Jack has a temper. Growing up with alcoholic parents, he was the kind of kid who was always getting in trouble at school – threatening classmates who he thought were talking about him, quickly got into fights on the playground. Even now as an adult he’s been known to snap at his employees. His wife sees him as constantly irritable and controlling. She’s always walking on eggshells.
Ellen has never had a temper. But in the past six months since her mother died she has felt not so much depressed or even a feeling of grief, but an impatient, a being out of sorts. To her surprise she suddenly found herself ranting at her boss last week almost getting herself fired.
Anger takes on many faces – the sudden blasting outburst, a WWIII-level explosion, the constant irritability that snaps at everybody and everything like a terrier on drugs. Often it is associated with control, with intimidation – the bully boss, the tyrannical spouse; other times with stress, bad moods, being tired, cranky, the just-leave-me-alone.
It’s a problem – certainly for those who absorb its blast, who walk about on eggshells – and for the perpetrator – the getting in trouble – at school, on the job, with the law. But it is also a solution of sorts, a learned way of coping, a cover for something else, its close cousins anxiety and depression.
Here’s what we often find when we deconstruct angry:
Hypervigilance. This is likely Jack’s problem. He grew up in a chaotic family, in his case an alcoholic one where he undoubtedly learned early on to detect the shifting moods, to know when the parents were drinking or sober, when to stay away, when it was safe to approach. If they flared up when drunk, this add to the mix his likely identifying with the aggressive, learning to imitate what sees, like it or not.
But the same thing would probably have happened if one or both of his parents had mental health problems, mood disorders that made them seem unpredictable and erratic. He would still be wired to be hypersensitive, hyper-alert as a way of surviving. What drives the anger is his constantly looking for the threat. Yes he’s angry but he’s also anxious.
What helped him survive as a child, doesn’t work as well as an adult. The wiring, the mental seeing the world as unsafe, is difficult to override. His control is now his way of not having any surprises sneak up and rattle him. His irritability is his anxiety bubbling to the surface.
Lack of emotional flexibility. The other problem under Jack’s problem is that he is basically a one-note-Johnny when it comes to emotions. He’s frustrated, he gets angry; he’s tired, he gets angry; he’s sad, he gets angry; he’s worried, he gets angry; he’s horny, he gets angry. Whatever else he might be feeling, he doesn’t feel it. It all comes out as anger.
Loss and grief. Ellen is in a different place. She isn’t wired like Jack is. But her mother’s death has taken its toll whether she feels it or not. Sometimes people like Ellen don’t have the opportunity to grieve – the rest of the family is falling apart, they are ones who have to handle the funeral, be the executor – and they get busy, go into action, focus on everyone and everything they have to do.
And then finally there is less to do, life goes more or less back into its old routines. They settle, but they don’t really settle. The impatience comes, the flare-ups. Some automatically drink more or use drugs without any conscious connection to their loss. Others shoplift or become shopaholics, act out with sex, get lost in video-games.
The grief has gone underground, it mutates again into anxiety. But because it is never tapped into directly and drained, it continues of leak out, spilling over into their lives and relationships.
If anger is a problem for you, you need to 1) learn to self-regulate and manage it and 2) untangle it from it’s source.
Self Regulation
Self-regulation is two steps: The preventative and the first-aide. The preventative is catching anger early enough to begin to control it. Check in with yourself 10 times a day and ask yourself on a scale of 1-10 (low to high) how irritable are you. If you find yourself getting up towards a 4 or 5, do something: Exercise – go walk around the block; sit in the bathroom and do deep breathing; take action – do something you can do to fix the problem in an appropriate rather than continuing to feel frustrated by it.
The first-aide. When you get triggered to go from 0-60 in 3 nano-seconds, the problem in the room is never what you are thinking about – your employee, your boss, your spouse’s comment – but your emotion. Forget about solving the problem and instead focus on putting out the fire of anger. Get away from the situation, go sit in the bathroom until you calm, down, write down how you are feeling, go punch a pillow. Don’t spray your anger around the room like a fire-hose. If you can’t do that on your own, go to a therapist, go to your doc and ask about medication. She’s likely to put you something for anxiety and depression, because that is essentially your problem.
Untangling and Rewiring
Hyper-vigilance. Rather than going on auto-pilot, you need to do voice-overs in your head all the time telling yourself that you are not 8 years-old anymore, that not everyone is out to upset you, that this is stuff from the past. The first 1000 times you say this to yourself, you’re not going to believe it. That’s okay. Simply by saying it you’re beginning to rewire your brain.
Find ways of lowering your anxiety. The exercise works, so does meditation, mindfulness, yoga, or if need be medication. If you lower your anxiety threshold, the hyper-vigilance will reduce.
Control. Same deal. Lower anxiety, do the voice-over in your head. It’s about anxiety and also often about having a hard time with surprises and transitions. Tell your wife to give you more notice if she can about inviting her mother over for dinner. Tell your employees to give you regular feedback about issues, rather than coming to you only in crisis. The first 1000 times your wife or employee does this, you still may get upset (go self-regulate), but with practice, you’ll find it easier to tighten your grip.
Emotional flexibility. When you’re doing your 10 check-ins a day and find yourself feeling irritable, try asking yourself what else you might be feeling – sad, worried, hurt, tired. Again, the first 1000 you ask, you’ll probably say, just irritable. That’s fine. By asking the question you are rewiring your brain. It will get easier. If you discover another emotion lurking beneath your anger, try to feel it, and certainly act on it – do something constructive about your worry, go take a nap if you tired.
Loss and grief. If you suspect that your anger is tied to unresolved loss, you need to grieve. Go to the cemetery by yourself and talk to the person you’ve lost. Better yet, write a letter. Imagine that person coming back to see you for 1 hour. Say in the letter whatever it is you wish to get off your chest. Take your time, don’t rush, do it in a quiet time and place. Allow yourself to feel what you feel.
The aim here is to remove anger as a solution, as an old form of coping that no longer works. It will take some time and diligence but we are talking a few months, not years. Tell the people close to you how they can help you do what you need to do.
And finally if you are one of those people on the receiving end of another’s anger, try seeing their anger as not about you, but them, not about their stubbornness or control or irresponsibility, but their struggle with anxiety and depression. That doesn’t mean that you need to be an emotional punching bag, but often changing your attitude will change your behavior and reaction, which in turn will help change theirs.
