Many of my patients struggle with the effects of anger. Being easily angered can create great difficulties, not least of which is the fact that angry people are tough to live with! In this article, I address common myths about anger and get real about what actually drives this destructive emotion.
Anger is an emotion that carries perhaps more myths and misconceptions than most. Partly, this is because many people are not well informed about the science behind anger or about psychological research that has clarified its mechanisms over the years.
Additionally, because of its very nature, people are reluctant to talk about anger, along with the troubles that tend to follow in its wake. Usually, they feel more comfortable bringing it up in therapy, and that is not a bad thing.
Rational Emotive Behavior Therapy (REBT) reveals several productive and highly effective ways in which we can counter angry emotions.
But first, let’s turn to several (unhelpful) mythologies about anger. These are misconceptions that often interfere with improving anger management.
Myth #1: Letting It Out Makes It Better
Perhaps the most pervasive and unhelpful misconception about anger is this: that you shouldn’t bottle it up and should instead express your anger freely and frequently, lest you somehow damage your delicate brain!
The metaphor behind this belief is that the human mind functions like an old-fashioned steam boiler or pressure cooker. Inside this steam-aged mind of yours, emotions supposedly boil and build up pressure.
So naturally, this line of thinking would have you believe that you had better let off emotional steam before everything blows up. Following such advice, many people who struggle with excessive anger express it even more forcefully by shouting, screaming, punching stress dolls, or even paying to smash old televisions with baseball bats!
But this strategy does not work. Just like in the old joke, “How do you get to Carnegie Hall?”—”Practice, practice, practice”—expressing anger in this way is perfecting it rather than countering it.
Expressing anger only teaches your brain how to be more angry. Modern psychological studies with infants and adults confirm this suspicion. The main reason? Your brain is not a pressure cooker!
Instead, the brain more closely resembles a highly complex and convoluted supercomputer that is incredibly good at learning and reinforcing what it has learned.
So rather than reducing anger, freely expressing it or even amplifying it (i.e. destroying old televisions) merely, and ironically, gives your brain an opportunity to practice being angry. Not great.
Myth #2: Taking a Time-Out Makes It Better
If expressing anger freely isn’t the way, perhaps walking away from it might help, right?
Not really.
A common strategy for countering anger—especially popular with parents—is the time-out. If you start to feel angry, just take a break, go for a walk in the garden, or, if your child is getting angry, let them take a time-out in another room.
Unfortunately, this avoidance of anger seldom works. Why? Because it fails to target what is actually causing your anger: the attitudes, beliefs, and thoughts you have about whatever you think is “causing” your anger.
In REBT, we recognize that the real causes of anger lie within you: Specifically, within your own mind.
As a result, you can’t truly walk away from anger or “take a time-out” because you’ll just be carrying your angry ideas and emotions along for the ride!
In any event, ignoring, delaying, and avoiding problems has seldom been a useful strategy for anyone.
Myth #3: Knowing Where It Comes From Makes It Better
If neither venting nor avoiding anger is effective, perhaps understanding its origins might help. Indeed, many people believe their anger stems from early childhood experiences or past events.
Psychological science has found that when we observe anger as children, we often reproduce it later in life. If adults teach us that anger is normal or desirable, we may indeed learn to be angry ourselves.
However, there are countless people who learn such lessons in childhood but do not suffer from severe anger, just as there are countless others who have had relatively anger-free childhoods but display extreme rage and debilitating anger as adults.
How do we explain this? In psychology, it is well known that complex behaviors like anger have multiple causes. This principle, called multifactorial causation, acknowledges that while it may seem appealing to pinpoint a single origin for psychological disturbances, they are seldom caused by any one thing.
Research suggests that anger and rage may be associated with parental conditioning, socio-economic status, early life experiences, genetic predispositions, exposure to violence, and, importantly, beliefs and attitudes we develop on our own: such as rigid thinking, rageful ideas, and the belief that anger is justified and desirable.
Even if we concede that in your particular case, your parents taught you how to be angry, the fact remains that your thinking and attitudes about those events and “lessons” are currently maintaining your anger.
Whatever the initial starting point of your anger, you are still applying those learned lessons in the here and now.
And while knowing more about the origins of your anger may be interesting or personally gratifying, it does little to help you conquer anger in the present.
Believing this myth is a bit like believing that if you only knew why you were so bad at tennis, golf, or some other skill, you would magically be better at it. But if you’ve ever tried to master any skill, you know that simply knowing why you struggle does not automatically translate into improvement.
Sad, yes. But true, certainly.
The Mechanisms Behind Anger
Now that we’ve covered some myths about anger, let’s briefly outline what actually drives anger and how it can be addressed through REBT.
From an REBT perspective, anger does not arise simply because of external events or past experiences. If that were the case, then everybody (you included) would react to such events in the same way.
So, for instance, if encountering an annoying, rude and abrasive individual caused you to feel anger at them, then it would always cause that in everyone, and in you, every time and in every conceivable context. Cause, after all, leads to effect!
But you already know that it certainly does not. In fact, some people are not troubled by such individuals in the least. They shrug it off, ignore them, laugh at them, or in rare cases, may even enjoy annoying, rude and abrasive people! Even within your own life, you can probably think of at least a few times where you did not feel anger at such annoying folks, but merely annoyed or even indifferent about them.
The reason behind this diversity of reactions?
- The different ways in which we interpret and evaluate things (or in this case, annoying people).
Anger typically stems from rigid and unrealistic demands you impose on yourself, others or reality such as:
- “I must succeed at what I do, and if I don’t, it’s awful!”
- “People must treat me fairly, and if they don’t, they are damnable worms who deserve punishment!”
- “The world and things in it must go my way, and when they don’t, it’s unbearable!”
These inflexible attitudes create extreme emotional responses (i.e. anger and rage).
Controlling Anger the REBT Way
The key to reducing anger is to challenge and replace these inflexible attitudes with more flexible and constructive alternatives, such as:
- “While it would be nice to always succeed at what I do, I can’t demand that I must succeed. That’s just nutty. Instead, I’ll keep on preferring constant success but when I fail, I’ll just try better next time.”
- “Clearly, people don’t have to treat me fairly. They can do as they please and often will. I don’t have to like unfair treatment. But I can still accept people who act unfairly as fallible human beings, just like me, while disliking their unfair acts.”
- “Where is it written that the world must arrange itself around my wishes? Nowhere! While it would be great if existence danced to my tune, it clearly and often does not. Too damned bad! I can handle it despite it being uncomfortable.”
Key to becoming more flexible and less angry is the insight that you often create your own anger by stubbornly clinging to not only myths about anger, but your own rigid and unrealistic attitudes that fuel anger and rage.
Final Thoughts
Anger is not an uncontrollable force that needs to be vented, avoided, or traced back to its origins. Instead, it is largely driven by your own rigid attitudes about how you, other people and the world “must” be.
By challenging and adjusting these attitudes, you can break free from the cycle of anger and cultivate a more balanced and productive emotional life!
For more on this, give me a call and set up an appointment.
Thanks for reading.