usually leaves a trail of resentment, anger, and bad feelings. For example, parents who frequently yell at their kids sometimes get momentary compliance but usually end up with rebellious, resentful kids in the long run.
Yes, you can clobber people without saying a word. Examples of nonverbal bashing include unfriendly gestures, such as pointing, clenched fists, and “flipping the bird.” Facial expressions of anger include dismissiveness, hostility, and contempt (through sneers, prolonged angry stares, and snarls). We don’t know quite how to explain dirty looks, but you know one when you see one! Purposely ignoring and not speaking when spoken to also convey anger and hostility. Body language includes aggressive, puffed-up poses.
People who suppress anger feel mad but work hard to hold it in. Usually, close friends and family members pick up on the anger that these people feel. However, some folks are masters at suppression, and no one truly knows how much hostility they hold inside.
Unfortunately, this type of anger often comes with common physical costs, such as high blood pressure, digestive problems, and heart disease. Chronic tension, unhappiness, fatigue, and distress frequently occur as well. Therefore, suppressing anger doesn’t constitute a good anger-management strategy. See Chapter 3 for more information about the costs of anger and anger suppression.
People who express their anger in a passive-aggressive manner try to find “safe” ways of showing their anger. They like for their behaviors to have plausible deniability of their actual angry feelings. In other words, they make excuses and claim that their motives were excusable. Examples of passive-aggressive behaviors include
✔ Chronic procrastination of promised tasks to get back at someone
✔ Chronic lateness
✔ Subtle sulking or pouting
✔ Purposely performing a task for someone poorly
✔ Purposely forgetting over and over to do a promised task
✔ Indirect verbal expressions such as subtle sarcasm
Here’s an example of passive-aggressive behavior:
Nic, a passive-aggressive fellow, was married to Sonya. Nic often felt irritated and upset with Sonya but rarely, if ever, expressed his feelings directly. One day, he decided that their house would look better in a different color. So he brought home samples of about 30 different paints to splotch on the walls throughout the house to see what color he preferred. Somehow, he failed to get around to actually painting the house for over two years. He always told Sonya, “I’m so sorry; I promise I’ll get to it as soon as I can.”
When confronted, passive-aggressive people always have an excuse in hand and inevitably deny that they feel any anger at all. People living with passive-aggressive partners get pretty tired after 500,000 instances of “I’m sorry,” and/or “I forgot.”
This strategy, like passive-aggressiveness, generally feels safer than directly confronting someone with anger. Complainers and gossipers find sympathetic listeners that will hear their frustrations, woes, and anger about someone else. That way, they avoid actually confronting the person they’re angry with. And, not surprisingly, little gets resolved in the process.
Slamming doors, punching holes in walls, and throwing dishes all fall under the category of physical aggression against objects. This type of aggression can feel very intimidating to those who witness it. Furthermore, these behaviors sometimes precede physical aggression against persons. Assaults can take the form of pushing or shoving, punching, and slapping, and they can even include the use of weapons. Obviously, physical aggression is almost always abusive to both recipients and witnesses.
As noted in the section “Finding Anger in All the Wrong Places,” earlier in this chapter, sometimes people feel great anger toward someone. However, because of differences in power or fear, they don’t feel safe in expressing their anger. Unfortunately, these people may take their anger out on innocent victims, such as a spouse, children, pets, or friends. This type of anger is known as displaced anger.
Exploring Anger Feelings: Frequency, Intensity, and Duration
To understand how much of a problem you have with anger, you need to look at how frequently you experience the emotion, how long it lasts, and how intensely you feel it. Obviously, if you feel frequent, intense, and long-lasting anger, you have a problem, and your anger likely interferes with your life and relationships. Ask yourself the following questions:
✔ How frequently do I feel irritated, annoyed, or angry? Generally, if you experience angry feelings more than two or three times a week, it’s probably a good idea to look at whether you have situations or stressors that need to be addressed. However, your anger intensity and duration may matter more.
✔ Just how mad do I get? Everyone gets annoyed from time to time. And frankly, most people experience anger here and there. But most people don’t punch holes in walls or aggressively threaten people. The intensity of your anger is excessive if you become violent, hysterical, vicious, scary to other people, or out of control. There’s no really simple, valid, numerical scale of how much anger is too much, but you get the idea.
✔ How long do I stay mad? Some people get over their anger quickly. Others dwell and ruminate for hours, days, or even longer, sometimes for years. Once we took a cruise and had an Eastern European waiter. He bitterly complained about Barbarians who had butchered his family. We expressed shock and concern. Then the waiter went on to say that this butchery had happened in the tenth century. That’s a long time to hold onto a grudge!
State versus trait anger
Anger specialists have described the difference between what’s known as state and trait anger.
✔ Trait anger refers to a chronic, long-standing personality characteristic that shows up as an almost constant tendency to become angry at the slightest provocation. People with high trait anger have very low boiling points. People with high trait anger run into lots of interpersonal conflicts, problems at work, and health problems.
✔ State anger refers to temporary, short-lasting outbursts of anger. These episodes are considered appropriate in many situations and often call for problem solving. The appearance of occasional state anger responses is a normal part of life unless the intensity, frequency, and duration are way out of proportion to the triggering event.
The relationship of state and trait anger is much like the connection between weather and climate. Climate and trait anger both represent long-standing patterns, such as the climate in Alaska tends to be rather cold. State anger is like weather, which can change quickly from one day to another. Thus, where we live in New Mexico, the climate is quite dry, but major thunderstorms can pop
