Managing Anger: Simple Steps to Dealing with Frustration and Threat. Gael Lindenfield
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digestive disorders such as ulcers and gastritis through increasing acid secretion
– create hypertension
– raise our cholesterol levels
– damage and block our arteries
– aggravate heart disease
– exacerbate bowel conditions such as colitis
– increase our susceptibility to infection
– intensify pain
– create headaches and exacerbate sinus conditions
– contribute to inflammatory disorders of the muscles
– hinder our recovery from major traumas to the body such as operations or serious illnesses such as cancer or Aids.
I hope that this abbreviated list is sufficiently impressive to convince most of you of the immense potential cost to our bodies if we mismanage our anger.
The Physical Triggers
THE EFFECTS OF CHANGES IN OUR BIOCHEMISTRY
There are many bodily states which may predispose us to use our anger response more than perhaps we would normally do. I am not just referring to the most obvious examples such as brain damage, dementia, severe diabetes or epilepsy, but also of more common everyday conditions such as headaches and stomach pains. (The latter are often caused by the stresses of normal growth transitions, sometimes by disease, and sometimes by self-inflicted habits and practices.) Because our bodies are going through some biochemical change or have their energies already overstretched coping with some internal or external stress, the effect is to lower our resistance to frustration. For example, most people will, in the course of their life, have direct or indirect experience of anger and irritation being ‘nearer the surface’ when:
– over-tired
– very hungry
– going through hormonal changes such as those which take place at puberty, pre-menstruation, the birth of a baby or menopause
– recovering from flu
– physically craving for a substance to which they are addicted, such as nicotine, alcohol, caffeine or any other drug
– ‘on a high’ from over-using any such drug or substance
– suffering from acute pain
– ‘worn down’ by chronic pain
– in a state of sexual frustration.
We must stop blaming our bodies for our anger, for they merely act as vessels for containing it, or vehicles for expressing it – and we can use our head to rule either function!
We commonly hear the physical condition itself being blamed for an outburst of anger or irritability – ‘It’s just her monthlies’; ‘It was the whisky talking’; ‘It’s only the baby blues’; ‘He’ll be alright when he’s had his dinner’. But, of course, not everyone with PMT or toothache or six pints inside them will get angry in response to frustration. The state of our health is only ever part of the explanation of our expression and management of anger.
We have already looked at how the way we perceive a trigger affects our anger response. But let’s now consider other important ways in which anger can influence our minds.
Anger and Self-Esteem
Our attitude to anger can affect the way we think about ourselves, and therefore it has the power to affect our self-esteem and self-confidence. In our culture, because anger still has such a negative aura for many people, even feeling the emotion, let alone expressing it, can damage self-esteem. I often hear people admitting that they keep even minor feelings of irritation well-hidden because they are ashamed of them.
As most people’s ideas of ‘goodness’ include benevolence, tolerance, generosity, kindliness and affability, angry (‘negative’) feelings are often banished to the private worlds of fantasy and dreams. These can, of course, be very natural safe healing abodes for difficult feelings – as long as we do not hate ourselves for actually experiencing them there. But how good are we likely to feel about ourselves when we are carrying around images in our heads of the awful things we would like to do, or dreamed last night of doing, to get our own back on someone who has hurt us? Certainly very many of my clients report that they have found it excruciatingly difficult to ‘confess’ their angry fantasies to me, because they are convinced that when they do, I will see them ‘for what they really are’ and I am bound to reject them out of fear and loathing.
Similarly, many people have told me how they are ashamed to admit that they are gaining vicarious satisfaction from books, films and plays where anger is expressed, sometimes quite horrifically and destructively. They are worried that their interest proves that at some deep level they are just as evil and violent as the fictional characters, and that if they were to release their anger they would be just as destructive themselves.
Many other people have their self-esteem damaged because they have actually experienced disapproval and rejection in direct response to the expression of their anger. If this happens frequently, it can make them feel very despairing about themselves, because they begin to wonder if they will ever be capable of loving or being loved, or of achieving success.
There are two main reasons why the expression of anger can be followed by disapproval and rejection:
1 The recipients themselves have such low self-esteem or are so stressed that they are not able to cope with the anger which is being directed at them.
2 The anger has been expressed in a threatening or unjust manner.
Identifying which of these two reasons is involved is vitally important, because the first is neither the fault nor the responsibility of the angry person (unless, perhaps, the other person is in our care, e.g. a child). But the second most certainly is our business and we do have the power to do something about it – we can learn to manage our anger more assertively! If we do, we will find that not only will our relationships improve but so will our self-esteem.
ANGER AND SANITY
Another way in which people allow their self-esteem to be damaged by anger is by thinking that not only can it make them ‘bad’, but that it also has the power to make them ‘mad’ – and, of course, that label may have even more power to eat away at our self-image! We often hear variations on these themes:
‘He was so angry that he just lost his reason.’
‘She flew into a rage and went quite crazy.’
So let’s try to separate the myths from the reality around the relationship between anger and mental health.
To feel and express anger healthily is actually the antithesis of madness.
THEODORE ISAAC RUBIN
Links between anger and mental health have been made for many centuries. Horace, the great philosopher, who lived from 65 to 8 BC, is quoted as saying ‘Anger is a brief madness’. Nowadays, we may not equate anger with madness, but very many people still believe that it can directly cause it.
In fact, like many fellow therapists, I firmly believe that an ability to express anger in an assertive, healthy and controlled manner is indeed one of the most important signs of good mental health. But I do acknowledge that mismanaged anger can aggravate mental health problems. At this stage I would love to be able to quote irrefutable scientific evidence to support this belief, but I cannot, because it does not exist, and I very much doubt