What are you really angry about?
[One dog says to another in a yard outside a house.] ‘I can’t explain it. I see that guy coming up the walkway and I go postal.’
— Leo Cullum cartoon, The New Yorker
It’s a widely held belief that when people get angry, they know perfectly well what they’re angry about, and that if you wish to know what’s got their knickers in a knot it’s enough to ask them. A lot of anger research, for example, consists of simply asking people, ‘what angers you most?’ and then cataloguing the answers. One such survey, conducted recently in Australia, revealed the number one most commonly cited irritating thing to be ‘telemarketers’. This is a curious fact given that people on average get telemarketing calls about once a month or less, but get irritated several times a day.
In actual fact, our true thoughts and ‘inner workings’, in particular the shoulds at play in a given anger episode, are hidden from ourselves just as much as from others. What we now know about our ability to accurately report our own thoughts or motives is that we’re very poor at it. This is why advertising works: people don’t realise they’re reaching for a particular brand of detergent because it is white and red in colour and has the word ‘new’ on it. In fact it is often the case that an individual will have less insight into his thoughts than the experimenters who are testing them out — less even than an impartial outsider. While an individual might have access to autobiographical information only he knows pertaining to what ticks him off, he is also at a disadvantage relative to a third party. He’ll be motivated to justify his response, discount ‘lame’ or embarrassing shoulds (more on this later). He’ll be susceptible to a thing called ‘social desirability’ (reporting thoughts or feelings he thinks are socially desirable) not to mention the tendency to explain his behaviour according to preconceived clichés about how people behave — basically a kind of biased pop-psych account of his reaction.
The mind is a black box.
Sometimes we can answer the question ‘what are you really angry about?’ accurately; but when we do so, as it turns out, it’s not by ‘introspecting’. When you get angry, and shut your eyes, there is no news stream with your shoulds flashing across a screen. Visually, there’s probably something like a kind of dark kaleidoscopic swirl, flashes of half-sketched images or memories and amorphous neon blobs. Physiologically, there’s arousal, similar to anxiety; emotionally, there’s a hot, tense, gritty, outward-thrusting feeling that’s experienced as aversive. The shoulds are nowhere to be found in all that.
If you pay even closer attention to your mind on anger, you’ll find there’s generally a stream of verbiage. There appear to be echoes of words or sentences, or voiced phrases, like, ‘what a dick!’ or ‘why?’ or ‘after everything I’ve done for him’. There might be snatches of the offensive stimulus [truck pulling in front of you], or the words that angered you [‘your opinion doesn’t mean shit!’]. And you might hear yourself rehearsing retorts or arguments [‘yeah, well it means more than yours’] or plotting revenge [‘that’s the last time — the last time’ or ‘wait till he sees my stuff in boxes, then he’ll be sorry’]. But none of these conscious ‘thoughts’ are the shoulds we’re looking for. They’re all afterthoughts, ripples, reactions. The conscious verbiage that immediately follows the onset of anger is actually mostly a smokescreen, in a sense.
The ‘causal cognition’ — the should that set you off in the first place — is beneath and before awareness. To get at what is really angering you, introspecting is about as informative as consulting a coffee stain or reading your weekly horoscope.
The ultimate cure to anger is to break down and challenge the shoulds that are causing you most disturbance. However, if you miss the mark (i.e., challenge the wrong should) all the challenging in the world will be useless.
Imagine a man’s date cancels on him just a couple of hours before a show and he gets angry. How do we know what exactly he’s angry about? Let’s imagine we ask him and he says, ‘Look, she said she wasn’t feeling well, so what do you want to do?’ He sighs and shakes his head, suddenly furrowing his brows and saying, ‘I just think she could have told me earlier is all, how the hell am I expected to get someone else to come now at two hours notice? It’s just fucking inconsiderate’.
If we take him at his word, then his should is, ‘she should have given more notice’. Now if we go with that, we could invite him to reflect on how hard it may have been for her to know she was going to be too sick to go until a few hours beforehand — that she did say she was sorry and offer to pay for her ticket; that he can probably still find someone to come with him, or go by himself, making her lateness irrelevant; and that he did the same thing to her just the other day.
But imagine that when you say all that he continues to shake his head in frustration and says, ‘Oh come on. Do you really think I’m that dumb? She’s not sick, I can guarantee you. She’s just fucking with me. Friggen games, man, I hate the games. If she doesn’t want to date me, let her come out and say it straight up: ‘sorry, I’ve given it some thought, and I’m actually no longer interested’. Simple. I’m a big boy. I can take it. Instead, it’s this “I’m sorry, I’m just not feeling well” shit’.
Ah ha! you may exclaim! He’s actually angry because he believes she’s being deceitful and evasive. Ok, so you roll up your sleeves and go to work on his expectation that ‘she shouldn’t be deceitful and evasive’ and that perhaps she’s cancelling precisely because she doesn’t want to play games with him; you could remind your friend that he has done the same thing on several occasions to girls; that he usually has a very breezy attitude towards lying, that dating is always a bit of a game.
Imagine that he readily concedes these remarks and dating truisms, saying, ‘Yeah, yeah, I know; whatever …’, but still seems visibly miffed, and goes on to say: ‘Cats, man. Tickets to Cats. What more does she want? The friggen Taj Mahal? What the hell’s wrong with this chick?!’
So you go after his apparent demand that the girl should appreciate musicals. You mention that his ex-girlfriend hated musicals with a passion and he used to just laugh about it. Let’s assume that you get nowhere with this either. What’s going wrong here? We would suggest that this conversation is falling flat because you are challenging the shoulds he reports, but none of them is the real should, the operant should (the one operating in the scene), the causal should (the one causing the reaction). As it turns out on closer scrutiny, it wasn’t the late notice that bothered your friend, or the lying, or the lack of appreciation for musicals. It’s the rejection that miffed him: ‘She shouldn’t rebuff me. I’m eligible; I’ve done everything right. She should go for it’.
Challenge that cognition (successfully), and the anger will lift, well and truly. All else, alas, will miss the mark. Getting the cognition right, really hitting the nail on the head, is like that moment a masseur really gets his fingers into a sore spot and releases the knot. The rest is peripheral.
What’s interesting about the above case is that the rejected fellow genuinely believed that those other misdeeds (she shouldn’t cancel at such late notice, she shouldn’t lie, she should appreciate the musical) were what he was angry about. We believe part of the reason the causal should was hard to identify (or get him to articulate) was that so many red herring shoulds presented themselves as more obvious candidates.
These breaches of etiquette or social decorum are relatively uncontroversial. The causal should, ‘she should be more into me’ when laid bare, may appear a little insubstantial or controversial or perhaps even a little ‘lame’. When a should is one we suspect won’t fly with most people, or is a bit embarrassing to admit, then we’ll often cover it consciously or unconsciously with other, more socially accepted shoulds. We deny or remain unaware of the lame should and propose better ones in its stead. Given that it’s all guesswork anyway, it’s not surprising that this picking and choosing should occur.
Let us try to illustrate the idea of lame shoulds with another example:
Mary was grumpy at breakfast, and her husband asked: ‘Is everything ok? Are you a little tired honey?’
‘I’m fine’, she answered; but this set her to thinking, ‘Am I a little tired perhaps? I don’t think so. Why am I so irritated that he is being nice this morning? It feels like he’s trying to get away with something’.
The husband suggested that they could go grab a coffee at a nearby café and read the paper.
She snapped back, ‘No! I’ve told you before I don’t like that café, why don’t you ever listen?’
‘Whoa! Chill out! I was just asking. You seemed to have a good time there last time,” said the husband.
Mary replied, ‘Yeah well you wouldn’t remember would you. Too busy flirting with the waitresses. Pathetic, at your age.’
Her husband, bewildered, replied, ‘What are you talking about, woman?’
And so it went, until finally she stormed out of the kitchen saying, ‘Go without me.’
Later in therapy, they tried to track what she was annoyed at that morning. Was it really just the slightly ill-advised café suggestion? Surely this does not account for the degree of anger. She did attack the broader problem of his not ‘giving a shit’ about her, which may well be a ‘theme’ in the relationship. But we still need to explain the timing of her outburst. Why was that theme at the forefront of her mind that morning? When did the anger begin? She had noticed she was already annoyed at breakfast and was seeing his ‘niceness’ as somehow insincere, so whatever primed her perceptions of him had started before breakfast. Did she wake up that way? Was she underslept, or sick, or premenstrual. No, she says she woke up feeling good, well slept and excited about the day. Mary thought about this and related what had really happened to make her grumpy:
Lame shoulds are passed off as higher sounding shoulds to legitimise our reactions.
Mary: I got up before him, to shower, then got back into bed. And he — Ah, (she exclaimed, as if a light bulb had just gone off), I think I’ve got it! I got back into bed, but then seconds later he got up and showered. I waited for him in bed, thinking he’d come back and cuddle. Instead, he comes out of the shower half-dressed and heads into the kitchen. Generally on lazy weekends, we cuddle in bed a little before getting up.
Therapist: And why didn’t you say anything at the time?
Mary: I don’t know, he was gone before I got the chance and I guess I didn’t want to. I don’t know. What would I have said? — ‘Darling come back and make love to me. You clearly don’t want to, but that’s fine, make an effort to satisfy your pathetic old wife!’ [This is when the therapist begins scribbling: when out of the confused fray of grievances and complaints one emerges as ‘the one’.]
Mary: Anyway, I just lay there and got to thinking about other things. How he’s just not that interested in me anymore, doesn’t seem to care. How he never asked about my cousin even though he knew I had visited her in hospital. I don’t know. I can’t remember precisely what I was thinking about, but it covered all sorts of topics and by the time I got myself out of bed I was well and truly in a bad mood.
We have many elements that make poor insight likely here — the trigger was a nonevent rather than an event (it was something her husband didn’t do). It was something she is not in the habit of ever really talking about (sex). It is something she feels a little ashamed of needing or wanting (the very fact that she wants it and isn’t getting it makes her feel a little pathetic) and so she’s motivated to not report it or dwell on it. Another way of putting it — it’s a should that, if articulated (and presented to the perpetrator or a third party) she knows would probably not ‘stand up in court’. In other words, she knows that if she were to say to her husband, ‘you stand before the court accused of not knowing your wife wanted you to come back to bed’, an imaginary judge would dismiss the case on the grounds of it being trivial. After all, strictly speaking, a man has a right not to respond to every subtle sexual signal of his wife. This is not to say that at some more intuitive level she doesn’t herself feel she has a case. It’s just that it’s not something she feels would fly in an argument. In addition, there were other more noticeable and seemingly more plausible explanations that presented themselves (his pandering, his ill-advised café suggestion, the memories of his flirting and his general lack of care toward her and her desires), which seemed real enough that her mood didn’t seem at first glance to require any further explanation. Lastly, it was not immediately voiced or addressed. Rather, a good deal of rumination on many other themes and past incidents interceded between onset and reflection (he asked ‘what’s wrong?’ about 48 shoulds downstream). Remembering the original trigger then becomes like trying to remember a dream — disconnected from anything else that’s going on.
To come back to what we were saying, then — it’s not your conscious verbiage we’re interested in — it’s the triggering thoughts. This lady’s operant should was, ‘he should not neglect me’ or ‘he should know when I want him’ or ‘he should desire me’ or some such thing, and that’s the thought that interests us.
Your task, then, in monitoring your own angry reactions, is to get good at tracking down and ferreting out those trigger thoughts. To do this, ironically, we need you to get out of your head and disregard the conscious flux of angry dross. We need you to pay attention instead to your reactions and behaviours to the events as they unfold.
How to monitor well
Good monitoring is really the art of making educated guesses as to your causal shoulds in a scene. You’re effectively reverse engineering your anger. Here are some things to look out for:
• Timing: Look for what happened or what you may have reacted to just the second your anger began. In other words, track the emotional ‘inflexion point’—the point where your feelings shifted. Does your hypothesised should match the timing of the onset of anger?
• Degree: Does your hypothesised should account for the degree or intensity of the feeling; the range of feelings (if there are non anger feelings in the mix, which there almost always are); and most importantly, does it explain the behaviours you displayed in the scene (as well as previous behaviours in similar situations)?
• Specifics : Then, since shoulds are so idiosyncratic, we need to ask: what about that event angered you? What does it mean to you that he cancelled? What about the person speaking on his phone in Starbucks was so irritating to you?’ Why do you find it so unacceptable that she was unresponsive to you?
A clue to this is scope, which can be determined via what are called comparison sets. In what other different situations have you reacted similarly? Or conversely: In what other similar situations have you reacted differently? Beware shoulds du jour: Does it appear you’re objecting to something that you’ve never objected to before? Although this possible, it is more likely that the causal should will come from a list of well-worn favourites.
Let’s look at an example of a man complaining about his mother and how she mollycoddles her dog:
I just can’t stand the way my mother obsesses over her dog. She treats it like bloody royalty and doesn’t seem to understand that it’s a dog. An animal. I try to tell her about my day but she just sits there with this blank expression on her face, but when the dog bounces in she explodes with joy and takes up that stupid high pitched voice ‘look at my little bumble bee!! oh-zi-bo-zi bo-zi boo … Oh isn’t he precious, yes he is, yes he is!’ — Christ! Get some perspective woman! It’s a mutt! A flea-infested food processor. Honestly … and then if there isn’t an outside table we have to eat elsewhere ‘cause we can’t leave it tied up outside, no, not even for 10 minutes; it might get lonely — it’ll cry, she says. Oh boo hoo. We wouldn’t want that happening would we? Doesn’t she get that it’s just a stupid animal? She spoils it rotten. And what gets me most is that that’s not even good for the dog! Dogs need boundaries; they need to learn independence. You can’t just make your whole life revolve around them. I try telling her, but she won’t listen. She’s obsessed.
What’s this man angry at?
It would appear he believes ‘people shouldn’t mollycoddle dogs’. Of course, one might ask the man in question: Why shouldn’t people mollycoddle dogs? Indeed why shouldn’t they mollycoddle whatever or whomever they please? Who has ordained it so?
A checklist for identifying causal thoughts
Can the should/s explain the timing of the anger you experienced in the event?
Is this should consistent with how you’ve reacted in the past?
Can the should/s explain the intensity of the anger in the event?
Can the should/s explain your behaviours in the event?
Now the man might defend his position intellectually by giving practical reasons for not spoiling a dog — he might point out that it costs one in time, energy and resources without necessarily benefiting the beloved canine. He’s explaining why it is sensible not to spoil a mutt but not why it angers him that his mother is spoiling hers. In truth, he’s rationalizing his anger. He’s missed the real annoyance. Psychologically speaking, his whole speech about the proper treatment of dogs is irrelevant. One might continue, ‘Okay, so your mother is overindulgent with her dog and ignorant of some of the latest research in dog rearing. There are a lot of people ignorant of a lot of things; we all have our little obsessions. Here’s the million-dollar question: What about it bothers you so much? Why does it bother you now (the mother’s had that dog for years)?’
His stance on dog rearing doesn’t explain the intensity of his anger, nor its timing.
There’s a clue to the answer in the gentleman’s original statement: I try to tell her about my day but she just sits there with this blank expression in her face, but when the dog bounces in she explodes with joy. Perhaps that was the moment he felt angry. So this man is inadvertently missing the point in talking about dog rearing in general. Perhaps the source of his malcontent is something far less academic. Hazarding a guess, we might say he’s angry because his mother appears more attached to her dog than to him. One might further hypothesise there is a mixture of sad and angry feelings in our man: sadness that his own mother seems relatively unattached to him, and vexation at her suggesting through her actions that the mutt is more worthy of her affections than he.
Why wasn’t he complaining about the more vulnerable should? We believe it’s because he felt a little ashamed to admit that was his issue. He thought it might come across as a little weak or pathetic. These are what we call lame shoulds. They are especially susceptible to being masked and dressed up as tougher or more righteous sounding shoulds.
Beware character assassins — they often mask a personal slight
Angry words and insults are often punitive after-thoughts or planned defenses rather than causal shoulds. For example, if you come away from a friend’s place and hear yourself insulting the friend or thinking negatively about some aspect of the friend (e.g., she’s superficial, he’s a bad host), then chances are there was some specific thing they did to offend or hurt or disappoint you, and that these insults are coming after the fact as a kind of defense or rebuttal (or insightless attempt to articulate your feelings of ill will). The clue is — the things you’re devaluing the friend for are probably things you’ve always known about him/her but which haven’t bothered you on other occasions. What has changed that they should suddenly bother you now? The other clue is this: a character trait in itself, while you might find it ugly or unlikable, would be unlikely to anger you in itself if you were otherwise well-disposed towards the person. For example, ‘Glenda can be brusque, but that’s her character — big deal’ (general attitude). She snubs me or belittles my ignorance; suddenly I complain angrily about her character. It would appear it is not her character that I am angry about, but her criticising me or treating me unkindly. The should is not: ‘Glenda shouldn’t be a brusque person’; it is, ‘Glenda shouldn’t have spurned me. Despite her general personality, and irrespective of how much she may or may not respect others, she should respect me, or be kinder to me’.
Beware: Rants about generalities often mask particular offences that have set off ruminative chains
A woman takes her dog to the hairdressers, and tells the hairdresser to cut whatever she likes, but not the dog’s moustache. She comes back later that afternoon to find that the dog’s moustache had been cut. She is furious:
‘You’ve got to be kidding me, we made it SO clear we didn’t want you touching the moustache.’
‘Oh, but I thought you meant the beard,’ said the hairdresser.
The woman’s reply — ‘What part of moustache don’t you understand?!’
The woman refused to pay for the job, and the hairdresser conceded the fee. The woman was still angry, however, for days to come, saying over and over, ‘how can you be that stupid? I spelled it out to her…’. Hence, clearly the should was not about being ripped off, or insulted or treated unkindly or any such thing. It was about not listening and being ‘incompetent’.
When a partner starts with ‘you always’ or ‘I think you and I are very different’ or some such abstraction, then always ask: when did you start feeling this way? What happened? What did I do?
Beware: Incompetence and rudeness shoulds often disguise something interpersonal, mostly to do with ‘respect’
Read the following examples.
• Example 1: Sabbath believed she was angry at her secretary’s incompetence; in fact, it was her disrespectful attitude and the fact that she was rough, a battle-axe, talking to Sabbath with a bossy, slightly irritated tone suggesting antagonism and not deferring.
• Example 2: Susie believed she was angry at her real estate agent’s incompetence (telling her and her friends they had the rental when it actually went to the other people). In fact, he was a young and undereducated man of a different ethnic and cultural background who she believed was treating her with unacceptable disrespect. This, to her, was also an indication that he didn’t ‘value’ her. Not to mention the fact that the other applicants were chosen in the first place, which is also insulting, and left Susie complaining about how she and her group were in fact very reliable good tenants.
Beware: Shoulds du jour
Shoulds du jour or highly ‘socially altruistic’ sounding shoulds could be a case of special pleading (i.e., overblown or high-sounding arguments that disguise a lame should).
One of us [RM] falls for the ‘altruistic sounding shoulds’ with some regularity.
RM’s daughter asks to go to a friend’s house to stay over on a Friday night. RM responds gruffly: ‘You’re not going to get any sleep, and you need your sleep. It’s out of the question.’
Interestingly, RM has often not shown any concern about her sleep, and indeed kept her up himself on occasion. When asked why he didn’t simply say to her — But wouldn’t you rather spend time with me?
He laughs and reflects: ‘That would have sounded pathetic.’
So the lame should that was really the cause of the anger (i.e., ‘she should want to spend time with her father’) gets replaced by an altruistic mask (‘she should get more sleep’).
Now it’s time for you to have a go at identifying the should in a couple of cases (answers shown at end of chapter):
1. I [SL] show my friend a film of mine I really liked; the friend watches it but takes breaks to get food, and seems distracted throughout the film. At the end he makes highly critical and academic remarks about it.
I say: It pisses me off the way people can’t just watch films simply, but rather feel they have to pick at it. An action film is an action film; you can’t watch it expecting a sophisticated epic…’
What’s the causal should here? What clues are there here that the stated should is not causal?
2. John’s friend often leaves social events at around 9.30 pm, saying, ‘I’ve gotta get up early’. On this occasion, there were only a few people at John’s party. His friend leaves early and John gets annoyed, and says, ‘I just think people have gotta let their bloody hair down sometimes’. On a previous occasion, the friend had left at around the same time, but John had plenty of other guests there. This hadn’t annoyed him at all.
See the following answers to the earlier example cases, do they agree with yours?
1. My friend should respect my taste in films.
Clues: The expressed should is a generalisation (‘people’, ‘films’) and a relatively ‘intellectual’ or ‘high-sounding’ should. This doesn’t explain the intensity or timing of the reaction.
2. My friend shouldn’t have left the party so soon when there were so few people there.
Clues: The comparison sets are the clue here.