they are doing may be destructive, wrong for the situation, or just unacceptable.

Indeed, I not saying that what they are doing is the best that can be done or even what they should be doing. In many cases, this is usually obvious.

What I am saying is that, when you do not immediately judge the behavior and assume that this is the best they can do, in the moment, with the information they have, the assumptions they make and the skills they have, you have many different options from which you can choose to deal with this individual.

The other alternative is to judge the behavior and react by doing something that worsens the interaction and that you may later regret. This, by the way, is what usually happens when one’s feelings get hurt, misunderstandings occur, and the situation gets out of hand.

When you assume that what they are doing is the best they can, your next step can be to understand what underlies and has led to the actions they are taking with you.

Steven Covey in his book 7 Habits of Highly Effective People notes that, in your interactions with others, you should seek first to understand and then to be understood.

When we react to others out of our own emotional state, we do the exact opposite. We want to stand up for and defend ourselves to a perceived attack. If you are interacting with a boss, a spouse, a customer, or even your kid, this usually is not an effective way to move the relationship forward.

In dealing with another person whose emotionally driven behavior clearly seems over the top or not fitting the situation and making the above assumption, you now have the opportunity to look into the information they have and the assumptions they are making. Once you know this, you can begin to change the interaction by giving additional information and clearing up any misunderstandings they (or you) may have. With new information, the behavior they are displaying toward you can change.

Please note that you have not given up any of your options either in the emotions you feel or the responses you may choose to make. But, when they change what they are doing, you, most likely will also change what you choose to do.

And, this leads us to Rule #2.

Rule#2: Know what you want to accomplish in your interactions with this person.

In any interpersonal interaction, it is important for you to know what you want to accomplish because this will determine what you choose to do.

Interpersonal interactions cover a wide range of situations from wanting good service from your server in a restaurant, building a healthy (however you define this) relationship with your spouse or significant other, keeping a customer happy on a service call, through getting respect from your supervisor and so forth.

So, you can see that it is important to understand the nature of your relatioship with this other person, what you and they expect in the relationship and where you want the relationship to go (what you want to accomplish in the relationship).

Once you know this, you are in a better position to decide what actions you will take to get you where you want to go.

And, this takes us to rule #3.

Rule#3: Seek to get a win/win with the other person but settle for a compromise if you have to.

Most people think that compromise is the best you can hope for when there is a disagreement. And, sometimes, this is true.

When you compromise, both you and the other person give up something you can do without to get something you must have. There is nothing wrong with this but, in one sense, it is a lose/lose proposition in that you both have given up something you would just as soon have if you could.

Someone once said that if you shoot for the stars and you miss you end up on the moon. If you shoot for the moon and miss, you end up back on earth. The moon is a compromise.

I am suggesting that you shoot for a win/win in which both of you get all that you want, whenever this is possible. If this is your goal in a relationship, you will work to find ways that meet all of both your needs.

This is often possible if you look for it.

If not, you can always compromise.

In an upcoming series of three posts, I will discuss in detail a six step process for dealing with someone who directs their anger at you.

I welcome your comments.

If you feel anger, should you always express it as long as how you express it is not destructive?

I was asked this question on Quora and wanted to address it here (in greater detail) as I believe it raises an important issue involving anger and whether or not you should express the anger you feel.

Well, as you might suspect after reading some of my posts, the answer is: it depends.

No, this is not an attempt to evade the question.

Rather, there are three elements which go into determining whether (how and if) you express you anger:

understanding the message of anger
assessing the nature of the threat (is it valid or due to a misunderstanding)
whether to express anger or not (and under what conditions) and the nature of your expression (direct or in.

The message of anger.

Anger is one of six primary emotions, four of which are primitive threat detectors. Anger is a primitive threat detector which has been around since we lived in caves, can be seen in all human and some subhuman species, and functions today as it always has.

In other words, your brain is genetically programmed, just like in your ancestors, to both search for threats and subconsciously prepare your body for fight, flight or freeze to “deal” with those threats. This happens very fast, as it should if you are facing a valid threat to your survival, and is not consciously mediated. We call this the fast track message. Your brain prepares you to react.

Each emotional threat detector informs you about the nature of the threat you have perceived and your relationship to it.

If the threat is more powerful than you, your body is “set-up” to freeze or flee and fear is the emotion you experience. The message of fear is that the threat will “kill” you so get away from it.

If you subconsciously size up the threat as being “weaker” than you (You are more powerful than it is.), your body is “set-up” to go to war with the threat and the emotion you experience is anger. The message of anger is that you have detected a threat you believe that you can eliminate if you throw enough force at it. Thus, when you are angry, the Adrenalin that flows through your body makes you ready to attack and overwhelm.

While the primitive emotional cycle unconsciously prepares your body to REACT and fight off the threat has not changed, your human brain has evolved giving you the option to respond rather than react.

The reactive aspect of the emotional cycle involves a fast track message from the sensory organ (eyes, ears) through the Amygdala in the brain to the Thalamus. If the threat will kill you (as all of them did in the lives of our Savannah or cave dwelling ancestors), your survival would necessitate a quick (and unconscious) reaction.

As humans evolved and the brain grew, the Cerebral Cortex developed to give us options beyond our primitive drives.

The element of the emotional (or in this case Anger) mastery cycle which allows you to choose how you want to respond to the threat goes through the thinking part of the brain, the Cerebral Cortex, and is referred to as the slower track message.

Thus, you have a choice about how you want to respond to the threat. The Anger Mastery Cycle reflects this choice.

As a reader of this blog, you are probably aware that I have discussed the Anger Mastery Cycle in other posts and that you can download a copy of the Cycle using the link in the “welcome” post at the top of this page.

Assessing the threat.

It is important to note that, in our “civilized” world, the threats we are most likely to encounter are psychological (not physical) and involve our goals, our egos, or our values rather than our lives (although this can happen). We feel (and we may actually be) vulnerable and this vulnerability elicits anger.

Once you become aware of your anger by noticing how your body physically alerts you to anger, your next step is to create some “distance” between you and the threat. The purpose of the “distance” you create is to protect you from the threat and give you time to assess the nature of the threat. You create physical distance by taking a step back and you create psychological distance by taking a breath to calm yourself so that you can respond rather than react to the threat.

You then need to assess the validity of the threat.

If there is a real threat to your life, your core values, your finances and so forth, then you will need to take action (This is the third element above.) Here you are expressing your anger.

If the threat is not valid, you will need to choose a different response.

Whether to express your anger (or not) and the nature of the expression.

How (or if) you express your anger depends on three factors:

First: is the threat valid or not?

If you are facing a predator who wants to hurt you (physical threat), you should, if you can safely do so, use all the energy your anger provides and attack the predator.
If the threat is real but not life-threatening (psychological threat), then you need to make a plan to effectively nullify the threat and execute your plan.
If you decide that there is no real threat because you have misunderstood the other person, then the “expression” of your anger is a genuine apology or doing nothing.

Second: Do you express your anger directly or indirectly:

Direct action.

If you can directly address the threat and resolve it, do so.

Indirect action.

Sometimes, directly attacking the threat may not be “safe” for you to do because your “adversary” is too powerful, too influential, or too evasive. The risk (unwanted consequences) to you is too great. In other words, the threat may be real but your surroundings do not permit you to directly express your anger.

An example is a professional setting in which women, who are legitimately angry because boundaries have been violated are demeaned or marginalized by the men in their office when they (the women) express their anger.

Under these circumstances, a more indirect approach is needed which eliminates the threat without directly focusing on the the threat or the person who is engaging in the “threatening” behavior. The “project manager” approach I discuss in Chapter 10 of my book Beyond Anger Mastery Master Your Anger as a Strategic Tool is a possible suggestion. I’ll discuss the “project manager” approach in a future post.

Third: Match the response to the situation.

Whatever you do (or do not do) should match the context of the situation in which you find yourself. This will help to avoid either an inadequate (ineffective) response or an inappropriately aggressive (attacking) response.

I hope this information is useful and I welcome your comments.

Anger is like a sunset: Think psychology not poetry.

Everyone has “experienced” anger.

If the word “experienced” in the context of an emotion seems odd to you, that is because it is odd.

You “experience” a sunset in that you see the sunset and you “choose” how it will impact you.

You may be overwhelmed or touched by its beauty. Or, you may just notice it and move on. You don’t control a sunset, you master it.

This is a subjective, or unique to you, emotional response.

With anger, however, most people believe that you get angry. Or do you?

The implication is that anger just happens to you. While some people believe this, and it is partially true, overall, it isn’t either the whole story or even accurate.

So, back to sunsets and anger.

Psychologically, you subjectively “experience” anger similarly to how you experience a sunset.

The sun sets every day and you have seen many sunsets. But, you may only have stopped what you are doing to interact with the sunset and let it impact you.

With anger, as I discuss both in previous posts and in my book Beyond Anger Management: Master Your Anger as a Strategic Tool, you are constantly scanning your surroundings for threat. The anger mastery cycle begins with the perception of threat and quickly moves to the unconscious reaction to the threat.

This is the ONLY part of the emotion of anger where the anger “controls” you.

You engage the threat when the cycle proceeds to the conscious recognition and labeling of the emotional reaction as anger, validating the nature of the threat and choosing a response.

Objective and subjective “definitions”.

You can look at sunsets and anger both objectively and subjectively.

Sunsets (objectively)

Objectively, you can talk about how a sunset is caused when light is scattered in the atmosphere by different molecules and how clouds in the sky reflect the light in different ways the scattering of light. There is no emotion in this description and unless you are interested in the science, none of it matters. In fact, to stand in awe of a great sunset and have someone tell you what is really happening would be a “buzzkill”.

It is a bit different with anger.

If your goal, as in many anger management courses, is simply to control, minimize, or eliminate anger, then you really don’t need to know what anger is. Once you recognize you are angry, you put on the brakes, and you are done.

Well, many anger management approaches are unsuccessful because they do not provide a context for anger which explains what anger is, why we, as humans, have anger, and how we can use, or master, our anger to improve our lives. Being able to objectively understand anger facilitates our subjectively learning to master it as a tool.

Anger (objectively)

Anger, as an emotion is one of the 6 primary emotions “discovered” by Paul Ekman. These emotions are mad, sad, glad, fear, disgust, and surprise. All of them can be seen across human cultures and in some subhuman species. If you have kids, you have learned to recognize these emotions in your kid’s faces when they were too young to think about, or subjectively configure what they were feeling.

With the exception of glad and surprise, all of the primary emotions are primitive threat detectors the evolutionary function of which is to alert us to the presence of a threat and subconsciously prepare our bodies to deal with the threat. You can think of emotions as tools. I have written about this emotional process in my book entitled Emotions As Tools: A Self Help Guide to Controlling Your Life not Your Feelings which is available on Amazon. You can download the first chapter of this book from my blog for free with no opt-in.

When a person is subconsciously alerted to a threat through the Amygdala and the Thalamus and experiences anger, he or she is “set up” to REACT to the anger. When we were living in caves, this was a good thing and helped insure our survival.

Sunsets (subjectively)

If you stop the car to “take in” the sunset, your “breath is taken away” by its beauty, or you “stand in awe” of this magnificent display, you get the subjective “definition” of a sunset.

Anger (subjectively)

Subjective

Today, we have a choice about how we want to RESPOND to a perceived threat because our nervous system alerts our cerebral cortex (thinking part of the brain) about the situation we are facing.

It this tendency to react to one’s anger and go to war without really assessing the nature of the threat that has both given anger a bad reputation and has negatively impacted lives and relationships.

While our brain automatically sets us up to react, it also, by a different pathway, allows us to assess our situation and choose how we want to adaptively respond to what is going on.

This response to anger is anger subjectively defined.

If you choose to go with the anger rather than learn to master it, you may get in trouble and blame your anger for you inappropriate behavior. You may believe the anger controls you but this is still your choice. This is one subjective response.

Other people choose to master their anger as I discuss in my current book Beyond Anger Management: Master Your Anger as a Strategic Tool which is available on Amazon. By the way, you can download the first chapter of this book for free with no opt-in on my blog TheEmotionsDoctor.com. Here is the download page.

This is another subjective response.

My goal has been to give you another way to look at and understand your anger. I hope this article has helped.

I welcome your comments.

How do you deal with bad moods?

Most people do not understand the difference between the words, “feeling”, “emotion” and “mood”.

In Psychology, the words “feeling” and”emotion” tend to have different meanings. In everyday language, they are essentially the same.

The word “mood” , while also used interchangeably with “feeling”, tends to have a different connotation.

A “mood” is a longer lasting “feeling state” that may not be related to any specific issue or point of focus.

The website 6seconds.org (a good source of information on emotional intelligence) defines mood as “They’re not tied to a specific incident, but a collection of inputs. Mood is heavily influenced by our environment (weather, lighting, color, people around us), by our physiology (what we’ve been eating, how we’ve been exercising, if we have a cold or not, how well we slept), by our thinking (where we’re focusing attention), and by our current emotions. Moods can last minutes, hours, probably even days.”

If you are dealing with a mood, suggestions which involve distraction including going for a walk or listening to music can be effective. Questioning the weather, your environment, or your physiology is also good. Finally, just waiting it out allows you to avoid giving the mood too much “power” by elevating its impact on you and lets the mood pass.

As I will show below, using distraction for feelings may not be a good idea.

That being said, let me address this issue in terms of feelings.

Feelings tend to be more short term and related to a specific trigger. In my opinon, feelings, and how we relate to them, are, a different story compared to moods. The reason for this is the function feelings serve and the information they provide. If you don’t understand your feelings (or emotions), you may find yourself doing things you later regret (anger), failing to give yourself permission and time to recover (sad), being too hard on yourself (guilt and shame), or missing out on opportunities to positively impact your life and your relationships.

As I’ve written about in my two Amazon best seller books Emotions as Tools and Beyond Anger Management, while we can see manifestations of feelings in all human societies and in some subhuman species, feelings, in humans, helped us survive as a species and, in many ways, while we, as humans, have evolved, the 6 primary feelings (mad, sad, glad, fear, disgust and surprise) and how they impact us, have largely remained the same over time.

Four of the six primary feelings are threat detectors which evolved in humans to subconsciously alert us to threats which in primitive times would kill us and prepare our bodies to deal with the threat. This is the emotional reaction to potential threats which we still experience today.

Over time, the thinking parts of our brains developed to the point where we now have the ability to choose how we respond to possible threats.

Incidentally, there are no good or bad emotions (This is an emotional myth.) just like there are no good or bad moods.

There are two reason that feelings (and moods) get labelled as “bad”. The first is is that some feelings are hedonically negative (they are experienced as discomfort). Secondly, some people do dumb or hurtful things when they are reacting to a feeling. Unfortunately, the feeling rather than the hedonic state or the unfortunate choice of behavior gets the label and the bad rap.

Each feeling communicates a specific message about how a “threat” is perceived. Understanding this message gives you two advantages and it is these advantages which make feelings valuable and allow you to use them as tools to improve your life and your relationships. I’ve discussed the message of specific feelings in other posts.

While some writers suggest distraction as a viable means of dealing with uncomfortable feelings, I do not believe this to be the case. To ignore a possible threat(and the feeling which is alerting you to it) via distraction is the same as texting while driving. If there are no obstacles, you may be able to multitask while driving. However, if an obstacle or threat is real, you will miss it.

Moods do not have these advantages.

First, when you understand the message of the emotion you are experiencing , you can evaluate the nature of the threat and choose your response. If the threat is valid, stay with the feeling, make a plan to deal with the threat, and execute your plan. If you have misperceived the threat, change your perception and move on. This can have a positive impact on your life.

Second, when you understand the message of an emotion, you are in a better position to deal with another person who is directing this emotion at you. This can have a positive impact on your relationships.

I welcome your comments.

How to Handle Disappointment and “Failure”.

The classical advice about dealing with disappointment and “failure” is to pick yourself up and get back on track. While this is good advice, it focuses on the behavioral aspect of disappointment and not on disappointment as an emotion or on “failure” as a construct.

The emotion of disappointment is defined by Your Dictionary.com as “a feeling of sadness, dissatisfaction or displeasure when something isn’t as you planned”. So, in other words, when you are disappointed, you are sad about a situation that has not gone as you expected or wanted.

As I discuss in my book Emotions as Tools A Self Help Guide to Controlling Your Life not Your Feelings, Sadness is a threat detector and one of the 6 primary emotions (mad, sad, glad, fear, disgust, and surprise). The message of sadness is that you have experienced a loss and the function of sadness is to both alert you to the loss you have experienced and prepare your body to deal with that loss.

The intensity of sadness can vary along a continuum from mild disappointment through the sublime sense of loss one experiences when someone close to us dies to depression, a condition which can be life-threatening.

The Emotions as Tools Model teaches that all emotions go through a similar cycle. For emotions that involve threat, the cycle starts with the unconscious scanning of one’s surroundings for threat, physically reacting to that threat, managing one’s reaction to the threat when appropriate and, in time, mastering the emotion by validating the threat and choosing how you want to respond to it.

When you experience disappointment, you want to acknowledge and label the emotion as disappointment and recognize the message of the emotion, manage the emotion by giving yourself some psychological space between the situation and your reaction to it and then master the emotion by assessing the validity of the loss and choosing your response to it. The point is that there may, indeed, be a loss or you may be misinterpreting what is happening as a loss and there is, in fact, no loss.

When you understand this approach to dealing with the emotion of disappointment, you now have a context from which you can interpret and evaluate all of the advice you can find about how to handle disappointment.

So that I can keep this post to a reasonable length, let me give you a link to a blog which will give you some good suggestions for dealing with disappointment including 5 key steps and what to do both in the moment of and after a disappointment but please don’t go there until after you have finished reading this post. Here is the link.

Let’s look at the concept of failure.

Many people view failure as a destination and split achieving a goal into two opposing positions. You are either a “success” when you have accomplished your goals or you are a failure because you have fallen short of whatever it is you were trying to do. In my view, and others, success is defined as getting back up and on track more times than you fall down (failing). “Failure” only means that you are off course. When you “get up” more times than you “fall down”, you are almost guaranteed to accomplish your goal.

I believe that a dichotomous view of success and failure is a psychological trap which can elicit a misleading feeling of disappointment, sadness, or even depression.

Let me give you an illustration.

There is a story about Thomas Edison, the inventor of the light bulb. When he was asked by a reporter what it felt like to have failed 10,000 times to make a light bulb, Mr. Edison reportedly said that he did not fail 10,000 times but he did find 10,000 ways to make a light bulb that did not work. Obviously, he kept on going until he “successfully” found a way that did work. There are numerous such stories in the theater (Muppets), literature (Carrie), and so forth.

Mr. Edison did not give in to disappointment or a sense of failure and give up. Giving up is a major downside possibility with disappointment.

So, when you define failure as a destination or as an absolute, you experience a sense of disappointment or loss. This sense of loss is “misleading” because, in fact, you have really not lost anything. As most successful people will tell you, you need to reevaluate, adjust, and move forward.

A very good book on the subject is John Maxwell’s book Failing Forward which is available on Amazon.

So, when you experience disappointment, approach it from an Emotions as Tools perspective. Acknowledge the emotion, take a psychological step back from the situation (management), and move into mastery by assessing the threat and choosing a response. When you hear yourself talking about “failure”, remind yourself that accomplishing a task in a journey, not a destination.

I welcome your comments.