Anger Management Techniques: Why They Fail
Members of the press frequently ask me why anger management techniques don’t work. (Actually, they can help a bit, if you remember to do it when you’re angry. I’ll explain why you probably won’t in a moment.) The most important point is this. Instead of wasting energy trying to control anger, focus on reducing the feeling of vulnerability that causes it.
Anger occurs in humans and animals when they perceive vulnerability and threat. The more vulnerable you feel, the more threat you perceive, which is why injured animals are so ferocious. The problem is that anger is self-reinforcing, if not addictive. The more anger you experience, the more vulnerable you feel without it. Eventually you feel so vulnerable that you run your life with the energy of low-grade anger, usually in the form of resentment. When an unpleasant event happens, you don’t start to get angry, you are already angry, you just get more angry. Anger management techniques can help with escalating anger, if you remember to apply them when you’re angry, but they won’t do anything for the underlying resentment, let alone the vulnerability that causes it.
Guilt vs. Motivation
Anger has to do with guilt. The formula for most anger is:
Vulnerability (shame, anxiety, disappointment, sadness) + Guilt = Anger
Take away the guilt and you only have the vulnerable emotion; add guilt and you get angry. Guilt always oversimplifies or distorts reality to some degree, which is why angry and resentful people often seem paranoid. Much worse, guilt subverts the natural function of vulnerable emotions by making them seem like unfair punishments inflicted by other people.
Vulnerable emotions are not punishments; they are motivations to heal, improve or be faithful to your deepest values. The next time you are angry or resentful, forget about blaming and justifying the feeling and focus on healing, improving, or being true to your deepest values. You will notice that resentment and anger dissipate immediately.
Of course, it’s almost as hard to do that when you’re angry as it is to remember anger management techniques. The culprit is one of the most powerful neurological principles: habituation.
Forget Techniques, Think Reconditioning
By the time you reach adulthood, the vast majority of your emotions are conditioned responses or habits, so we tend to make the same mistakes over and over again. Habits, the things you do or experience automatically, are processed in the brain much faster than the things you do or experience consciously. Before you have any idea that you’re angry, you’re already motivated to devalue someone, at least in your head. In excited emotional states, he probably won’t remember what he learned in calm learning states, which is why Mr. Hyde won’t remember what Dr. Jekyll learned in anger management class or in psychotherapy.
The best way to overcome habits is not to change them (neurological evidence suggests they can’t be changed), but to extend them—that is, add another habit to them. Attaching a new habit to an old one is known as emotional reconditioning. Requires repetition or practice over time.
To illustrate how emotional reconditioning works, consider one known as a CURE. It conditions a state of core value–enhancing, healing, appreciating your deepest values–to occur with the physiological trigger of anger – tension around the eyes, jaw, neck, shoulders, arms, hands, and chest. These physical changes are much faster than consciousness. Then, once the new habit is formed, you won’t notice that you were angry, because you will have quickly and automatically shifted to making the situation better instead of devaluing someone because of it.
Each HEALS practice session lasts approximately two minutes. She begins by recalling a past incident that caused anger or resentment, focusing on the physical sensations she felt at the time. Next, identify the deepest vulnerability: feeling unworthy (or, if it’s someone you love, inadequate or unpleasant), appreciation of nature or creative works, a sense of community, and small acts of compassion. Your imagery of value moves you from devaluing the object of your anger to a deeper, more humane understanding of the person you were angry with. Then you feel more human and have more intellectual resources at your disposal to solve the problem. When you’re angry, you demonize the person, you feel less human, and you only have a fraction of your intellectual resources available, which is why you’re bound to make things worse by acting in anger.
After about six weeks of twelve repetitions per day, the association of the arousal of anger with the core value becomes a habit. The baseline resentment level is reduced. Because you feel much less vulnerable, the frequency and intensity of your anger decreases.
Of course, HEALS is not the only way to recondition the anger response and make it less necessary in your daily life. But it does include the crucial elements of emotional reconditioning, most of which are missing from anger management techniques.