Thank you for your blog entry. I think I used to have a vague idea of anger being triggered from a perceived attack on the ego, but your article cemented it in my mind and explained it very thoroughly. There still is something I don't quite, understand, though.

You briefly mention "frustration-anger," but you don't (explicitly) specify whether the rest of your article applies to it. I observe and experience this kind far more often. To be clear, I'm imagining situations such as a parent being angry at their child for not doing homework or chores, or a group of friends being angry at the one who was 30 minutes late and made everyone wait, or that unpunctual person being angry at his girlfriend for taking so long and making them 30 minutes late, etc. Essentially, it's a "I become angry because you're making life difficult for me." How should this kind of anger be addressed? Does your article apply to this kind of anger at all, or is that an article for another day?

Frustration anger is very short-lived and not a component of problem anger. What you describe is people feeling devalued by the child not doing homework or the friend not being on time, with a motivation to punish(devalue)in return. That is precisely why you get such a negative response from others to anger - they do not process why you feel devalued, they react to being devalued themselves. You don't consider whether the saber tooth tiger is validly hungry, or whether it has cubs it has to feed or whether it's on the endangered species list, you simply react to threat.

It is not the other person making your life hard, but the highly impaired judgment that occurs while you are angry, which is why you should not try to negotiate for ways to improve when you are angry. All that will register is your aggression.

Notably, frustration-tolerance, a vital component in successful task-performance, is considerably lowered when angry.

Sometimes people react quite quickly to something you've said or to a picture or a sign you might be carrying or something you are wearing. How can you help another in a short time span? Especially if they are angry and you are not sure what they are angry about. How can you defuse that anger quickly before it escalates? Especially when there may be a treat of physical harm from the angry person.

Dr Stosny, if I understand you correctly, the core of what you are contending is as follows:

- Anger is for practical reasons a simple (i.e., indivisible---differentiation between kinds of anger is, for the most part, fruitless and fraught with danger).

- The function of anger is protection, and its "design" is to protect life and limb.

- When people are angry, as with other strong states of arousal, their perception of the world and their physiology change. Anger is unique, however, because of the element of violence with the intent to neutralize a threat (emotionally, physically, or both).

- With the evolution of a more egalitarian society (or the perception of one), the original stimulus for anger---namely, life protection---has been confused with or supplanted by "ego" protection. Consequently, people now respond with anger when they feel vulnerable to identity attack (perceptions of disrespect)--and this response is unnecessarily damaging, ineffective, and self-defeating because it causes people to act against their integrity (core values, in your words).

- Our brains are constructed in such a way that the anger response is automatic/unconscious---conditioned. Ring a bell, salivate... Consequently, the most effective way to change the anger reaction is to condition a different response. If I've understood your HEALS process, that is essentially its design and intent.

- Compassion is incompatible with anger (conditioning an incompatible response). Too, it has the added benefit of strengthening, rather than depleting, integrity and, hence, has a cascading positive effect.

I know I have not detailed everything you're arguing. There are many good points you've made that I've left out, but this seems to me the core of it---if I have read you correctly.

I am curious about one detail, however, and I'm wondering if you'd be willing to comment on it. You state that people respond with anger because they are feeling vulnerable. I wonder what you believe they are ultimately feeling vulnerable to. The thought that came to my mind was that they were feeling vulnerable to rejection, which, if that is correct, would lead me to believe that they are responding to a very primal fear: abandonment, which it would seem to me is, at least conceptually, life-threatening (and I'm thinking about this at a primitive thought level)---though rarely so for adults in Western society, admittedly. If that is the case---if people are responding to an evolutionarily conditioned "fear" of abandonment---I then wonder to what extent, if any, that would nuance how you can effectively work with a client (or even a partner/friend/&c.) who is struggling with anger.

I look forward to your response, and appreciate your time.

My latest post addresses the mechanism by which protection of the ego became the primary function of anger. It could happen to any social animal who achieves self-consciousness. Displays of most anger within social groups are used to enforce hierarchy, not protect members from death – they don’t want to destroy each other, as that would endanger their survival. They seek submission to the hierarchy by invoking fear and shame. The post also describes value.

The association of anger with abrupt decline in ego value is a conditioned response to increased vulnerability – a less valuable ego feels more vulnerable. A large part of my therapy with angry clients is helping them see that nothing bad will result from loss of ego value, therefore, it doesn’t require the protection of anger. It is only telling you to do something that will make you feel more valuable, which anger cannot do.

Hi, a subject dear to my heart :-),

You wrote:

On the contrary, in other species of social animals, anger-displays are limited - often by pain of death - to those who have achieved territorial dominance, namely alpha males and matriarchs.

This alpha-anger looks pretty ego-driven to me, it's all about maintaining power and status. How is that different from modern ego-driven anger?

It may simply be that standing up to alphas is no longer likely to get us killed (at least in most 'civilized' places), so non-alphas naturally find their ego needs coming to the fore, a la Maslow - now that the basic need to survive is relatively assured, higher needs (such as ego) can be met.

Maybe anger is only a 'problem' nowadays because many of us no longer submit to a rigid dominance hierarchy? So the 'rules' that used to work about anger are no longer in play, and new rules are being worked out.

Maybe alphas and non-alphas are representative of two different lines of human development (dominator types and cooperative types), and when the two mix, you get anger 'problems' because the cooperatives assume we're all equal, while the dominators believe absolutely in hierarchy.

(Riane Eisler wrote about dominators and cooperatives - she used some other terminology which I'm forgetting - in The Chalice and the Blade. Many others have written about these ideas as well - a book called Ishmael, for example, calls them Takers and Leavers.)