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Welcome to Lesson #3:
Discovering the Center of the
Struggle
You’ve already taken the first step toward understanding the
struggle that lies within your anger. You’ve looked at the
costs
of your anger. You’ve faced all your previous attempts to
manage
and control anger thoughts, feelings, and actions. Then
you’ve
realized the difficult truth that nothing has really worked. No matter
how hard you tried, no strategy to manage anger has ever helped long
term. The costs are still there.
The healthiest response is to give up the struggle with anger, to
surrender. By surrendering you will experience—perhaps for
the
first time—what your struggle with anger has really been
about.
 It seems like
you’ve been fighting a tug-of-war, with the anger
monster pulling at one end of the rope and you pulling at the other
end. Yet no matter how hard you’ve pulled to defeat the anger
monster, it has always come back stronger, pulling harder at the other
end. While you were engaged in this endless and exhausting fight, with
both your hands firmly clenching the rope, it probably never occurred
to you that you don’t need to win this fight.
What would happen if you decided to stop fighting? You could simply
surrender and end the fight by dropping the rope. The anger monster
would still be around, throwing the rope at you, trying to get you back
in to the fight. But it’s your choice whether to pick up the
rope
again and continue the battle, or to keep your hands free so that you
can start doing the things you really care about.
Dropping the rope and ending the struggle creates a doorway. If you
aren’t consumed with the effort to control anger, there may
be an
opening to see and experience something deeper, something that the
struggle has masked.
You may be wondering how you can actually drop the rope. The first
thing you would do is give up being a manager of anger. You can stop
fighting against the feeling and the waves of pain. When you give up
being a manager of anger, you can start becoming an observer of the
anger process. You can watch your thoughts, feelings, and impulses.
The Anger
Process
There are five components to the anger process. Each one can offer
vital information about what lies at the center of the struggle.
• Pre-Anger Feelings
The first component is your pre-anger feelings. These are emotions, as
well as the physiological sensations, that come before the anger.
Pre-anger emotions are usually painful and something you want to avoid.
Shame and guilt are examples as both of these feelings attack your
basic sense of self-worth. They create a feeling that you are bad or
wrong at the core. Anger is a classic way to avoid these feelings.
Instead of you being wrong, anger turns the tables and makes it the
other person’s fault.
Another pre-anger emotion is hopelessness. A lot of male depression,
which has hopelessness at its root, shows up in relationships as anger.
The experience of hopelessness is somewhat covered up by the
high-energy emotion of anger or disgust.
Other pre-anger feelings include hurt and anxiety. Both create alarm
reactions. With hurt, you feel the sudden risk of abandonment; with
anxiety, you have a feeling of an imminent danger. Anger converts alarm
into a drive for action and the fear goes away—at least for a
while.
Bodily sensations can also play a role in your pre-anger experience.
Tension in your abdomen, shoulders, or jaw can be an indication of
anger. Feelings of heat or heaviness, agitation, headache, shakiness,
and the like are frequently mentioned precursors to outbursts of anger.
Angry behavior can mask all of these unpleasant sensations.
• Trigger Thoughts
The second component of the anger process is trigger thoughts. These
include painful memories and images brought on by the provoking
incident. Memories of past hurts, failures, losses, and so on can
become unpleasant to the point where you just desperately want to avoid
them. Trigger thoughts also tend to be good or bad, right or wrong
judgments about yourself or other people and their behavior. In fact,
anger is essentially impossible unless your mind comes up with some
type of judgment. Trigger thoughts usually paint you as a victim and
blame someone else for your pain. They often contain broad labels such
as stupid, incompetent, selfish, crazy, lazy, wrong, jerk, and so on.
• Anger Feeling
The third component is the anger feeling itself. It can show up as
either a gradual or sudden surge of arousal. This arousal typically
consists of autonomic nervous system responses, such as a pounding,
rapid heartbeat, fast breathing (hyperventilation), trembling hands or
legs, clenched jaws, muscle tension, and feeling hot or flushed.
• Impulse to Act
The arrival of the anger feeling usually generates a fourth component
of the experience—an impulse to act. This impulse often feels
indistinguishable from the trigger thoughts and anger feeling; but if
you watch carefully, you can see them as distinct stages of the
process. The high energy generated by escalating anger gets more
unpleasant as it grows, and there’s a natural pressure to
discharge this anger physically. You want to do
something—now—and so you begin to file through a
short list
of responses learned during past angry feelings.
• Anger Behavior
Up until this moment, you haven’t actually done anything. To
be
sure, you have experienced quite a few changes on the inside, but
nothing much has happened on the outside. Yet the pressure is mounting.
Now it seems that this pressure will lead naturally to the last and
most destructive component of the process, which is often some form of
aggressive behavior. At the dramatic end, this includes shouting,
finger pointing, run away, hitting, breaking things, and the like.
Sometimes anger behavior is more subtle such as rolled eyes, a look of
disgust, crossing your arms and looking away, a deep contemptuous sigh,
cutting comments, sarcasm, gossip, emotional and physical withdrawal.
And so on.
A person can cycle through these five anger stages again and again
during a single anger episode, and likely see this playing out multiple
times over the course of a day.
Michael’s
Story
Michael and his girlfriend got into it following a complaint she made
that Michael
isn’t very affectionate. His pre-anger feeling was hurt with
tightness in his stomach. Trigger thoughts included memories of other
complaints, as well as the following self-talk: “What a
hypocrite! She never hugs, never touches me, unless I start
it.”
Then the anger feeling ignited and included the sudden impulse to do
something. In this case, it was Michael saying something sarcastic:
“That’s funny, coming from someone with the warmth
of an
ice cube tray.”
The argument didn’t stop there. Michael’s
girlfriend came
back at him: “Remember when I hugged you at your birthday
party,
and you wouldn’t even hug me back because you
didn’t like
the music I had on? Your arms just hung there.” Now Michael
had a
new pre-anger emotion—shame. It felt horrible—like
something was really wrong with him. He didn’t want to feel
that,
so he started revving up for a real rage. His trigger thoughts included
an image of his girlfriend turning away when he tried to kiss her later
at the party, and the judgment—“I’m sick
of her crap.
She is totally selfish and ungiving.” Now came a flush; his
heart
started beating like a trip-hammer. Big anger feelings equal a big need
to do something. Michael roughly pushed his girlfriend out of the way
and stormed out of their apartment.
Five minutes later, his cell phone rang. “I don’t
need
this,” she said. “I won’t be here when
you get
back.” Suddenly Michael was afraid—he felt the icy
wind of
abandonment. This feeling was too hard to stay with. He
couldn’t
stand it. So the words came to him and he felt the urge to swear at her
and call her a name, and so he did. “You’re a
bitch,”
he told her, and then hung up the phone.
Becoming An
Unbiased Observer
To really watch something, such as how anger affects you, you have to
plant yourself firmly in the present moment. The past and the future,
where our thoughts so often dwell, must be abandoned in favor of the
here and now. This is the place you are anyway, and where your life is
lived out.
You do this, first of all, by deciding to do it. You decide you want to
understand the heart of the struggle, to fully experience everything
that happens when you get angry. You can make this choice any time and
commit to it.
The second way to stay in the present is by listening to your body.
This is achieved by noticing your breathing, your beating heart, your
posture, and your areas of tension. You observe any significant
sensations in your body: areas that hurt or feel hot, heavy, or shaky.
This is not an easy skill to learn, which is why you will be given
exercises throughout this book for you to practice everyday, so that
you can apply these skills when anger arises. If you want to apply
these skills in the heat of the moment, it’s best to practice
them at other times first.
The third way to stay in the present is to notice and keep track of
your conscious mind—your thoughts, emotions, and drives.
Throughout an anger episode, you need to keep asking yourself these
questions:
• What am I feeling besides
anger?
• What judgments am I
making—what good or bad; right or wrong thoughts are going
through my mind?
• What am I driven to do right
now?
The final strategy for staying in the present is to use a simple phrase
to remind yourself of your role as observer. Something such as,
“Listen and watch; do not judge.” For the observer,
there
is no right or wrong—there is just seeing and learning. And
if
you find yourself judging, then simply observe that—without
judging the judging. In the end, a judgment is just another thought.
As an observer you can simply observe what is going on (your
experience) without having to take sides or decide what is good or bad,
right or wrong. Being an observer allows you to end the struggle;
it’s one way of dropping the rope in your tug-of-war with
anger.
However, this is easier said than done. Anger thoughts and feelings are
so strong and powerful that they can seem to rule you. In the moment
you experience them, anger thoughts and feelings are difficult to
distinguish from your own separate identity. It becomes difficult to
see that, while thoughts, worries, and feelings are part of you, they
aren’t you. They come and go. You don’t own them.
You
can’t make them go away if you dislike them. You
can’t hold
on to them, even if you like them.
A “good” thought such as “I am
confident” is
not more like you than a “bad” thought such as
“I’d like to hit this guy.” They are both
part of
you, and they come and go all by themselves.
Try to think of yourself as being like a house. Just as a house
provides the space for people to live in along with all their furniture
and other belongings, we provide the space in which our experiences can
occur. The structure of the house remains the same, regardless of who
lives in it, how it’s furnished, or how it’s
decorated. The
house doesn’t care about who lives in it, how people furnish
it,
or what they think or feel. The house simply provides the space in
which all that living can occur.
Exercise:
Mental DVD
Sometimes it is impossible to watch and pay attention to everything
that is happening during one of your anger episodes. Things just move
too fast and furiously. You get swept in to the anger and stop noticing
key thoughts and feelings. But you still want to understand what
happened—to look beneath the surface of that anger and see
what’s hidden there. Mental DVD is an effective technique for
recovering forgotten details of a recent anger experience.
Begin by closing your eyes and taking a deep breath. As you release it,
try to let some of the tension flow out of your body. Now imagine a
white circle of light just above your head—kind of like an
oversized halo. The circle of light starts to descend, first
surrounding the top of your head, then moving down to your face, neck,
and shoulders.
Try to relax each part of your body as the circle passes. Take another
deep breath and watch the circle descend to your hops, thighs, and
calves, then disappear beneath your feet.
With your body more relaxed, take one last deep breath, and focus your
attention on the anger episode you want to understand. Start in the
middle—where you’re fully angry—and
imagine you are
watching everything on a DVD. Observe the scene for a minute.
You’re really angry. On this disk, there’s a
voice-over of
your thoughts—listen to what is going on in your mind.
Now hit the button that takes you back to the beginning of the episode,
before the anger started. Press Play. Watch the action; listen to what
is being said. What are you feeling in that moment before the anger?
Are you hurt, ashamed, scared, hopeless, guilty, feeling wrong or
unworthy? Pay attention to your posture and your voice. Try to make
contact with what is happening inside you just before the anger erupts.
Now watch any memories or images that have been triggered. What are
your thoughts? Do you have trigger thoughts that paint the other person
or the situation as bad or wrong? Keep listening until you hear the
words of this inner voice.
Now the anger is coming. Watch as it grows. Notice what if feels like,
what it makes you want to do. Be aware of any impulses to speak or act
on your anger. Don’t do anything about your feelings. Just be
the
house and let your feelings be. Just observe them.
Mapping Your
Anger Process
Now that you have learned how you can observe your anger,
it’s
time to map how your anger really works—the process of your
anger. For the next week or so, closely watch each anger episode. Use
the techniques mentioned earlier to remain a here-and-now observer of
your experience.
Either adopt the house perspective or use the mental DVD to recapture
an anger event that was too overwhelming to track as it unfolded. What
have you learned? On a separate piece of paper, record as much detail
as you can in the following anger map exercise.
Exercise:
Your Anger Map
Pre-Anger
Feelings
Describe the emotions and physical sensations you noticed this week
preceding your anger episode. Is there typically one feeling, or are
there several that may show up at the beginning of your anger process?
How do these feelings affect your sense of self-worth? Do you find
yourself wanting to escape or suppress them? Are there physical
sensations preceding anger that are painful or uncomfortable? Does
anger help to push them out of your awareness?
Trigger
Thoughts
Write down as much as you can remember about any painful images or
memories that come up in anger situations. What judgments do you
typically make about other people? Which of your expectations or rules
for living do they fail to live up to? Note how your trigger thoughts
may change your pre-anger feeling or distract you from them.
Anger Feeling
Does your anger build slowly, or suddenly ignite full force? Does it
sometimes stick around and brew for long periods of time, like a
low-grade cold? Does it feel good, sweeping away hurt or shame? Does it
feel scary or disturbing? Write down everything you’ve
learned as
an observer of your anger, every detail about the feeling and its
effect on you. Especially note what happened to your pre-anger feelings
and any changes in your trigger thoughts.
Impulse to Act
What did you want to do this week when your anger surged? What images
or thoughts came to mind? Write down everything you imagined saying or
doing. You may have done only some or perhaps none of those things, but
it’s important to identify as many anger-driven impulses as
possible. How did you decide whether or not to act on them?
Anger Behavior
Write down what you actually did, via gestures, facial expressions,
words, tone of voice, or overt behavior (acts of aggression, violence)
as a response to your anger. How did the aggression feel at the moment?
How did it affect your anger (both the emotion and physical
sensations)? As time went on, how did your feelings change, if at all,
regarding your anger behavior?
End of
Chapter Thoughts
The path out of your anger and into your life will take you to places
you’ve never been before. Some of these places may be scary
and
difficult for you to experience. Yet there is something at the core of
this struggle that is soft and has extraordinary value: protecting a
delicate human being (you) who fears two things—that people
will
judge and reject you and that you will reject and hate yourself.
The fear is that you will finally be seen—by yourself or
others—as unworthy, broken, or bad. The only hope is to stay
hidden, safe, and protected from those pre-anger feelings by trigger
thoughts and rage. That vulnerable self you’ve been shielding
has
always felt like it could be broken or mutilated if the arrows of
judgment were ever allowed to hit home. So you remain vigilant, on
guard, and angry.
Anger is a way of protecting that delicate human being. It makes the
feelings of inadequacy, hurt, shame, and guilt and keeps them out of
view. Think, for a moment, what it feels like to have your buttons
pushed. When others, either by their words or by their actions, push
your buttons, you become angry, in part because those buttons represent
aspects of yourself (including your past) that are painful, hurtful,
and embarrassing to acknowledge openly and directly.
A lot of us feel this way. When our buttons are pushed, the totality of
who we are is right in our face, and not entirely by our own doing.
Anger is a natural reaction to this process. We feel wronged and then
we act on it to defend that fragile self that has been brought out in
the open; this way we can push those unwanted feelings and old hurts
and pains back out of view.
Here’s a novel idea: What if all this protecting and
defending
and hiding is the problem? What if there is no need to hide anything?
What if letting go of those painful feelings, of those moments of hurt
and judgment, of the fear of being seen and rejected is the beginning
of a solution?
You’ve tried the old way—running away from the
pain—long enough. It hasn’t worked. It only creates
more
problems; the struggle just keeps playing out in your life. Are you
ready for a change? What if you were to stop struggling and drop the
rope? What if you started to be an observer rather than a member of one
team or the other?
Simply noticing what you feel means beginning to accept what you feel.
It does not mean liking what you feel or agreeing with what somebody
has done to you. It only means being aware of what you feel and
acknowledging it for what it is (a thought, a feeling, a sensation, a
memory, an image), without taking sides or doing anything about it.
Protecting yourself from hurt and pain using anger and blame is at the
core of your futile struggle with anger. This has not worked; instead,
it has caused numerous problems in your life. As you learn to
acknowledge angry thoughts and feelings for what they really are, it
will become easier to give up your struggle with anger. Learning to
become an observer is a skill that can bring remarkable relief from
suffering.
• Points to Ponder: You can
learn to become an
observer of, rather than a participant in, your anger. You are not your
thoughts and feelings.
• Questions to Consider: Do you
really need to
hide and protect yourself from feeling hurt, shame, fear, and
inadequacy? Are you willing to learn to be an observer of anger
feelings and thoughts rather than participating in a struggle with them?
Click Here to Go to Lesson #4
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