Anger

[A.J. Mahari]

The first PDF file here is called, "A Comparison of Five Types of Anger"

[A.J. Mahari]

In this "wheel of anger" 8 roles (ways) that anger is expressed - 8 styles of presentation of anger.

[A.J. Mahari]

How To Successfully Deal with Your Anger or Disarm and Angry Person

Just click on the PDF file to download this sheet.

[A.J. Mahari]

Anger serves as a signal that we are facing a frustrating or stressful situation.

A person enters the bank to withdraw money from their account only to be told that their pay was not deposited. The person becomes disappointed and experiences tension and stress. The person may choose to treat this event as a minor annoyance or enter into a full rage.

Anger serves as a signal that we are facing a frustrating or stressful situation. From the infant to the adult, anger is a choice of behavior that becomes a habit.

Moderate feelings of anger can be used to motivate a person, however extreme anger can be destructive. As a communicator, anger is a means of sending information to others.

People deal with anger in a variety of ways. The person will either confront the situation that caused the anger or will withdraw from it. Those that try to put it off may be hoping that it will go away. At times, however, the feelings of anger are diverted into other excessive activi-ties as working, drinking or eating.

A person who suppresses anger may experience sleeplessness which often leads to physical and mental anguish. Suppressed anger can lead to depression or may cause a person to experience explosive episodes of anger.

People who express anger either through physical violence or mental abuse may be in need of professional assistance. Abuse as an expression of anger does not serve any constructive purpose to anyone.

[A.J. Mahari]

BPD and Rage
By A.J. Mahari

Borderline rage is the protector of the primal pain of the narcissistic psychic injury that is the core wound of abandonment. Rage is a primitive, young, emotionally immature way of expressing pain and need. Rage is toxic and when not dealt with appropriately is abusive and fuels negative relationship destroying verbal abuse, physical abuse, and other types of abuse as well.

Rage is a very challenging and difficult aspect of Borderline Personality Disorder, (BPD) for both the person with BPD and those who know someone with BPD. The degree to which rage effects those with Borderline Personality Disorder (BPD), like the degree which rage manifests itself, can be a very individual experience. Rage is encompassed within the Borderline trait:

"inappropriate, intense anger or difficulty controlling anger; frequent displays of temper" (listed in the DSM-IV)

Some people with BPD will manifest this rage inwardly through self-harm, suicide attempts and others will manifest it outwardly by either showing "fits of rage, temper, anger" (yelling - push/pull behaviour -- the "I hate you don't leave me" kind of thing) or through emotional abuse and physical abuse of those closest to them and or toward therapists. And some borderlines will express this rage both inwardly and outwardly.

In my experience with rage that was of borderline intensity it became apparent to me that it originated from two areas of me, biological and emotional. The major motivation of my rage has always been the result of being triggered into what were highly dissociative states. I think that until recently the degree to which many borderlines dissociate has not been understood, treated properly, or written about much, if at all. It is this triggered-dissociative reality that lends itself to the outbursts of "inappropriate" (that is situationally inappropriate) intense anger" and or rage. When a person with BPD is in the throes of this behaviour which is a major coping mechanism in order to protect an already compromised, and to one degree or another, fragmented ego they are in a dissociated state of reality. This dissociated state of reality is the "small picture". It is the fragmented reality within the world of BPD. To the outside observer of a temper tantrum, or a borderline who is raging it is not a part of his/her time-consistent reality, in the "big picture". So it is labeled "situationally inappropriate" when in fact for the situation that the borderline is re-living it is not inappropriate at all. It is a natural reaction to the pain and often the trauma that one has had inflicted upon one and that one has had to find a way to endure and survive. So the operative reality in which we live does not always unfold in the same way or time-frame, for both the person with BPD and the person who is not borderline. We live in the same physical world but emotionally we live in parallel universes.

Rage is a very protective mechanism that rises up from the centre of self and or aspects of self collectively. Rage exists where pain is not or cannot be felt and acknowledged and expressed in other ways. The pain that the borderline feels is so threatening to his/her overall survival (ego - identity) that it truly feels like one will die, be annihilated, cease to exist. The extreme behaviour of those with BPD speaks to the level of the intensity of the intra-psychic pain.

Rage is often seen and judged or described as "madness" or "insanity". However, in the triggered-dissociative reality of the person with BPD the rage is not "madness" or "insanity" within the context of his or her past experience and the damage that was done to him/her that the BPD is the result of.

Borderlines have been very unfairly judged by not only those in their own lives but by the world of the professionals as well. The stigma attached to BPD generally, and the intensity and frequency of the rage and anger that Borderlines struggle with can only be fully understood when one has lived it.

© Ms. A.J. Mahari - June 27, 1999

To read the rest of this article please go to: http://borderlinepersonality.ca/borderrage.htm

[A.J. Mahari]

ANGER IS A BASIC HUMAN EMOTIONAL RESPONSE it is neither good nor bad. To place judgments on anger, Of, for that matter, on any emotional reaction, Is counterproductive. Emotionally healthy human beings experience feelings continuously throughout the day. Even though each emotion has a unique function, all emotions have one purpose in common: to provide in¬iormation about every incident encountered. In this capacity, each of the sewn basic emotions-happiness, guilt, sadness, loneliness, inadequacy, fear, and anger-functions as an indicator. Happiness indicates that this is fun. let's keep doing it. Guilt indicates that our behavior has gone contrary to our beliefs or values. Sadness alerts us to appreciate people and things betore they are gone. Loneliness cues us to the need for human contact. Inadequacy highlights areas where personal improvements are needed. Fear sounds the danger alarm. Anger says it is time to protect.

The act of judging a feeling diminishes the emotion's functional capapabilities. Many people assess emotions by separating them into two categories: those considered good, or worthy of pursuit, and those that are bad, or meant to be avoided. The first category contains happiness and similar emotions, while the second consists of all other feelings, including anger. Some of us put most of our energy into seeking the first category and avoiding the second. Sometimes we are not aware of or choose to ignore feelings that provide information about our environmental circumstances. A valuable source of internal information is unavailable to help us interpret circumstances and make decisions.

Feelings are natural and the ability to use them is instinctive. The desire to seek some and ignore others is taught through a socialization process. Families, churches, media, and schools contribute to this cultural training process. The lessons may be presented in a subtle manner, such as a disappproving scowl from a parent. Or they may be more obvious, such as a group of schoolboys teasing another because he is afraid. Whether subtle or obvious, these social lessons override our instincts and encourage us to avoid or misuse many of our own feelings and to respond negatively to other people's emotional expressions.

Often the lessons we learn are not accurate. An eight-year-old boy who is afraid to jump off the roof of a ten-foot-high building is not a sissy or a coward, as taunted by his friends. He is demonstrating good sense, and he needs to listen to that fear. But he is being taught otherwise and, if he heeds the lesson, he will learn to disparage the fear instead of use it. The same is true for all the emotions placed in the "negative" feeling category, includding, if not especially, anger.

One of the more common and harmful lessons taught about anger innvolves what I call the misappropriation of responsibility. The lesson can be summed up in one sentence: You are responsible for my anger, and I am reesponsible for yours. This idea is taught and reinforced every time someone says, "You made me angry." The message is clearly that my anger, or lack of anger, depends upon your behavior. So it is up to you to do something that will remove my anger. Someone who buys into this message cannot respond effectively because the angry person is asking for the impossible.

The idea that one person can change another person's feeling is based on erroneous information. No one can reach into another person to flip the on-off switch of an emotional reaction. To respond to another person's anger productively, the responsibility for that anger must be shifted to its proper place, to the person who is experiencing the feeling. The first task in accomplishing this is to understand how anger is defined as an emotion and how it works.

ANGER IS AN INTERNAL REACTION

The phone rings, you pick up the receiver, place it to your ear, and say hello into the mouthpiece. An unknown voice comes through the line, explaining that she is a nurse at a local hospital. Someone you love has been in a serious accident. Your breathing stops and then becomes rapid and shallow. Your palms are sweaty. Your muscles tense. You struggle to stay in control, to stay focused.

If this had really happened, you would be undergoing an internal reacction, a biophysiological response. You would be experiencing a strong feelling or emotion. The internal reaction and the physical sensations occur because your body increased certain chemicals. The most predominant chemical in this situation is adrenaline. Humans recognize the consequenntial physical sensations as fear.

The "re-" in reaction indicates that the chemicals and the resultant physical sensations are a response to something. In the phone call situation, the response is to the information given by the voice on the phone.

The phone call, with the information it contained, is an external event.

This is usually the case. But feelings may occur without an external stimulus when a biophysiological, chemical imbalance is present within the human body. This imbalance can be caused by something as minor as hunger, which produces a nervous feeling, or as major as the imbalance responsible for manic-depression, a serious illness with vast mood swings. Whether the internal reaction is triggered by an external event or a biologically based chemical imbalance, correct the chemical imbalance and the emotion fades. When we daydream, fantasize, or imagine, we create emotions by using our minds. We think of an incident or create a scenario in our minds and then experience emotional responses to these mental images.

Defining an emotion as an internal reaction to an external event is adeequate only when discussing animals other than humans. At this bestial level, feelings are instinctive and used most often for physical survival. Human beings still function using this primitive ability. It comes from what can be called the "old brain" and is experienced most intensely during times of immmediate danger, when survival depends on action without thought.

Through evolution, the human mind has developed what can be considdered an additional brain. This "new brain," the neocortex, provides us with the ability to abstract, symbolize, and convey information. With this devellopment, we gained the ability to think about, differentiate, label, and verrbally communicate various internal reactions. It is what sets us apart from other animals. My dog cannot come home after a hard day of dog work, sit in her favorite spot, and ruminate about the internal reaction she had when the huge monster dog down the street chased her for three blocks. My dog felt that sensation and then ran. It was all about instinct and survival. But because the neocortex is not about instinct, this higher function must be learned. With this learning, emotions take on a dimension that requires soocialization.

We learn to give a name to our internal reactions. This labeling involves experiencing, differentiating, and naming each biophysiological sensation. This is a complex process, and learning it starts at a young age. Children, by the age of six, are developmentally capable of labeling and expressing the four most basic feelings with the descriptive words of mad, glad, sad, and afraid.1 Because youngsters have to learn the names for each feeling sensaation, they need teachers-the people immediately involved in their lives.

We can use this understanding of emotion to develop a definition of anger:

Anger is an internal reaction (that a person learns to name) to an external event.

The emotional process of anger is straightforward and physically based: Something happens. The brain interprets the event in such a way, acccurately or not, that it directs the body to produce the chemical that inncreases the heart and pulse rate, quickens breathing, makes the skin flush, increases muscle tension and body temperature, and activates sweat glands. Metabolism speeds up and the body responds accordingly. The person laabels the complete experience "anger."

The important point is that anger, like any other emotion, is the body's internal response to the release of a natural chemical, a hormone. Thoroughly understanding this point will help you respond to other people's anger more effectively for two reasons. First, realizing that anger in itself is not dangerous, threatening, or hurtful removes much of the emootion's potency. Second, understanding what anger is clearly indicates where the responsibility for anger lies. If someone is angry with you, the anger is her chemical, physical response. It is her internal reaction. You cannot reach inside and change the reaction. Although you may choose actions that influuence the external event, ultimately only the person experiencing the anger can change the internal response.

MISINFORMATION ABOUT ANGER

In order to choose your response to another person's anger, it is important that you not be trapped into responding out of misinformation you've gathhered during your lifetime. Some misinformation strongly influences your emotions because it was presented in powerful, sometimes traumatic, ways. In those cases, the simple act of gaining new information about anger is not potent enough to change your emotional reaction to another person's rage. But you can begin by intellectually replacing the misinformation that you have been given. This will enable you to look at anger in a more positive way. In chapter 5, you can do some exercises designed to assist you in changing your more resistant emotional reactions.

Most cultures engender many misconceptions about anger. Of all our emotions, anger is the one that has the most taboos restraining its expresssion and the most erroneous information concerning what it is and how to use it. This situation creates discomfort for a person encountering another's angry feelings.

To respond effectively to anger, you need to increase your comfort level around angry feelings. You can increase your awareness of inaccurate ideas about anger and replace them with factual concepts about this powerful emotional response.

The following statements counter the most common misleading ideas about anger propagated by our society.

Anger is not an accusation. You may have discovered in chapter I that an accusation of wrongdoing accompanied your caretaker's anger toward you. If this happened often enough, you learned through your experiences that anger is an accusation, and consequently your first reaction to anger is to respond as though you are being blamed for a misdeed.

Although anger is not an accusation, it may be accompanied by an acccusation. The accusation is the angry person's interpretation of the external event. In this scenario, the external event would be your behavior. Anger can occur and be expressed without any accusations when all parties take responsibility for their own internal reactions.

Anger is not a sin, and a person who feels angry is not bad because of it.

I have heard anger called un-Christian. Some people believe that experiencing anger means they are not living a Christian life. Think about the emotional state of Jesus when he went into the temple and overturned tables. He was not happy nor accepting when he did that. He was quite angry. Not one of the people I have pointed this out to is willing to say that Jesus was in a state of sin or that he was a bad person because he felt angry.

Anger is not a behavior. Often people confuse anger with aggression.

Aggression is a behavior. It is one way that people may choose to express anger. They could choose instead from a number of other behaviors besides aggression. Likewise, anger is not violence. Violence is a descriptive cateegory of behaviors. Anger is the internal reaction, and behaviors are the exxternal expression of that reaction. If you understand that, then you know that it is not the other person's anger that gives you problems. Your diffiiculty in responding to them has to do with the behaviors they may use to express their angry feelings. As an adult, you encounter many people who feel angry. Few of them express that anger with aggression or violence.

Anger is not a weapon. Many parents, without realizing it, methodiically set their children up to fear anger in the same way they might fear a weapon. The process consists of these steps: (I) The child does something that the parent does not like. (2) The parent feels angry and expresses it by physically hurting or verbally berating the child. (3) This behavior is repeated, and the child quickly learns to make an anger-pain connection. (4) From then on, the parent wields anger as a weapon of intimidation by announcing, in a threatening tone, "I'm getting angry." The expected outtcome is similar to brandishing a gun: Do this or I will shoot. Do this or I will get angry. Anger has become the vehicle of hurt.

Another similar inaccurate impression of anger is the expectation that angry feelings result in punishment. It reminds me of a time about five years ago when a worker's error cost our company about six thousand dollars in Medicaid reimbursement. I felt angry about the situation. I called the worker in, I expressed my anger, and then we talked about what happened and how he could avoid the mistake in the future. He left my office and all seemed well. Two days later he returned, stood in my doorway, and asked, "Well?" I looked at him quizzically. He added, "When are you going to get me?" I asked, "For what?" He replied, "For that Medicaid thing. What diss:iplinary action are you taking?" After a half hour of talking, I finally connrinced him I had no intention of punishing him. I told him that discipline neans to teach and that I thought he had already learned how to avoid the same mistake in the future. "And so," I asked, "Why would I punish you?' He looked at me as though I were an alien who had no understanding aboul Earth before he replied, "Because you were very angry."

Anger is not an evaluation of your worth as a person. Because anothel human being is angry about something you have done, that does not mean that you are worthless, stupid, unimportant, unlovable, or lazy. Many oj my clients have heard such messages from their caregivers. And even though many of them have not had contact with their caregivers in years, they respond to expressions of anger as though they are still hearing the same negative evaluations flung at them as children.

Anger is an internal reaction. Another person's internal reaction has nothing to do with your rightness or wrongness as a human being. It has to do with the chemicals being produced by his body because of the way he has interpreted events around him.
 
Anger is not a gigantic mistake. Nature did not err when it gave people a wide array of feelings, including anger. Every basic emotion was built into the human species so that Homo sapiens would survive and flourish. I have already spoken about emotions being indicators, but their function and im¬portance to humanity goes even further. Each feeling is designed to produce an outcome that will increase the probability of survival. For example, lone¬liness has played a large part in helping our species survive. Human beings are not the strongest, the biggest, or the fastest animals. In more primitive times, humans protected themselves and fought against bigger, stronger, and faster animals by forming societies. Loneliness encourages us to come to¬gether in communities. It is the emotion that motivates us to seek out and make alliances with other people.

Anger has also helped humans since primitive times as the feeling state that directs us to fight when attacked by those bigger, stronger, and faster animals. The adrenaline produced by anger temporarily makes people stronger and faster, leveling the odds of combat.

Anger is not hot boiling water, and people are not teapots. This statement alludes to the concept that anger is stored up and added to on a regular basis until it expands to such large proportions that it has to be vented or it will overflow. This idea is such an enticingly simple explanation that even some professional counselors believe it, but the concept has three major flaws. First, anger cannot be stored. Considering the definition of anger - an internal reaction created by an overproduction of adrenalineeI asked three physicians if it is possible to carry around an overabundance of adrenaline. All three assured me that a person who stayed high on adrennaline would be extremely agitated, unable to sleep, and close to crazy within three days.

Second, under the teapot theory, each outburst of anger a person has would lower the anger level. If someone had many outbursts of extreme proportions, the anger would be reduced until it was almost gone, and it would be a long time, perhaps months or years, before it built up enough to overflow again. Yet in real life this is not what occurs. Most often, people who experience episodes of rage are people who routinely express anger through aggressive behaviors. According to the teapot theory, these are the people who ought to have spent all their anger. Yet they are the ones who keep on agressing.

The third flaw in this concept is the idea that anger needs to be vented to be reduced. Studies done in the I970S2 and in the I990S3 indicate that venting angry feelings increases rather than diminishes the physiological arousal of anger. Anger was not given to humans so they could vent. Venting fulfills no survival purpose whatsoever. As with every emotion, anger serves to sustain and enhance life. Anger accomplishes this by providding the ability and strength to defend through physical altercation. When the altercation is finished, the angry feelings recede, to be reproduced when necessitated by another danger.

Anger is not a chronic illness that needs to be managed. This concept may contradict the current fad of anger management workshops, seminars, counseling, classes, and groups. Anger is an internal reaction whose main function is to defend the human being. It does not need to be managed. Instead, anger arousal needs to be identified when it occurs and used effecctively, within the given social context, to fulfill its protective function.

From the Book: "Responding To Anger Workbook" by Lorrainne Bilodeau, M.S. who also wrote "The Anger Workbook"