Let’s face it—if we didn’t need anger, we probably wouldn’t have evolved with it. Anger in itself is neither positive nor negative as an emotion—it is what you make it. It serves a function, though, and so it remains. Anger is very effective in accomplishing certain things. For instance, it helps us stay alive. Anger wakes us up. It arouses and gets us ready to take action. In the words of Mr. Spock from the TV series Star Trek, “Jim, madness has no purpose, no reason, but it may have a goal” (circa 1965).

Other species have instincts, those special little behavioral gizmos built right in that help them protect their interests when they are threatened. For example, big brown bears stand on their hind legs and bellow, tigers flatten their ears while exposing awesome choppers, bulls paw the ground, nostrils flaring, and even the wimpiest of dogs can snarl and yap like the dickens. In their own ways, these animals are trying to let you know they are a force to be reckoned with. They don’t want to be messed with anymore. They look mad, growling and grimacing, but are they angry? They probably feel threatened about something, and their instincts are preparing them for what is termed the “flight or fight” response.

What we need to remember is that we behave as we do because of stuff that has been hard-wired into our brain’s chemistry. We don’t, after all, spend much time reminding ourselves to blink our eyes or hold our breath under water. These biological necessities are not that far removed from the same needs that “lower” animals exhibit in various overt ways, such as their behavioral displays of growling or snarling.

We, too, have incorporated certain behaviors into our makeup due to evolution. These behaviors may not be instincts, but they sure are good for keeping us alive! Unexpected situations demand quick responses. Clearly, in these situations, taking time to analyze motives may be detrimental to your health. (While you are sorting out your emotions, the lion may eat you or the mugger may shoot you!) So anything that can get you moving fast can foster the most primary of the biological urges, self-preservation.

But we humans no longer rely solely on instinct. As children develop, they gain what we call “impulse control”— the ability to control instinctual urges in favor of more socially acceptable behavior. Two-year-olds find out rather quickly in preschool that biting is unacceptable, and parents do their best to ignore the temper tantrums thrown by angry three-year-olds in hopes of extinguishing that behavior.

But what’s an adult to do? Instead of biting, he’s learned to substitute some behaviors for others and has evolved something loosely dubbed “anger” that accomplishes the same ends for him. After all, unless it’s Hannibal Lector we’re talking about, biting just isn’t something that’s expected from the average adult, but anger signals, such as yelling or glaring, might be considered acceptable.

As you probably recall from biology class, when man (or woman) is faced with any of a myriad of threatening situations, this “anger” prepares him for the same survival-necessary “flight-or-fight” response that all other animals have. It clearly is some type of arousal state, but what state? And when we feel violated or threatened in some way, is the emotional experience always “anger,” or is what we call “anger” merely a surface response to a perceived threat covering up more subtle (and scary) emotions underneath?

What Is Anger and Why Do We Get Angry?

You may wonder why I put the word “anger” in quotation marks. I set it off that way because I hope you might begin to consider looking at it in a new way.

Webster’s dictionary tells us that anger is a term for “sudden violent displeasure or belligerence accompanied by an impulse to retaliate.” That’s fine as far as it goes, but couldn’t “anger” also serve as a kind of a “temporary emotion”? Anger can allow us to protect ourselves from threat until we sort out the underlying emotion. That is to say, “anger” may be a kind of a handy catchall behavior that allows us to hold in or cover up other emotions that we can’t understand or sort out at the moment.

The History of Anger

How and why does this anger response help us and when can it be appropriate? You can bet when our early ancestors came down from their trees and began trekking across the African savannah they had to develop some good survival skills in order to elude the much larger and even hairier predators of the time. Those old Australopithecus guys didn’t have to think twice—their bodies’ inherent survival mechanisms just kicked into gear and the fast ones lived see another day.

Similarly, when our Stone Age ancestors were faced with a threat, their hearts beat faster to pump more blood. Respiration increased to force oxygen into their lungs; digestion slowed to conserve needed energy. Those whose bodies responded and figured out clever evasive maneuvers lived to become our progenitors; those who didn’t, didn’t survive. Evolution just did the rest.

Later, in more hip, sophisticated Paleolithic times, many new survival strategies were added to our Cro-Magnon ancestors’ “staying alive” tool pouch. Probably modeling the very creatures who threatened them, humans adopted some of the behaviors that they thought were most persuasive for asserting domination and a kind of “don’t mess with me!” attitude.

Faced with salivating, starving wolves laying siege outside the dim and smelly cave containing his loved ones and, moreover, all of his food for the winter, our cave guy had better have come up with something that showed not only how tough he was, but more important, something that could psyche him up. He’d need something that would make him believe he was tough, something that forced him to take action for survival. (Plus, it was also not such a bad idea to act in a way that was intimidating to potential attackers.)

So what could he do? Get mad—really mad! So, our hairy guy gets a big, big club, grunts and hollers and makes ugly faces. Take that, you lousy wolves! And boy, did he feel better! Later, this type of display probably took on a ritual-like dimension. By performing the ritual, a kind of “magic” occurred that would give our hirsute hominid a sense of confidence.

And because (if it was successful) the performance of the ritual and subsequent action would be calming and self-soothing, it would be quite likely that he’d do the same thing the next time there were wolves at the door. It might even be tried with other predators—or family members. It thus became part of our cave guy’s behavioral repertoire. (And this, of course, would have implications for subsequent generations of little cave persons to come.)

Anger in the Present Day

You can easily apply this scenario to the present day if you follow your ancestor’s line of thinking—just plug in some of today’s more modern strategies! Think, for instance, of the whooping and arm waving of the average football team (or their fans in the stands) and any of the menacing looks and gestures you undoubtedly have received if you drive on the highway. In these situations, modern man comes very close to the snarls of wolves and chest beating of jungle gorillas asserting their dominance.

Man’s body automatically responds to threat (or perceived threat) in certain very measurable ways, ways that may be critical for survival under threatening circumstances. The body’s muscles become tense, respiration increases, digestion stops, the heart pumps more blood to the brain in anticipation of quick action. However, these ways can also become a threat to man if they are allowed to go unchecked in unnecessary situations.

As was mentioned earlier, anger as an emotion is neither positive nor negative. It is merely a response to some type of stimulus. Perhaps because it does feel empowering, many people overuse anger as a self-preservation response. But, chronic reliance on anger can become a problem because it can be destructive to one’s relationships as well as one’s health.

If your anger or the anger of someone you love is negatively affecting your life, there is hope. Anger is usually a temporary condition, and it becomes a problem only if it becomes chronic or if you deal with it in destructive ways. The best news is that managing anger is not impossible once you gain insight into what kind of threat (or feeling of being threatened) causes it in you and how you react to it in self-defeating ways.

Remember—you have control over your anger. You get to decide what changes are necessary, and by reading this book, you will learn practical and positive ways to manage your particular anger style. A good way to start this process of change is by beginning to develop a sense of compassion, not only for others, but for yourself.

The Rules for Being Human

When you can give yourself and other people the benefit of the doubt, and when you can admit that it’s not really even within your power to be perfect, you can begin to relax a little. You’ll start focusing on finding new things to be happy about. As you become more forgiving of yourself and others, your anger resilience will grow.

Consider thinking about the following precepts.

1. You will receive a body. You may like it or hate it, but it will be yours for the entire period of this time around.

2. You will learn lessons. You are enrolled in a full-time informational school called Life. Each day in this school you will have the opportunity to learn lessons. You may like the lessons or think them irrelevant and stupid.

3. There are no mistakes, only lessons. Growth is a process of trial and error: experimentation. The “failed” experiments are as much a part of the process as the experiment that ultimately “works.”

4. A lesson is repeated until it is learned. A lesson will be presented to you in various forms until you have learned it. When you have learned it, you can go on to the next lesson.

5. Learning lessons does not end. There is no part of life that does not contain its lessons. If you are alive, there are lessons to be learned.

6. There is no better place than “here.” When you’re “there” has become a “here,” you will simply obtain another “there” that will again look better than “here.”

7. Others are merely mirrors of you. You cannot love or hate something about another person unless it reflects something you hate or love about yourself.

8. What you make of your life is up to you. You have all the tools and resources you need. What you do with them is up to you. The choice is up to you.

9. Your answers lie inside you. The answers to life’s questions lie inside you. All you need to do is look, listen, and trust.

10. You will forget all this. You can remember it whenever you want.

—Anonymous

EXERCISE

Being Human

Think about a recent situation that made you angry and think about how you reacted to the situation. Ask yourself the following questions:

1. What need was I trying to meet with my behavior?

2. What pain or other feeling influenced my behavior?

3. What beliefs about the situation influenced my behavior?

4. While knowing I was responsible for my decision, no matter how unfortunate, can I accept that when I did it, I was only trying to survive?

5. I wish ____________________ hadn’t happened, but it’s over now. Can I let go of it and move forward?

6. Can I look at what happened as something I can learn from?

Remember, change and growth are possible!

Monkey See, Monkey Do

Cognitive therapists would argue (oops—contend might be a better word!) that anger and the other basic emotions— happiness, sadness, and fear—are at least partially based on a specific belief system that has been encoded in our brains that defines what’s happening to us and how it is affecting us. Further, they would say that, based on their observations of human behavior, a person has a fair amount of control in deciding whether or not to become angry.

“Psshh,” you say!

No, really! Think about a situation that made you really mad. Say for instance, you got angry because your neighbor not only left his garage door open (forcing you to have to look at the filthy interior), but also parked his car on the front lawn. Just where and when did you decide your neighbor’s messy habits had anything to do with your angry feelings?

A lot of things that make us mad are things that are attached to how we grew up and the way in which our parents and society groomed us. It didn’t even have to be something that was told or taught to us; it could have been something to which we were merely exposed. For example, a child who sees her sister burn her hand while trying to cook something on a stove will be leery of doing the same thing. She figures out that cooking can be a dangerous thing without actually experiencing a burn herself. We learn strategies for dealing with people in much the same way. We watch how other people do it, and we tend to follow their lead.

The teaching/learning situation can be either a single intense experience or it can be a learning that occurs from something witnessed frequently or learned over time. Think of the little kids you’ve seen who model their parents’ behaviors, use the same mannerisms as their parents, or have the same vocal cadence as their parents when speaking. After all, it’s what dress-up and pretend is all about: modeling and practicing to be just like Mommy or Daddy.

Not uncommonly, however, the behavior a child models loses something in the interpretation, and this can lead to problems. For instance, my daughter, at age three, put her kitty, Angel, into her toy Betty Crocker Easy Bake Oven. She closed the door and flipped the switch that safety-locked the door and turned on the oven. While this action was not exactly something she had modeled from me, it was a form of imitation nonetheless. She was cooking! The concept was okay—it was the execution (so to speak) that was the problem. (Angel did survive, one of her nine lives kaput no doubt, but only after I broke the oven getting the door open.)

The family is critically important and very, very powerful in teaching us the rules of correct behavior. That’s okay as far as it goes, if the family is operating with reasonable rules. That is to say, a healthy family will have rules for behavior that are considered to be acceptable within the culture to which the family belongs. As long as there is no big family secret operating (like nobody knows that crazy Grandma is locked in the attic or that Dad beats the heck out of little brother Max), and as long as the family is neither too rigid nor too chaotic, it will receive reality checks from outside sources that keep it functioning well. The family system will model positive and healthy problem-solving strategies. But when a family uses outmoded or counterproductive strategies for problem solving, it is considered to be dysfunctional.

Family rules get passed down from generation to generation, so a dysfunctional family can lead to trouble. For example, when a child is exposed to a mom that goes ballistic when Dad doesn’t listen to her and goes after him with her fingernails, the child may figure, that’s life. Or when Dad takes off his belt and gives sister Mary a beating for mouthing off, a child may assume that’s the way everybody handles their upsets. This stuff is usually not talked about outside the family. In fact, there may be strong interdictions against “airing the dirty laundry.” As a consequence, the child doesn’t have a chance to explore alternative behaviors. The family rules thus remain intact and unchallenged. These home-taught lessons can easily follow the child to school and translate into bullying or fighting with other kids or, worst-case scenario, even shooting at somebody.

The old TV series, The Addams Family, provides us with a rather far-out example of a family whose rules were definitely outside the norm. Everyone from Uncle Fester to Wednesday and Grand Mama happily subscribed to a set of family values that were downright bizarre. After all, most moms aren’t vampires, and most kids don’t play with guillotines. These kinds of behaviors may seem a little outside the ordinary to most, but because everyone in the Addams family went along with things as they were, the rules stayed intact. Even Lurch the butler (a pretty strange guy in his own way) went along with the family’s unusual behavior.

The Message Is the Medium

How about your house when you were growing up? What kind of messages did you hear there? “Big boys don’t cry”? “Good little girls should always say ‘please’ and ‘thank you’ and try to be nice”? “Think of the poor children (in wherever) and eat your food”?

Many of these parental edicts are probably popping into your head right now. All of them are filled with what cognitive psychologist Albert Ellis called “shoulds.”

We all have our own personal lists of “shoulds” based upon our ages, cultures, and socioeconomic groups. This is not to suggest that internalized rules are always a bad thing. In order for a society or a culture (or a family) to exist, there needs to be some type of consensus regarding acceptable behavior, unacceptable behavior, and taboos (which are reserved for the most antisocial types of behavior). Many of these internalized rules become imbedded so deeply in our psychological makeup that we may actually be unaware of them. They are part of our personality structure.

As adults we tend operate on autopilot with some of these imbedded rules. And that’s where trouble may be brewing. In relationships, even very simple differences in each partner’s family rules can have damaging consequences. For example, newlyweds argue over whether or not the toilet seat should be left up or down. Couples make a big brouhaha over eating turkey or ham for Christmas dinner. And whether or not to open presents Christmas morning or the night before can lead to black eyes.

“Little” things and strongly held belief systems can mean quite a lot sometimes. Much conflict can arise in a relationship when a couple does not share common assumptions about even more important values. Making an assessment of the old “shoulds” that are still operating in our lives is the first important step in overcoming anger. Some of these “shoulds” may still be at work within us, and some may be harmless. I challenge you to make a list of your closely held ideas and beliefs that are operating in your own life.

Remember, keeping some of your “shoulds” operational is fine, so long as they don’t cause you pain or problems in your life or relationships. For example, if somebody “should” be driving faster and it makes you so angry you run her into a ditch, or if your partner’s views on politics make you so mad you get into a boxing match, then your belief system probably needs an overhaul. The information in this book will show you how to make positive changes in order to overcome your anger and prioritize your “shoulds.”

Looking for Reality Checks

It’s crucial when learning how to manage your anger and other emotions that you evaluate your “shoulds” and decide if they work for you or against you. Anger may be tied to the messages we got as children about what was “right” and “wrong” and “good” and “bad.” Here’s where a reality check might be helpful.

For instance, I once had a client, Sandy, whose life was negatively affected by her “shoulds.” Sandy was a widow and had been dating a man for a year. Although she was clearly in love with him, she was unwilling to have a sexual relationship with him and it was causing problems between them. After a few sessions, we came to the root of her problem. She had been brought up to believe that good girls “should not” have sexual relations outside of marriage and she was not married to the guy! Sandy was a mature, unmarried woman, but for her, a rule was still a rule. And the rule was, good girls don’t have sex outside of marriage. She had a dilemma.

At this point, Sandy was forced to look at this old familial “should” and consider whether it was still something that she could live with or whether it was time for her to unload it. Sandy’s partner came in for a few sessions to discuss the situation. They decided to focus on building intimacy in the relationship in other ways and take the pressure off the sexual aspect for a time. Gradually, Sandy 14 began to explore the idea of letting go of an outmoded belief system that was not appropriate in her present circumstances. Eventually, everything worked out satisfactorily for both partners!

The Identity Crisis, or Facing the Double Bind

Everyone comes to adulthood with his or her own personalized set of rules. Occasionally reviewing these rules can be helpful in allowing you to reevaluate their practicality and value in your current life situations. This exercise may help you decide to discard a few of your archaic nonfunctional precepts.

EXERCISE

What Are My Shoulds?

First, check out the list of “shoulds” below and see if you can identify with them!

1. I should never make a mistake.

2. I should always be polite.

3. I should always do whatever it takes to keep the peace.

4. I should always be smarter, more competent, or better than everyone else.

5. I should always think about the worst-case scenarios of a situation in order to be prepared.

6. I should always be cared for.

7. I should always feel loved and admired.

8. I should never say “no” to a loved one.

9. I should always be responsible for everything.

10. I should never be wrong.

11. I should never have to do something I don’t want to do.

12. I should never have to wait for gratification.

Then, take a minute to write down the “shoulds” that you learned, implicitly and explicitly, in your family when you were growing up.

Next take a minute to write down the “shoulds” that prevail in your life now.

Compare your two lists. What has changed and what has stayed the same? Which “shoulds” from your childhood do you now realize were counterproductive? Are there any “shoulds” in your present-day repertoire that you believe might be wise to change or you could do without?

As children, we tend to believe that the stuff that our parents, teachers, and authority figures tell us is true. We’re taught at an early age that if we follow the golden rule and other rules important to society, all will be well, so, as young children, we follow these rules without questioning. But by the time we reach our teenage years, we begin to see problems with this line of thinking. For the first time, we begin to question those values that were set forth to us. Perhaps Mom and Dad weren’t right after all. We begin to see a new reality.

As emerging adults, recognizing this reality can be a frightening and disheartening thing. Despite the mantra of the golden rule, we may not always be treated with respect. We learn that promises can sometimes be broken, and we may find ourselves breaking promises to others. What we are actually feeling and what we believe we should be feeling may leave us with a sense of failure, confusion, and frustration, and these emotions don’t feel good. They leave us feeling weak and helpless. As a result, we seek other outlets or strategies for dealing with our feelings. We may decide to deflect or project our vulnerable feelings on to somebody else, usually our parents and siblings, maybe even our friends. By doing this, we can then replace our “not good enough” feelings with a more powerful feeling—anger.

It’s just plain easier to tell yourself that you’re mad than it is to say you’re sad, confused, hurt, or frightened. If you’re sad, confused, hurt, or frightened, it’s your problem—you must own it and take responsibility for it. However, if you’re mad, you can blame others for the way you’re feeling. Try going back through the anger to these kinder, gentler emotions. It is in facing them and learning how to deal with them that you will overcome your anger. Take a minute to look at what it was like as you were growing up.

EXERCISE

When I Was Little

Many of the things that took place in your family have had an impact on who you are now and what you believe about the world. Maybe you haven’t thought about your childhood family in a while. Maybe now is a good time for a reality check.

Place a check mark next to any statements that apply to your childhood.

	Yes	No
At least one of my parents drank a lot or took drugs.
A lot of my basic needs were not taken care of.
My family was usually supportive of me.
You could never predict what would happen in my house.
I was ashamed of my family.
My family had lots of secrets.
I wasn’t sure of the rules in my family.
Along with bad things, there were a lot of good things about my family.
I was always scared something bad might happen.
In my family there was open communication.
I had to take care of other people when I was young; I felt as if I was the parent.
I had a happy childhood.
My childhood is filled with wonderful memories.
I was beaten as a child.
It seemed as though there was never enough money to go around.
I never had any privacy.
My parent(s) were very distant/overinvolved.
I was sexually abused.
I felt I could always understand the family rules.
I usually had a lot of fun with my family.
I’m proud of the family in which I grew up.
I felt isolated in my family.
I felt like my family cherished me.
I always felt my family accepted me for what I was.
I knew better than to talk about what went on in my family.
I really don’t remember my childhood, but I sometimes think something really bad happened to me.
My friends were always welcome at my house.

Take a look at your answers. Did any of them make you feel happy? Did any of your answers disturb you in any way? Did any of them make you feel frightened, sad, anxious, or mad? Can you think about ways in which what happened to you as a kid are still influencing you today?