Part 1
When acted upon as aggression, the emotion of anger causes significant suffering in the lives of both others and ourselves. During the last five years working as an anger management specialist, I have helped hundreds of individuals, mostly men, who have experienced significant losses in their lives as a result of their aggressive behaviors. They have hurt others, usually emotionally but sometimes also physically, and are now paying the price in terms of being separated from loved ones. Sometimes this separation includes being separated from their children — the most painful consequence of all.
Given the suffering I have observed, the goal of this piece is to share what I have learned from assisting clients, with the hope of preventing the kinds of situations that result in a prescription of mandatory or “highly recommended” anger management counseling.
Here is the key take-away: You can develop your emotional intelligence and learn the skills needed to have relationships with others in which your needs are met and the relationship itself is harmonious.
Step #1 Recognize you don’t need anger management, you need aggression management.
Anger is a normal emotion that arises when something you value is being threatened; in other words, it’s your protective, “boundary-setting” emotion. Additionally, we are all motivated to meet our needs, and when that movement towards need satisfaction is blocked in some way, we naturally feel frustrated. Thus, feeling angry isn’t itself a problem; on the contrary, it’s important to allow yourself to feel anger throughout your entire body.
The problem comes when our actions, rather than protecting our boundaries or helping us achieve our goals, violate the boundaries of others or the natural world; in other words, anger is a problem when our behaviors, rather than enacting our values, go against our values. At that point, we need aggression management.
In addition to being true, this new perspective is also useful because some of us learned early in life that it wasn’t ok to feel angry. If we perceive as children that our experience of anger is threatening to the adults in our lives, we will learn to repress it. While repressing anger is an understandable survival strategy in childhood and adolescence, it nevertheless contributes to states of depression over the long term. This new perspective helps you to allow yourself to feel anger fully but not “act out” aggressively; in making this change, you not only avoid causing harm to others, but also avoid one of the major causes of depression.
Step #2 Express the “Energy” of Anger In Service of Clarity
In the paragraph above, I suggested that we need to feel anger fully but not act out aggressively. This first step of adopting a new perspective will help but you will also need to change what you do with all of that energy. Changing how we respond to the emotion of anger is especially important.
The key is to express the intensity of the angry feeling, but to do so while refocusing the narrative self upon the desire for freedom and clarity. For example, you can pause, take three breaths, and look into what lies beneath the anger. Sometimes, if you take the time to be curious, you’ll find some unexpressed need underneath the strong emotion (see part 2 of this article for details). When we can find our unexpressed need and articulate it clearly, it can bring deeper intimacy to our relationships rather than further separation.
Another example of what you can do if you are feeling strong anger is to stamp your feet while saying “free my mind!” and “free my heart!”. This approach draws on a Buddhist teaching of Tog Chod; which translates as the practice of cutting through thought and emotion. Sometimes, just a few peaceful breaths aren’t enough, so taking some sort of embodied action like stomping, yelling, and moving the body in some vigorous way is just the antidote we need to release some of the angry energy. This process releases some of the intensity and can give us more space to discover what is there underneath the anger.
Whether you use peaceful or more intense methods of interrupting the anger, underneath the experience is often a desire for clarity, a need for protection of self or other, or a boundary that has been crossed that needs to be reestablished. All of these are positive and healthy expressions of anger. In this way, the emotion of anger holds important information. When we learn to express ourselves from a place of clarity based on our needs rather than through aggression, we have a better chance of actually having our needs met. I hope the next time you feel a sudden burst of anger you remember to pause and try one of these methods. Instead of acting out in aggression, see if there is a chance to discover more about yourself and what lies underneath the anger.
For more details on accessing your unmet needs, check out the second part to this article: Expressing Anger as Nonviolent Communication.
Part 2: Expressing Anger as Nonviolent Communication
In the first part of this article, I explained the important difference between feeling anger and acting out with aggression. While anger is a natural emotion that can be important to fully feel, acting out with aggression can lead to unintended negative consequences. If you haven’t read part 1, I encourage you to do so here. In this article, we’ll explore how to turn anger into a clear expression of either assertiveness or need using a method called Non-Violent Communication.
Is your anger hiding something more vulnerable underneath?
In psychology, we sometimes identify emotions as either primary or secondary. Primary emotions are the core emotion being felt. Secondary emotions are reactive emotions that sit on top of primary emotions. Secondary emotions are often present because the primary emotion(s) are too vulnerable or uncomfortable to feel directly. Anger is a common secondary emotion.
Being able to recognize whether or not anger is primary, or instead is a reaction towards more vulnerable feelings like envy, fear, shame or potentially even sadness, is an important skill to develop.
This skill is important because anger can look like strength on the outside; therefore, we sometimes display anger when what’s really happening is that we are feeling something more vulnerable or less socially acceptable, “deeper down”. By finding out what is the primary emotion we are feeling, and then dealing with that, secondary anger often lessens.
How to Find The Primary Emotion You are Experiencing
You can learn to find out more about what emotion is primary in the following way:
The next time you feel angry, try asking yourself if there is more going on. For example, you can inquire “Could I really be feeling embarrassed or ashamed?” Or, “Could I really be feeling afraid or sad?” And, “could I really be feeling envious or jealous?” While asking these questions, you want to be tuning into the felt sense of your body. Even right now, you might take a moment to simply feel your inner experience right now. And by the way, there are no exact answers here, simply go with what you come up with.
If anger still turns out to be your primary emotion, then you will deal with it by learning to be assertive — not aggressive — as described below. If anger turns out not to be your primary emotion, then what you do is switch your focus to what is the primary feeling and work with that. Since each of the other emotions we discussed have different ways of resolving them, the “how to’s” for each of them will need to be discussed elsewhere. That said, you have already made a big win in clarifying what you are really feeling. Knowledge is power.
Being Assertive In Order to Protect the Boundary or Meet the Need
If you clarify that anger is your primary emotion, it’s important to learn how to communicate assertively.
The model I have found most helpful in my work on this is called nonviolent communication. Providing a way to communicate that is respectful of both self and other, “nvc”, as it is often abbreviated, includes 4 steps: (1) Observation, (2) Feelings, (3) Needs, (4) Request. These are as follows:
Step 1 – Observation: As best you can, separate out what is observable in the situation that is bothering you, from your interpretations or judgements about it. When your communication is as close as possible to an objective description of a situation — what I sometimes call the “video camera view” – it’s both easier for the other person to hear without reacting, and harder for them to avoid the truth of what you are saying. The nonviolent communication approach provides a sentence stem to make this easier, e.g “When I see….”, or “When I hear….”
Step 2 – Feelings:: Distinguish what you are feeling from what you are thinking, and share what you are feeling. When you risk speaking to your authentic feelings, you are simultaneously inviting a more vulnerable response from the other person. If they respond authentically in turn, then emotional intimacy starts to deepen between you. A list of feelings can be found here.
Step 3 – Needs: Emotions can be thought of as “energy-in-motion”, and what gets us moving? Our needs do. So the third step of recognizing and then expressing what it is we need from this interaction is crucial. Classically viewed hierarchically, although more recently re-formulated as “forms of integration” (see reference below), our needs include physical safety, relational connection and psychological self-esteem, exploration and creativity, and love and purpose. With these in mind, identify what is your need right now. A list of needs can be found here.
Step 4 – Request: Make a request that will help meet the need. When formulating a request that will help you meet your need, it is important to distinguish between what is a request versus what might be perceived as a demand. The difference between a request and a demand lies mostly in the tone and volume of your voice. Using a gentle tone of voice at a relatively low volume works best. For example, “Would you be willing to….”
In conclusion, taking the time to inquire into what we are most authentically feeling, as well as learning to communicate assertively when anger is verified as our primary emotion, are two skills that will make a difference in reducing problem anger.
For more details on how to communicate more effectively, check out CredibleMind’s topic center on Communication.
References
Nonviolent Communication: A Language of Life By Marshall B. Rosenberg, PhD.