target="_blank" rel="nofollow" href="#i000037550000.jpg" alt="tip"/> Anger can be triggered either by being intolerant or prejudiced or being the victim of intolerance or prejudice.
Violence permeates the world. Being the victim of violence or abuse naturally creates anger, although some people respond with anxiety and/or depression. Chronic abuse changes victims into abusers in some cases. Abuse takes many forms and ranges from subtle to blatant. The following are broad categories of abuse or attack:
✔ Partnership or domestic violence
✔ Partnership or domestic verbal abuse
✔ Child abuse
✔ Assault and battery
✔ Rape or sexual abuse
✔ War trauma
✔ Verbal intimidation
✔ Genocide
✔ Random violence and accidents
To get your anger under better control, figure out what sets you off. In Table 2-1, we list the broad categories of common triggers. The first column lists the trigger categories.
Table 2-1 Tracking Your Anger Triggers
Timothy’s anger triggers
Forty-six year-old Timothy teaches high-school mathematics. His physician tells him that his blood pressure has been quite high lately and wonders if he is under unusual stress. Timothy explains that recent changes in his school’s curriculum and teacher-evaluation system have given him a lot of pressure. He’s been feeling quite irritable as a result. In talking with his physician, he realizes that he’s been berating his students excessively and has lost his joy from teaching. His physician prescribes two blood-pressure medications but also strongly recommends some work on anger management. Doing so may even help him reduce his medications at some point.
At the second anger-management class, Timothy discovers the common types of anger triggers and is asked to fill out a Tracking Your Anger Triggers form (see Table 2-1). He discovers that his most frequent and problematic triggers are time pressures, threats to his self-esteem (from teacher evaluations), and unfairness because he feels that the curriculum changes are unfair to those who haven’t had time to assimilate and understand them. Just knowing his triggers helps Timothy feel a little more prepared and empowered.
In the second column, we recommend that you rate each trigger category from 1 to 5 in terms of how often it has occurred for you. For example, a rating of 1 means you rarely or never encounter this anger trigger. A rating of 3 means you encounter this trigger moderately often. A 5 means you run into this problem almost all the time.
In the third column, rate how problematic the trigger is for you. A 1 indicates you have little concern with this issue. For example, some people just don’t get stressed out by time pressures. Others find time pressure moderately problematic and would rate the item as a 3. A few people blow their stack on a daily basis due to time-pressure problems, and they’d rate them as a 5.
Finding Anger in All the Wrong Places
In this section, we explore the “where” of anger. After all, anger doesn’t occur in a vacuum; it happens in specific places or contexts. The most frequent place for anger to erupt is in the home. But the initial anger trigger often starts somewhere else.
Jennifer has a high-stress job as an account executive. Her boss demands long hours and often resorts to verbal abuse. Jennifer steams and fumes when he does so, but she remains silent out of fear that she could lose her job. Unfortunately, she routinely takes her anger out on her children. While preparing dinner, she feels impatient, short-tempered, and yells at her kids. Jennifer’s anger triggers occur at work, but the expression of her anger takes place at home.
Common anger situations or contexts include the following:
✔ Home: Sadly, many people save up their anger to express with their loved ones. They seem to believe that it’s safe to do that. What they don’t realize is that such behavior can be abusive and frequently causes emotional scars, divorces, marital strife, and even charges of abuse.
✔ Work: People in power have a tendency to express excessive anger, generally at those who have less power. People on the bottom of the hierarchy either stuff their anger in or explode and get fired.
✔ Crowds, noisy places, and traffic jams: Even people without major anger problems sometimes become irritable and frustrated in these contexts. Think about people who have gotten into fist fights on airplanes over 2 inches of legroom or instances of road rage that result in bodily harm. (See Chapter 23 for specific ideas about dealing with road rage.)
✔ Social settings: Parties and family functions can provide a tinder box for igniting anger. Sometimes that’s because of alcohol, which can disinhibit people’s anger expression. Other times, it’s because of long-standing histories of hostility between friends and family.
Expressing Anger
Everyone gets angry. After all, anger is one of those universal emotions – along with sadness, joy, and fear – that people throughout the world recognize when they see or hear it. But everyone experiences and expresses anger a little differently. The following sections describe many of the ways people show their anger or, alternatively, hold it in. Understanding your strategies for anger expression can be helpful before you work on changing how you show your anger.
Yes, keeping your cool can be one way of expressing anger. Of course, if you’re reading this book, keeping your cool probably isn’t your primary method of anger expression. Keeping cool means that you don’t respond impulsively. You may take a slow, deep breath or two before saying anything. Then you directly express your feelings while trying to solve the issue or problem. See Chapters 4, 8, 9, and 10 for more ideas on how to keep your cool.
Verbal bashing includes yelling, arguing, put-downs,
