FEELING OUT OF CONTROL 4

 Rage Attack, Seeing Red, Road Rage, Going Postal…

Annabel Shaw

 We all know what anger is, and we’ve all felt it: either as mild irritation or at times as extreme displeasure. Anger is a natural, adaptive response to threats; it inspires powerful, often aggressive feelings and behaviours, which allow us to fight and to defend ourselves when we are attacked. A certain amount of anger, is, therefore, necessary to our survival and a completely normal, healthy, human emotion.

But when it turns to rage, it is anger that is out of control and destructive. Although rage stems from anger, rage is never heathy. Rage denotes a complete loss of control and is characterised by shouting, threats of violence as well as acts of violence, and involves a degree of aggressiveness that is out of proportion to any provocation. Unlike anger, rage is not a normal, healthy emotion. Rage is destructive and harmful to all involved.

If you find yourself acting in ways that seem out of control and frightening – both to yourself as well as to the victim of your rage – you will need to seek help to find better ways to express your anger and deal with your emotion. There are psychological tests which can test your ability to express anger apropriately but most of us know if we have a probem with rage. We understand, almost instinctively, that our anger is not healthy anger.

It’s worth having an idea of the common ways in which most of us deal with anger. In general people use a variety of both conscious and unconscious processes to deal with their angry feelings. The three main approaches are expressing, suppressing, and calming.

Expressing your angry feelings in an assertive not aggressive manner is the healthiest way to express anger. To do this, you have to learn how to make clear what your needs are, and how to get them met, without hurting others. It can sometimes be very difficult to tread the line between assertiveness and aggression – especially in the heat of the moment.

Anger can be suppressed, and then converted or redirected. This happens when you hold in your anger, stop thinking about it and focus on something positive. The aim is to inhibit or suppress your anger and convert it into more constructive behavior. The danger in this type of response is that if it isn’t allowed outward expression, your anger can turn inward on yourself. Anger turned inward may cause hypertension, high blood pressure, or depression.

Unexpressed anger can create other problems. It can lead to pathological expressions of anger, such as passive-aggressive behavior (getting back at people indirectly, without telling them why, rather than confronting them head-on) or a personality that seems perpetually cynical and hostile. People who are constantly putting others down, criticising everything, and making cynical comments haven’t learned how to constructively express their anger. Not surprisingly, they aren’t likely to have many successful relationships.

Finally, you can calm down inside. This means not just controlling your outward behavior, but also controlling your internal responses, taking steps to lower your heart rate, calm yourself down, and let the feelings subside. This response can be especially helpful if things have become over-heated and you need to restore your balance before expressing your anger in an appropriate and uselful way. Many people find that by removing themselves, physically, from the situation is also helpful. However, it’s important that the anger is addressed later when your feelings have calmed down and you are again in control.

Strategies to help you calm down angry feelings include;

Simple relaxation, such as deep breathing and relaxing imagery.

• Breathe deeply and slowly, from your diaphragm; breathing from your chest won’t relax you. Picture your breath coming up from your “gut”.
• Slowly repeat a calm word or phrase such as “relax,” “take it easy.” Repeat it to yourself while breathing deeply.
• Use imagery; visualise a relaxing experience, from either your memory or your imagination.

Practice these techniques daily. Learn to use them automatically when you’re in a tense situation.

Think!  When you’re angry, your thinking can get very exaggerated and overly dramatic. Try replacing these thoughts with more rational ones. For instance, instead of telling yourself, “oh, it’s awful, it’s terrible, everything’s ruined,” tell yourself, “it’s frustrating, and it’s understandable that I’m upset about it, but it’s not the end of the world and getting angry is not going to fix it anyhow.” Remind yourself that getting angry is not going to fix anything, that it won’t make you feel better and may actually make you feel worse.

Logic defeats anger, because anger, even when it’s justified, can quickly become irrational. So use cold hard logic on yourself. Remind yourself that the world is not out to get you, you’re just experiencing some of the day to day irritations that are a part of everyone’s daily life. Do this each time you feel anger getting the best of you, and it’ll help you get a more balanced perspective.

Angry people tend to jump to and act on conclusions, and some of those conclusions can be very inaccurate. The first thing to do if you’re in a heated discussion is slow down and think through your responses. Don’t say the first thing that comes into your head, but slow down, breathe, and think carefully about what you want to say. At the same time, listen carefully to what the other person is saying and take your time before answering. Try to stay as cool as you can, reminding yourself that allowing yourself to get into a rage will not solve anything.

I have only touched the tip of the iceberg that is rage. There is a great more to say but that will have to wait for another day. My main aim today has been to look at the ways in which we typically deal with anger and to offer some simple techniques for dealing with anger that has the potential to become an unhealthy rage.

Victim support: We would like to know more about the experience of being on the receiving end of a rage attack and so it would be very helpful if anyone reading this blog and who has had such an experience could comment on how they coped and what strategies for coping they would recommend. Do remember that your comments can be completely anonymous and your email address is never given out.

Strategies for a Wonderful Life

Lucy McCarraher

We are all creatures of habit. Some of our habits are superficial and relatively unimportant, like biting your nails or having a cup of tea before bed; others affect your health or wellbeing, such as taking regular exercise or smoking. Our habitual thought processes and the associated emotional reactions, though, create patterns of behaviour which influence and define our lives.

 These strategies, for that is what they are, underlie our response to every experience and therefore have a considerable effect on our personal circumstances. Most of us have constructive and positive strategies which we have built up over a lifetime; but many of us also have some which may have served us well in the past, but are now redundant and can have negative effects in our lives.

For instance, someone who had an authoritarian parent could have developed a strategy of avoiding conflict by simply not talking to that parent about ideas or activities which would have been disapproved of or punished. This behaviour, repeated often enough, will have set up a sequence of thoughts and behaviours in response to any situation that suggested potential disagreement. This may have worked well for a teenager who was negotiating a short term situation before leaving home and setting up a lifestyle in which they could make their own rules. However, several years on, this deeply embedded strategy could have very negative consequences when unconsciously employed in a relationship with a partner or in a work situation.

Can you identify any recurring reactions you have to a particular kind of experience?

For example, does any criticism of you, or your work, bring on a depressive mood and the belief that nothing you do is ever any good, so you might as well stop trying? If so, you may be able to trace it back to a strategy you constructed in response to a teacher who thought disapproval of minor mistakes was more useful than praise of good work; or to a parent who believed that discipline was more important than displays of affection. In your current environment where constructive criticism is designed to improve your performance, your old strategy will be working against your ability to make positive use of this feedback.

When we allow a set of unhelpful responses to become entrenched, they set up repetitive patterns in our lives which result in negative situations. Our strategies for responding to situations are essentially a series of feedback loops of thought and emotion – some of which can repeat every day, others of which only show up every few years.

The exercises in My Wonderful Life are designed to help you try new ways of responding to key practical and emotional themes in your life. While you work on them, try to become more aware of your existing strategies for dealing with situations; build on those that produce good results and where you can identify repeating negative situations, ask yourself whether they are the result of an unhelpful strategy you’ve been unconsciously applying – then look to ways of changing the feedback loop of thoughts and emotions that it is made up of.

Learn How To Listen

Lucy McCarraher

On every measurement of human happiness, good relationships with other people rate very high, if not top of the scale. And how many times have we all been told that COMMUNICATION is the key to good relationships? So how come, when we start talking, at work or at home, about something we know the other person doesn’t share our views on, we end up so often with a predictably pointless discussion, or worse, aggressive argument?

Neurolinguistic programming quite rightly tells us that amongst the most important factors in good communication is the use of rich and varied language, which appeals to the sensory bias of the other person. So someone who employs phrases like “I hear what you’re saying” will understand you better if you use auditory metaphors; a person who “sees your point” will see it more easily if material is presented in a visual way; while it’s helpful to appeal to the emotions of someone who tells you “I feel very positive about…”.

Added to which, ensuring that the way you speak and your own body language are aligned to your words, and learning to read and interpret the body language of other people, are as important in communicating as the content of what you are actually saying.

However you process information, or present your material, nothing is more infuriating than sensing that the other person has not properly listened to you or your point of view. And it works both ways – if there’s a long standing disagreement festering in any of your relationships, you may unintentionally be failing to listen to what your partner, child, parent, boss or colleague is trying to make you understand.

One of our twelve sections in My Wonderful Life is “Richer Relationships”, and in it we talk about the skill of Empathic Listening. It involves focusing exclusively on the other person, and using both your intellect and intuition to understand what they want and need you to hear from them – particularly on a difference of opinion.

When you listen empathically, you use your whole self not just to hear what the other person is saying, but to gain insights into what they are thinking and feeling. By extending this courtesy to them, you also allow the other person the space and time to communicate in a more relaxed and less combative manner.

When you are listening empathically, you will find yourself:

•  Engaged and interested, with your attention focused outwards on the other person
• Intent upon and looking toward the other person, only glancing away occasionally to process what they are saying
• Mirroring the other person’s posture and gestures
• Using language which is “you” (not “I” or “me”) centred; using key words and language patterns that match the other person’s.
• Asking the other person open questions rather than expressing your own beliefs.

You can find more information and our exercise plan for developing Empathic Listening in the download of Section 8 on the My Wonderful Life Self Help website. If you want to ask Annabel or me a question about this, or any other subject, leave a Comment at the end of this post, or get in touch with us through the website.