Suppressed Anger

People who are suffering the pain of internal pressure, tension and stress are not as productive as they need to be. Coping with these unseen, often unconscious problems takes energy that they could be put to more productive use. They waste their energy in futile wrangling over minutiae, personality clashes, sulking in the corner, and looking out the window. We say that they are "preoccupied," but we do not know what they are preoccupied with. Neither do they. They are preoccupied with solving painful problems that they do not know how to solve.

We are not taught in school how to identify the presence of internal stress. We never learn where it comes from nor how to relieve it in the right way. We spend our lives "relieving" it in ways that make it worse. When we finally burst a blood vessel, they will nod sadly and say, "It was the stress." Yes. But which stress?

Our doctor will solve the problem by saying, "You've got too much stress. Quit your job." Or he will put us on pills that will numb us to the inner conflicts that are tearing us in half. It would be far more useful to identify these sources of our inner stress as a first step toward making them go away.

Source Number One: Negative Control
We are in control all right. We run a tight ship. We don't miss a thing. However, after we are taken to the hospital, we will miss quite a bit. There is an irony here, that the very things we are trying to prevent, such as loss of control, turn out to be our fate in the end.

• If we do not know how to control in the right way, we will control in the wrong way by default.

• If we don't know what to control, we will control the wrong things and fail to control the right things.

• If we don't know who is controlling, if we are only playing a role opposite someone else's role, nobody will be in control. A mere role that we play according to a script from the past cannot control situations effectively in the present.

• If we don't know what control is, we will make up our own definition of control that will not match up with the demands of the real world. In a contest between ourselves and reality, reality will win every time.
The Wrong Way

Internal stress comes from having the wrong definition of "control," a definition many of us have learned from our parents when we were three. We have not reassessed our definition since then: To us, control means "preventing bad things from happening." This definition, or more correctly, this attitude toward control, breeds endless stress because:

• It requires us to know what is going to happen before it happens.

• It requires us to solve the problem before it arises.

• It requires that we prevent the disaster perfectly. Nothing less will do.

• It sets us up to feel inadequate to cope with life because we cannot possibly fulfill the absurd requirements of this attitude.

• It sets us up for more disaster, not less because while we are trying to live in the future, we are neglecting our appropriate responsibilities in the present.

• When the "disaster" happens, we blame ourselves for "failing" to prevent it: "I should have seen it coming."

• We blame ourselves for "failing" to know what the other person was thinking and planning to do to us: "I should have known."

When we try to live in the future, when we try to "head it off at the pass," we cannot be in real control. We can only be out of control because our basis of control is not congruent with the real world. We live in fear of impending disaster in the future. This is one of the main sources of anxiety in our lives. It is very stressful indeed.

Suppressing our anger is another example. This is not "control," either. We are merely "stuffing" it for fear of the consequences of letting it out. We learned as a child that expressing anger was followed by severe consequences. "Stuffing it" now is an example of preventing "disaster" (punishment, victimization, rejection, displeasing, abandonment) in the future. We have never forgotten that lesson. It became our blueprint for "coping" with out of control situations in later life. These lessons once learned, can be unlearned if we know how.

The Right Way To Control

A better definition of control is "the feeling that one is making things happen on one's own terms in the present." The antidote to feeling out of control is the feeling that one is in control, not of others, or of life, but of oneself on an appropriate basis. If we want to experience positive control, we must make it happen. The next time we are angry, for example, we can relieve our frustration by reminding ourselves that we have a choice now that we did not have as children - to control it the wrong way, by a) "losing it," erupting like a volcano, or by b) suppressing it. Or, we can express it the right way. As adults, we can now choose to express our anger in the middle ground between the two extremes: We can tell the truth about it. We can choose to say, "You know, it really makes me angry when you do that!" We have just made that happen, on our terms, at a time and place of our choosing. That is control. That is appropriate responsibility for relieving the pain of our anger in a way that works. We get it out of our system. We do not add another lump to the pile that is making us sick inside.

If we are angry at someone who is not around for one reason or another, all is not lost. We still have our power of choice. We can choose to write our anger out of our system with an anger letter to the offender, past or present. We are making the letter happen right now. We are using the word "angry," not some childhood euphemism. It is not for the offender's benefit at all. It is for our own. It will give us relief that the old way of "expressing" it never did. We call this positive method of control, "managing anger."

Courage

It takes courage to manage our feelings and emotions in this new way. It is hard to have courage when we have been discouraged for so long. We need to replace our discouragement with encouragement. Courage is the willingness to take a risk. We are unwilling to risk doing something for the first time. We might fail, or someone might laugh at us for trying. Our lifelong agenda has not been to relieve our pain, it has been to prevent disaster, such as humiliation in the eyes of others. This unconscious agenda is an example of:

• living on other people's terms, not our own.

• living in the future. We cannot have courage in the future. We can only have it in the present, right now.

When we have the courage to call our anger by its rightful name, to risk the consequences of revealing our secret feeling even to ourselves in an anger letter, we strike a blow for freedom. We are liberating ourselves from a lifetime of inappropriate, hobbling feelings and attitudes that we didn't even know were there. The irony here is that we do not realize they were down there controlling us until they are gone!

One impediment to having courage is the feeling that we are inferior, we are not worth our taking a risk for. That is not reality, it is only a feeling, an attitude about ourselves. The truth is that, as a worthwhile human being, we are worth the risk, no more and no less than anyone else.

Source Number Two: I Can't Trust My Judgment

On the basis of our new definition of control, we are free to take the ups and downs of life as they come and do the best we can with it. We have stopped reacting out of inappropriate fears and attitudes e.g., "Life is just one disaster after another, it's only a matter of time," and instead, we are trusting our adult judgment to make appropriate decisions as occasions arise. As children, many of us learned not to trust our judgment: "It wasn't good enough." Well, it wasn't very good back then, was it? The problem is that our judgement has gotten much better but this attitude towards our judgment hasn't grown up with us - it is still back down there interfering with our judgment in the present. Some of us can make ten good decisions in a row, but our old doubt about our judgment will rise up and sabotage the next one. It is as if we were telling ourselves something like, "If I think it's A, it must be B!" So we override our first choice and pull the plug on ourselves. We were right the first time. We have shot ourselves in the foot. This conflict between wanting to trust our judgment and our fear of making the wrong one is very stressful.

Here, the major impediment is often perfectionism. Our attitude is: "The only way to avoid making the "wrong" judgment is to be sure that my judgment is perfect! Anything less than perfect might be wrong. So I'd better not make any judgment at all." We decide not to decide. We become paralyzed. Very stressful indeed.

When the crunch comes, we react to the pressure and operate out of attitudes from the past - fear of criticism, fear of punishment, fear of loss, and we come up with a non-rational "solution" that makes everything worse. We "confirm" our attitude that our judgment cannot be trusted. It still isn't good enough.

The Antidote To Distrusting Our Judgment

Some antidotes to distrusting our judgment would be to:

• give ourselves credit for making successful judgments in the past. We can build on our past successes. We are quick to criticize our lapses, but very slow to validate our legitimate successes. If we don't validate them at the time, we cannot build on them later. We can say, "I did that. It needed to be done and I made it happen." That is not "smug self satisfaction," that is our appropriate responsibility for repairing the discouragement of the past.

• replace our perfectionistic attitude with a more realistic one, such as "My judgment doesn't have to be perfect, it has to be good enough to get the job done. I am required to be competent at my task, and that is what I am."

• remind ourselves that an imperfect judgment, in most cases, is not the end of the world. That feeling is called anxiety, and it makes our judgment worse, not better. Instead, we can say to ourselves, "If I make an imperfect judgment on Tuesday, I can make a better one on Wednesday based on additional information and experience. I am a worthwhile human being in the meantime."

• remind ourselves that, "If I make an imperfect judgment, it is not a "failure." I can learn from it and not make it again."

• remind ourselves that, "If the organization loses some money due to a mistake in judgment, it is regrettable. It is the price they pay for having imperfect human beings in their employ. It is the price of our on the job training in how to make imperfect judgments in an imperfect world."

Source #3: "I Am Frustrated"

Frustration is a major cause of internal and external stress. The frustration may arise from external sources, such as a perfectionistic boss, or an irresponsible subordinate. External sources of frustration are visible to the naked eye - the sources of inner frustration are not. Frustration is an abstract concept. It does not show up on the x-ray directly, all we can see are the things that it has been doing to our insides for a very long time.

We need to define these abstract terms so that we can manipulate them as easily as we do our red hot sheets of steel in the rolling mill. We need to get a handle on these factors that are destroying our health just as bacteria used to do before Pasteur taught us to put the right label on them. Once he did that, an antidote could be found.

Frustration is:

• Anger ("This situation is causing me a grievance"), plus

• Powerless ("There is nothing I can do about it"), plus

• Out of Control ("The situation is controlling me. I cannot make anything happen!").

When we are angry and have the power to do something about it, we are not frustrated. We solve the problem. The anger goes away. We made something positive happen. Many times, however, we are angry, we try to do something about it and it fails. We wind up feeling frustrated. This is the emotion that causes employee burn out, executive heart attack, and "Type A personality" cardio-vascular "accident." But it wasn't really an accident, this individual worked at it. He did not do what he might have done to prolong his own life. It was not on his agenda. To relieve frustration, we must relieve all three components - anger, powerlessness and feeling out of control.

Let's take an example; Mack is angry at Mary Ann for losing his expense account. Every time Mary Ann looks up, Mack is glaring at her. It's unnerving. It makes her angry. She tells Evelyn, the Section Chief. Evelyn goes over to Mack and says, "Stop glaring at Mary Ann. It's unnerving," She goes back to her seat. She is angry at Mack, Mary Ann is angry at Mack, and Mack is angry at both of them.

Mary Ann looks up again. There is Mack glaring at her. That's frustration. She thought she had power on her side, and that it would resolve the problem. She sees now that she was mistaken. Nothing has changed. She is powerless. She goes back over and tells Evelyn. Now Evelyn is frustrated. She has been thwarted, her power and control have proven to be useless. She goes back to Mack and says, "Now stop it. I really mean it. You'll be sorry." This bluff and bluster does not seem to work, either. It didn't work the last time or the time before that. Mack is defeating them both in a power struggle over who can keep who from glaring at who. Mack is frustrated because his mismanaged anger is not solving the problem of his missing expense account.

These three people are all in pain. They are all pumping adrenaline which stimulates them to fight or flight. Unfortunately, they can do neither, which only compounds their frustration. They become super frustrated. Their hearts are beating too rapidly, their digestive systems have shut down, their energy is propelling them to actions which are forbidden by company policy, such as yelling and screaming, hitting, poking, punching and so on.

This situation has created an internal conflict between "letting it all out" and "keeping it all in!" They are going to remain in this morbid condition until Mary finally finds the expense account which has inadvertently been filed under "Bad Debts." Now they are all back in control of themselves, they are empowered to get on with their lives, and the grievances have been removed. The inner stress has been relieved.

But what if the source of the frustration is not so easily removed? What if Mary Ann had put in for a promotion but it was given to an employee with more seniority but less specialized experienced? Or Evelyn had submitted an idea for eliminating four unnecessary steps in processing vouchers but was turned down because her superior didn't think of it first? That is frustration, and it doesn't go away. It may become sealed over, like an oyster with a pearl, but it is down there causing "stress" just the same.

Coping With Frustration

Frustration arises when we have only one choice and it doesn't work, or two choices and neither of them work. Once again, the antidote is that we can free ourselves from these painful beartraps by giving ourselves a third choice. One complication is that, when it comes to relieving anger problems, our repertoire of responses is severely limited. We never learned at home or in school what our constructive choices are. All we have are these destructive choices of our own devising. But we are adults now. We can learn what our new choices are. This knowledge is empowering. As soon as we give ourselves an effective alternative, we will feel relief from the pain of this internal stressor.

Here are some choices that these three people could have made had they known that they were available. All of these choices come under the heading of an anger management technique called, "Telling The Truth." This is a difficult technique, which is why so few of us use it. Most of us have been using techniques that are easy. That is why they don't work. We cannot solve difficult problems with easy answers. It takes courage and maturity to do what is difficult. We strengthen our courage and maturity by doing what reality requires, not what we "think" it requires. Most of us do not even know that these hard choices are available to us. We have been told to pretend that we are not angry, we are just "upset," or "bothered." These words are not the truth. They are euphemisms for anger, and they do not give us the relief that we need. Also, they require no courage to express. Any fourth grader can express them.

Mack could have relieved his frustration by choosing to say to Mary Ann: "It makes me angry when you lose things that I give you." Mary Ann could have gone over to Mack and chosen to tell him the truth about herself, which she does have the right to do: "Mack, it makes me angry when you sit there and glare at me. It doesn't speed things up, it only slows me down. But, it's your choice. Just don't complain if it takes me longer to find your expense account."

Evelyn could have said, "Mack it makes me angry when you sit there glaring at Mary Ann when we have a 4:30 deadline to meet. There's work to be done. It's your choice, but if it isn't done, there will be a consequence in the morning. That's not a threat, that's the real world we live in."

Mack could have said, "Evelyn, it makes me angry when Mary Ann loses my things, and you don't do anything to improve her efficiency. She needs a better filing system."

Or, he could have chosen to "let it go." This is not suppressing or repressing, it is choosing to do what is appropriate in the reality situation. It relieves the internal stress.

Some of us are afraid to use the scary "A" word. It isn't "nice." Life gives us opportunities everyday to outgrow such childhood attitudes and replace them with more mature ones. Anger is unpleasant, but it is not a crime. We are not guilty, we are merely imperfect. Sometimes life requires us to stop being so "pleasing" and do that which is unpleasant. It is regrettable, but appropriate to the unpleasant situation at hand. It is up to us to use our judgment and make the right anger choice at the right time.

How Do These Choices Relieve Internal Stress?

We all know that "doing nothing" does not relieve stress. We also know that "doing the wrong thing" doesn't relieve stress. The third option is to do what reality requires us to do, no more and no less. We can use our judgment to tell us what reality requires, and we must have the courage to do what needs to be done - not for the other person, but for ourselves.

• We are not reacting or overreacting, we are making a considered choice.

• We are affirming ourself as a worthwhile human being in our own right.

• We are not building ourself up by tearing someone down.

• We are not letting them tear us down, either.

• We are making it happen at a time and place of our own choosing.

• We are not out of control, we are in control of ourselves.

• We are not powerless, we have the power of choice and the courage to carry it out.

• We are not using our anger to intimidate (control) another person. We are showing appropriate restraint.

• We are not living in the past or the future. We are living in the present.

• We are assuming appropriate responsibility, not too much or too little.

All of these good feelings are components of self-respect. When we make these new choices on an informed basis, not just because someone told us to, we have feelings of independence, security, equality, belonging to the human race and peace of mind. In other words, we have used a difficult anger problem as an opportunity to replace our self-doubt from the past with self-respect in the present.

• The more we succeed, the stronger we become in our new identity as a worthwhile human being.

•The more we respect ourselves, the more likely we are to earn the respect of our co-workers.

• The more we respect each other on a healthy basis, the less stress there will be, internal or external.

In this atmosphere of mutual respect, we will be more likely to cooperate with each other in getting the job done. We will be more productive, and we will enjoy it more.

http://angerclinic.com/

http://sites.google.com/site/aaronkarmin/home

Aaron Karmin MA, LCPC. Through Roosevelt University he holds an advanced certification in stress management which involves teaching six mind-body techniques which enhances relaxation. Aaron has worked at all levels of mental health care from inpatient to outpatient, private to community, not for profit to Fortune 500 executives. He is a highly effective guest lecturer, group therapy leader, and individual therapist who is able to discuss a variety of topics including: Anger Management, Leadership, Relaxation Techniques, Communication Skills, and Goal Setting Strategies. Aaron recognizes the need for flexibility and creativity to address the mind and body and uses solution-based instructions to promote a healthy lifestyle. His approach to anger management focuses on increasing frustration tolerance and impulse control by understanding triggers, identifying physical cues, recognizing thoughts, considering consequences, implementing solutions, choosing behaviors, and promoting expression. When individuals feel in control of their situations and their lives, their depression and anxiety are replaced with feelings of security, confidence, competence, identity, responsibility, belonging, and self-respect, which is the prerequisite for success at home and at work.