Managing Anger: Simple Steps to Dealing with Frustration and Threat

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Managing Anger: Simple Steps to Dealing with Frustration and Threat
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Managing Anger

Simple Steps to Dealing with Frustration and Threat

Gael Lindenfield


To Stuart, my husband, whose love, courage, honesty and humour have enabled me to take so many strides forward in my struggle to manage my own anger more positively and constructively.

Table of Contents

Cover Page

Title Page

List of Exercises

Introduction

ONE Understanding More About Anger

CHAPTER 1 Anger’s Journey from Stimulus to Response

CHAPTER 2 Anger and Our Bodies

CHAPTER 3 Anger and Our Minds

CHAPTER 4 Anger and Our Behaviour

CHAPTER 5 Personal Anger Patterns

TWO Managing Our Own Anger

CHAPTER 6 Step 1: Challenge and Change Your Attitudes

CHAPTER 7 Step 2: Take Control of Your Fears

CHAPTER 8 Step 3: Face the ‘Beast’ Within Yourself

CHAPTER 9 Step 4: Deal with the Backlog of Unresolved Anger

CHAPTER 10 Step 5: Learn to Express Feelings Appropriately and Skilfully

CHAPTER 11 Step 6: Find Constructive Channels for Your Anger Energy

THREE How to Deal with Other People’s Anger

Introduction

CHAPTER 12 Facing an Angry Outburst

CHAPTER 13 In the Wake of the Outburst

CHAPTER 14 Dealing with the Chronic or Repressed Anger of Other People

CHAPTER 15 In the Face of Violence

FOUR Preventative Strategies

Introduction

CHAPTER 16 Strategies for Yourself

CHAPTER 17 Strategies for Others

Further Reading

Index

Acknowledgements

About the author:

Copyright

About the Publisher

List of Exercises

Please use the search facility on your reading device to locate the exercises


My Rights
The Price of My ‘Niceness’
Dealing with Irrational Fears
Handling Rational Fears
Exploring My Darker Side
Uncovering Childhood Wounds
Identifying Your Inner Child’s Anger
Healing Childhood Wounds
Unresolved Anger from Adulthood
Assertive Anger Scripts
Action for Justified Anger
Positive Self-talk
Self-protection Techniques for Criticism
No Excuse
Sounding Out My Self-esteem
Stress Monitoring
My Stress Alert Chart
Challenging My Blinkers
Improving Communication Skills
Analysing My Relationships
Management Spot-check

Introduction

To most of us, the word ‘anger’ conjures up fearful and unpleasant images. In our minds, this is an emotion we generally associate with scenes of abuse, hurt, violence and destruction. But this dreadful reputation is very unfair to this natural, basic emotion. After all, it is actually designed to be a positive and constructive aid to survival. Its function is to provide us with vital boosts of both physical and emotional energy, just when we are most in need of either protection or healing.

But it is hard to remember the positive nature of anger today. Not only are we bombarded by media stories depicting the awful power of uncontrolled anger, we are also surrounded in our daily life by examples of people desperately trying to pretend that they have risen above this primitive animal emotion. This is not surprising when we consider that most of us were brought up to believe that anger was the response of the unenlightened savage to frustration, threat, violation and loss. As more civilized beings, we were urged, both directly and indirectly, to ‘keep cool’ and ‘turn the other cheek’. Our reward, we were assured, would be a place in heaven – plus fortune, power and happiness in this life as well!

But, many of us, newly empowered with self-awareness and the skills of confidence, are now challenging this myth. We realize that ‘gritting our teeth’ ruins our health, ‘grinning and bearing it’ destroys our relationships, and being ‘too nice’ inhibits our ability both to succeed at work and put right the wrongs of this very unfair world.

However, in making the attempt to reclaim the positive power of anger, I have noticed that disappointment and disillusionment are commonplace. The old habits sometimes seem impossibly hard to break. So, against our better judgement, many of us still find ourselves:

– unable to feel angry, even when we think we should, and so continuing to suffer abuse of our rights

– ‘going over the top’ with rage at the most inappropriate times and places

– taking out our frustration on our nearest or dearest or those least able to defend themselves

– crying when we would prefer to bawl and shout, or at least argue assertively

– rendered speechless and motionless with fury

– getting stuck in a depression when faced with loss instead of becoming angry and healthily completing our grieving

– being too cowardly and passive in the face of other people’s anger and then torturing ourselves with guilt and shame

– unable to control our own anger, even when those who irritate us may be too young, old or sick to handle our outbursts

– haunted by nightmares or daydreams of spiteful and violent revenge

– running to the doctor with headaches, ulcers and hypertension caused by holding in tight the steam boiling within us.

If the bells of recognition have started ringing, this is certainly the book for you!

Why I Have Written This Book

You may be comforted to know that I have a very personal interest in this subject because I am still struggling myself! I certainly don’t pretend to have completely mastered the art of managing anger well, though I know that am getting more and more skilful as the days go by.

 

In common with very many people I know, I was never taught the art of handling anger as a child – even though the adults around me knew that, because of neglect and injustice, I had plenty of reason to feel more than my fair share of it. So I found myself naturally locking my feelings defensively within myself. On the outside, I became predominantly ‘sweetness and light’, and as I grew up, I graduated from being a schoolgirl collector of ‘Good Conduct’ badges to an enthusiastic but basically cynical do-gooder. Then in my mid-twenties, a serious attempt to take my own life led me to the world of therapy, which mercifully released me from my depression by giving me the permission and space to feel angry.

But, with hindsight, I can see that this therapy was not enough. I needed guidance on how to handle this hitherto alien emotion. It is true that I was able to find some constructive outlets. I used my angry energy to battle on behalf of forgotten clients in the field of mental health but, more often than not, I displayed and vented my anger aggressively. I often obtained the results which I was seeking, but, needless to say, I found that both my personal and professional relationships suffered under the strain.

When, in my thirties, I experienced another major personal crisis in the shape of a marriage breakdown, I became even more aware of how my inability to handle my anger was hurting not just me, but my children as well. So once again I began to strangle and repress it, with the result that my physical health suffered almost disastrously. Luckily, however, in the course of my search for additional professional stimulation (to dull my personal pain), I discovered Assertiveness Training. At last I found a method of help which actually gave me alternative strategies to use in order to help me cope with my own and other people’s negative feelings. Motivated largely by my own personal needs, I began to adapt and expand the ideas of AT and integrate them into my counselling and self-help work. Using also my knowledge and experience of other therapies such as Transactional Analysis, Gestalt and Dramatherapy, I then began to formulate my own strategies under the heading of Assertive Anger. These became further tried and tested as I began to run courses on this specific subject.

More recently, I have become very aware that the mismanagement of anger is not just a problem for the small minority of people who may need the help of a therapist. As I began to expand my work outside the field of mental health, and specialize in helping with the more ‘everyday’ problems which face the majority of us in the daily course of our lives, I found that almost everyone I met seemed to have some degree of difficulty in handling anger!

Is this a problem of our age, I wonder? Many therapists and counsellors are beginning to think it could be and that, judging by the behaviour of many young people, there could be worse to come. The Director of the Samaritans in Great Britain has cited depression, resulting from unexpressed anger, as one of the most likely causes for the alarming rise in teenage suicides. Similarly, other professional social observers of the young are often heard to blame a build up of anger for the frightening outbreaks of riots and hooliganism.

If the problem is so widespread, we should all be very concerned because, as a society, it seems we have never been in greater need of the positive power of anger and, never under greater threat should this emotion be mismanaged. Mass anger about the injustices in our world and about the threats to our precious planet is, in my opinion, both appropriate and laudable. We should welcome it, because it could help motivate us to preserve what we value. However, if it is allowed to turn negatively inwards, it will weigh us down with disabling apathy and despair – and, if it is directed aggressively outwards, it could destroy us all.

What This Book Offers

While I am not suggesting that a change in the way in which we handle anger can be a cure-all for all the personal and social evils of the world, I do believe that it could dramatically improve very many people’s ability to cope with them. So in this book I have first explored some of the facts and fiction about anger, then introduced a model for managing it both positively and constructively. As I said earlier, I call this model Assertive Anger. A brief outline of its main features can be remembered easily by using the following mnemonic:

Assertive

Non-Violent

Goal-directed

Ethical

Responsible

The latter sections of the book offer practical guidance on ways in which we can work towards achieving this ideal!

In summary, the structure of the book is as follows:

 Part 1: Understanding more about anger is the theoretical section of the book and is designed to help you to understand more about how anger affects our bodies, minds and behaviour. It also explains what the philosophy underpinning the model of Assertive Anger is all about. You will find that there is considerable emphasis on the damage and hurt which both the passive and aggressive methods of handling anger can cause. I hope this will motivate you to read on and complete the practical work in the rest of the book!

 Part 2: Managing our own anger presents a six-step self-help programme which you can use to break old patterns and replace your conditioned responses with new behaviour. Through these exercises you can begin to learn how to express your anger without hurting yourself or others.

 Part 3: How to deal with other people’s anger offers guidelines and exercises to help you take better control of your own feelings when faced with outbursts from others. It also suggests ways in which you can help other people safely unbottle some of their repressed anger, which may be damaging your relationships with them.

 Part 4: Preventative strategies can help you plan ways in which you can alter your general patterns of behaviour and lifestyle, so that you can prevent a build up of unnecessary tension and frustration.

 Part 5: Further reading gives a list of other books which may be of interest and help.

Who Can Be Helped by This Book?

I think this book will be of particular help and interest to people who:

– have already completed some personal development work which has given them an awareness of the difficulties they have with anger

– have persistent relationship difficulties and find it hard to resolve conflicts without hurting themselves or others

– are suffering from health problems or addictions which they have been told, or suspect themselves, may be being caused, or made worse by, their mismanagement of frustration and anger

– are living or working under high levels of pressure and need to take particular care with the management of their emotions

– are bereaved and finding themselves ‘stuck’ in their grief

– are struggling with mental health problems such as depression, phobias, obsessions and eating disorders

– are trying to help others manage their stress and anger more constructively, e.g. managers, training officers, teachers, community workers, counsellors, nurses and doctors – not to mention millions of concerned and harassed parents!

As I indicated earlier, the ideas in this book have arisen in the main from my own personal experience and my work with people on ‘everyday’ problems at home and at work. I am very aware that a minority of people’s problems are so severe that their needs cannot be completely met within the scope of a self-help book such as this. For example, I would urge anyone who is prone to serious outbursts of violence, or suspects that they could be, to seek additional help from a professional therapist or doctor.

Similarly I would suggest that anyone who is living or working with someone with such difficulties, or anyone who has suffered serious abuse in the past, should not hesitate to request further professional guidance. A list of helping agencies can usually be found in any good library, social services or health department, or through the many confidential phonelines that now exist to help people living or working under such stress and threat.

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