How to Control Your Anger - What to do When ANGER Becomes a Problem

Welcome to Lesson #2:

Struggling with Anger is No Longer an Option

Face it, you want to change your anger. Perhaps your wish to change follows some incident where you lost control. Or maybe you’ve struggled for a long time, looking desperately for a way to stop the damage anger does to your relationships and your life. You’ve started reading this book because you no longer want to be trapped in your anger.

What are the Costs of Anger?

The battle with anger has cost you—in energy, of deep and painful regret, and of damage to your closest bonds. You feel that your efforts at anger control and all the ways those efforts have failed, have left a deep impact on you.

You probably already have a good idea how much responding with anger has cost you in the various areas of your life. Have you experienced broken and strained relationships? Sickness and poor health? Excessive stress? Difficulties at school or work? Problems with alcohol and other substances? There may also be other costs that are less obvious, or that you choose not to think about.

The following exercise on calculating the costs of anger can help you to see exactly what anger has cost you in your life. This will also give you a better idea of what you have missed out on by responding to anger feelings with anger behavior.

You may already have an idea that something is wrong. This is a good starting point. The difficult work is facing exactly what is wrong and coming to terms with what anger has cost you. In the following exercise, look at your personal experience with anger. If you are ready to get started, then grab a pen and a separate piece of paper.

EXERCISE: ASSESSING THE COST OF YOUR ANGER

1.   Interpersonal Costs

Summarize the effects of anger on your relationships. Have friendships changed or been lost? Have family members been alienated? Do they avoid you, or do you avoid them? Have you lost a marriage or romantic relationship due to anger?

2.   Career Costs

Summarize the effects of anger on your career. Have you ever quit or been fired from a job because of anger? This includes overt anger as well as passive aggression such as slacking off, being late, being less productive, bad-mouthing people, gossip, etc. Have co-workers been alienated by your anger? Has your anger affected your school career (relationships with teachers and/or administrators)?

3.   Health Costs

Describe the effects of anger on your health. There is a lot of research showing that anger stresses your body. Do you have any physical problems that could be stress related? Do you tend to get sick often? Do you experience physical symptoms during or after anger episodes (such as chest pain, muscle tension, upset stomach, and headache)? Do you sometimes mull over and stew over anger to the point of feeling sick or keyed up or having insomnia?

4.   Energy Costs

Outline how anger has affected your energy. Does your anger sometimes exhaust you? Have you put time and energy into disappointing efforts at control? Have your attempts to manage anger left you feeling discouraged, tired, or worn out?

5.   Emotional Costs

What has anger cost you emotionally? How much guilt do you carry for damage done by your anger? How do regrets about your anger episodes affect you emotionally? Are you affected by relationship losses due to anger? Do you suffer depression or hopelessness in the wake of your anger?

Completing your assessment of the costs of your anger is a crucial first step in honestly facing how anger has damaged you and continues to do so. But it also has another purpose. It’s important that you recognize and feel the effects of your anger despite all your efforts, promises, and resolutions to change it.

The History of Your Anger Management

In the last exercise, you reflected on the costs of your anger. Many of these costs probably led you to do one thing or another to avoid doing them in the future. For example, you may have blamed yourself or others for your hurt. You may have insisted on you being right and others being wrong. You may have blown up and yelled at people. Have these strategies made you less angry and happier with your life? Have they moved you in directions you want your life to take? Now, we would like you to reflect on what you have done about your anger and how well these past strategies have worked for you.

The reason for doing this kind of reflection is that we don’t want you to go on doing more of the same, especially when old anger management strategies have not worked for you. Successful anger transformation begins with facing—openly and honestly—each attempt at anger management, each past strategy, and seeing how it has worked.

Exercise: Taking A Look At Your Anger Management History

For this exercise, you will look at your past attempts to manage and control anger. This two-part exercise will help you organize your memories across different situations and relationships. The left-hand column of the grid lists categories of people who might trigger anger. If you’ve experienced anger in relation to one or another such person in your life, fill in the corresponding boxes in columns 2 and 3 (or use a separate piece of paper for your answers). Skip any people triggers that don’t apply to you.

In column 2, describe what you do to manage and control your anger when it’s triggered. What do you do with the feeling? Do you try to keep it from erupting? Do you push it down? Do you talk about it? Do you tell yourself not to react? Do you try to relax? Do you reach for a drink? Do you beat yourself up for past episodes with lots of negative self-talk? Do you promise people you’re going to change?

In column 3, describe the outcome of your anger management efforts. Have you succeeded in reducing your anger feelings? Have you succeeded in controlling your aggressive behavior? Have you been able to protect your relationships? Have you dealt with triggering feelings (shame, guilt, stress, frustration) in ways that don’t ignite anger.

Think about both the short term and the long term when you respond to these questions. Most importantly, what have you traded in or lost because of anger management and control efforts? Examples could be lost time or energy, frustration, missed opportunities, or diminished relationships or activities that you might enjoy or care about. Some of these losses may be similar to the costs you mentioned in the last exercise.

People Triggers	Coping strategy (my behaviors)	Outcome
Parents
Other family members
Supervisors
Coworkers
Friends
Partner/spouse

When doing an exercise like this, it can sometimes be helpful to see how another person filled it out. Take a look at the comments that Bob, a factory foreman, made about his anger management history.

People Triggers	Coping strategy (my behaviors)	Outcome
My father criticized me.	I act tough, withdraw, and stay away from him.	No relationship. Talk at Christmas on the phone.
My sister cuts me down.	I tell her nothing about myself.	No relationship. Feel alone.
Boss criticizes my work.	Get cold, distant, tell him he doesn’t know what he’s talking about.	Used to be friends. Now he doesn’t invite me to do things anymore.
Coworkers give me sloppy work.	Only give them written feedback to avoid blowing up.	People resent my notes, make jokes about me.
Friends don’t keep promises or aren’t on time.	I don’t say anything and pretend I’m okay about it.	I withdraw and stop calling them. Feel disgusted. Think about it for a long time.
Girlfriend disrespects or pressures me.	I get sarcastic or withdraw.	Feel resentful and more distant; lose sexual interest.

In the first part of this exercise, we looked at people who might trigger your anger. In the second part, you’ll identify feelings that might trigger your anger. Examples of feelings are listed in the left-hand column. If you’ve experienced anger in response to any of the feelings listed, fill in the corresponding boxes in columns 2 and 3. Again, skip any triggers that don’t apply to you.

Emotional triggers are often less obvious that people triggers, so you may find it harder to identify them. Pay special attention to feelings you don’t like or that have an unpleasant quality to them. As before, in column 2, describe what attempts you make to manage and control anger when it is ignited. In column 3, describe the outcome of your anger management and control efforts. Some of these may be similar to the costs you described previously. Use a separate piece of paper for your answers if they won’t fit on the chart.

Emotional Triggers	Coping strategy (my behaviors)	Outcome
Frustrated
Ashamed/guilty
Stressed
Afraid
Controlled
Disappointed
Threatened

Here is how Bob completed this part of the exercise. Notice that he altered the feelings category to more closely reflect his personal situation.

Emotional Triggers

Coping strategy

(my behaviors)

Outcome

Frustrated

I try to keep frustration to myself or come up with a reason for why things have gone wrong.

Sometimes I hit something (like the wall) to release my frustration.

Ashamed/guilty after screwing up

Try to say nothing and just fight for control of how I feel.

End up feeling worse for it; push people away and they resent me.

Feeling stressed when rushing or late

Try to stay controlled and keep my voice calm.

Eventually lose it; blow up if slightest thing goes wrong.

Feeling controlled by my girlfriend

I get sarcastic and withdraw.

Feel resentful, distant, “not there.” We fight about this.

When Bob reviewed this exercise, it was clear that his usual coping strategies such as being cold, distant, controlled, withdrawn, sarcastic, or silent weren’t working. That is because the outcome was usually to get so distant from others that relationships were damaged or lost.

After completing this anger management history exercise, look at what you’ve learned. Have your efforts to control anger worked? Have you kept relationships safe from the corrosive effects of your anger? Have all your efforts to manage rage still ended in episodes of lashing out? Have your efforts to keep anger feelings down actually kept them down? Or has anger continued to eat at you?

Chances are, if you are like a lot of people nothing you’ve done to control anger has really worked. You keep doing things you regret. You keep damaging the ones you need and love. And you keep trading in more and more of your life flexibility in an effort to get a handle on your anger.

What does your heart and your gut tell you about your history of anger? In your heart, do you feel sick about it? Helpless? Hopeless? What does your experience tell you about your response to anger? Take a minute to take stock.

Anger is a powerful feeling that can sweep away your strongest determination. Despite your efforts to manage and control anger, you still pay for it. You keep feeling bad about yourself and those who trigger anger. You want to change, but no amount of remorse or effort seems to control the force of your ignited rage. This is not a time to apply more willpower, either. You’ve already been down that road. More willpower is not the solution. You only need to be willing to adopt a different strategy—take a different path.

Stuck in Anger, Now What?

Feeling stuck and at your wits’ end is an important moment because there is a lesson here that can change your life. Knowing in your mind and heart—with absolute certainty—that the things you’ve done because of anger and to manage anger doesn’t work is the first step of a journey down a new road. Admitting and accepting that your anger feelings are stronger than your efforts to stop them creates a new freedom. You can do something new—because all your old ways to cope aren’t working and will not work.

When you look back at your responses to the previous exercises, you might think your situation looks hopeless. Yet there is hope, because there is another way. Hope starts with giving up on and stopping all your old anger management and control efforts. They haven’t worked and will not work in the future. They’ve kept you trapped with a false belief that control is possible, that anger management is possible, and perhaps, if you work harder at it or trade in a little more of your life, things will get better. Your experience tells you this isn’t so; so as long as you keep trying, you keep failing.

You need to understand that all the old strategies for managing anger lead to a dead end. They hurt you. This is why you need to stop them. Your experience tells you this. It is time to let go of old, unworkable strategies.

End of Chapter Thoughts

• Point to ponder: Anger has cost you dearly. Liberating yourself from the struggle with anger is a way out of the anger trap.

• Questions to consider: Have you and others suffered enough from the effects of your anger behavior? Are you willing to give up trying to manage your anger feelings and go down a different path?

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