Anger: friend or foe? Or both? That depends on you!

I am facing a situation at work just now in which I feel powerless and, as a consequence, infuriated. Another staff member has taken a unilateral action which detrimentally affects my section, my team and my students and I seem to be receiving no support from management. From my colleagues the only advice I am getting is to let it go because this staff member will “just make your life miserable, one way or another.”

At the moment I have no way of rectifying the situation. To add to my misery, my internal critics are playing havoc with me.

You teach NVC so how about you give yourself some empathy?

Why don’t you practice what you preach?

Why are you reacting and feeling so strongly about this – so much for your meditation, mediation and nonviolent practices.

See, the moment your buttons are pushed you are back to how you have always been – angry and stressed!

Yes, I feel angry. Some of my fundamental values are not being met right now – safety, integrity, fairness, professionalism and service. I am telling myself I feel powerless because I have no independent recourse for rectifying this situation without it creating even more punitive responses. I don’t want to let it go because I tell myself that lets this person “get away with this behaviour”.

So, have I somehow let myself down as my critics are implying. It is true that I cannot get to a state of equanimity. It is true I do imagine all the ways I would “like to get even.” It is true I do not like her behaviours and resent the impact they have on me.

However, I have not sent a reply email to her email for 2 days now as I try and wait until this “rage” inside settles. I have just tried to manage what I can manage within my section with some semblance of dignity. I feel close to tears and notice I am really needing ease and support from my managers – and I feel despairing at getting it. So, the critics may notice that my thoughts and emotions are still in turmoil  – BUT – hear is the kicker – I am not acting on them. This is new. This is a step forward. I cannot turn them off and get back into a state of comfort and out of the pain – but maybe the lesson is to learn to just be with the pain. Ride it out without action? Could that be it?

Then, luckily for me, I received this posting in my inbox by Steve Stosny. He writes wonderful blogs on anger.  I have copied part of his latest blog below. Maybe we can all relate to it.

Ego and Mental Errors
The recycling of anger to protect the ego introduces a much more complicated instigating factor to go along with the perception of threat, namely a perception of ego vulnerability to loss of value (feeling devalued or disrespected). Brain-stem reflex is enough to perceive the threat of an attacking sabre tooth tiger. But it takes a complex network of mental processes to organize the sound of an assemblage of utterances into meaningful words and then construe them to be a verbal threat to the ego – "She said what?!"

When it comes to construing someone’s indirect behaviour (e.g., not putting down the toilet seat) as an ego threat, still more complicated mental processes come into play. These include a theory of mind, which allows us to guess at other people’s states of mind (infer their thoughts, emotions, and motivations), the assignment of symbolic meaning to the behaviour, and an attribution of mal intent. The more complicated the mental processes, the more room for error.

The Neurological Imperative: Conserve Energy
In its continuous effort to conserve metabolic resources, the brain makes shortcuts of everything it does repeatedly, including complex mental procedures, at the cost of even higher error rates. Through the inexorable process of habituation, a perception of ego vulnerability, repeated over time, consolidates into a presumption of vulnerability, which requires the continual protection of anger. Also by virtue of habituation, the repeated experience of anger in defence of the ego reinforces its sense of vulnerability. The more you experience anger, the more anger you need to experience.

Inflation
In addition to needing more and more protection from threat, the angry person attempts to reduce the fear and sense of inadequacy (shame) that go with a vulnerable ego, through a process of inflation. An inflated ego is one whose value depends on downward comparison to the value and rights of others – I’m not equal, I’m better! In addition to temporarily making the ego feel less vulnerable, inflation justifies the motivations of anger to prevail and dominate. It also creates a sense of entitlement – I deserve special regard, treatment, or resources – that is certain to cause negative reactions in others and require a response of still more defensive anger. As if that weren’t bad enough, inflation guarantees cognitive dissonance whenever reality smacks against the overestimation of intelligence, talents, looks, shoes, or socks – whatever is used to inflate the ego.

Is It Natural?
It’s an arguable point whether defence of ego, inflated or otherwise, is a natural function of anger, but defence of ego is certainly a perversion of natural function of anger when it leads us to devalue that which we most value, namely, life, loved ones, and fellow tribesmen. Hence the term, "natural anger," though more accurate than normative terms, also misleads more than it illuminates.

The "healthy" way to experience anger
Normative words neither describe the function of anger nor come anywhere close to what actually happens to us when we experience anger. Yet everyone wants to know about "healthy" anger.

I enjoy giving the following accurate description of what occurs when we’re angry to members of the press who naively ask about "healthy anger."

"I am angry (or resentful, impatient, irritable, shut down, cranky, etc.), which means that I am presently in an impaired mental state that reduces my ability to grasp ambiguity and see any nuance of a situation. The adrenalin rush I’m experiencing makes me amplify, magnify, and oversimplify that which has stimulated my anger, while it degrades my interpretation and judgment of environmental cues and renders me unable to see other people’s perspectives or to see them at all, apart from my emotional reaction to them. I am probably more self-righteous than right. I am doubtless engaged in a petty ego defence that will make it more likely that I will violate my deepest values than protect them and almost certainly make me act against my long-term best interests. I am less able to control my impulses and tolerate frustration. My fine motor skills are temporarily deteriorated. I should not try to drive, negotiate, analyze an issue, or do anything important, until I have regulated this temporary state that has prepared me to fight when I really need to solve a problem."

Of course, we are unlikely to experience anger in this truly healthy way, without a great deal of practice. The point here is that the use of normative terms to describe anger obscures and distorts what happens in the experience of anger and thereby compounds problem anger – a recurring form of the emotion that m
akes us act against our long term best interests. To the extent that words are used to justify behaviour that devalues, manipulates, or dominates others, they greatly exacerbate anger problems.

Don’t Justify, Improve
The real motive behind the use of normative terms to describe anger is to justify certain kinds of anger and condemn other kinds, as if you have a right to experience some forms of anger but not others. What are mere conceptual problems for therapists and authors who try to distinguish justified from unjustified anger turn into disaster for people who use the pseudo-distinction as a guide for ordinary living. Of course you have a right to be angry and to experience any kind of anger. (You have a right to shoot yourself in the foot, for that matter.) The more important question is this:

"Is my anger helping me be the person, parent, intimate partner, friend, or co-worker I most want to be?"

This question invokes your deepest values, which are the foundation of your ego, as well as its ultimate strength. If your behaviour remains consistent with your deepest values, your sense of internal value increases, reducing the need for ego inflation. With increased internal value, you become less dependent on getting value from others. With reduced dependency as others, you are able to see them as separate people, who, like you, are often blindly and sadly protecting their own inflated egos; in other words, you become more compassionate. You perceive less internal vulnerability and less external threat, which makes you less likely to stimulate reactive anger in others. In short, you make anger less necessary in your life. You begin to see anger as not at all a bad thing but an important signal to get back to your core value. 

More later…as it unfolds.