associate with scenes of abuse, hurt, violence and destruction. But this dreadful reputation is very unfair to this natural, basic emotion. After all, it is actually designed to be a positive and constructive aid to survival. Its function is to provide us with vital boosts of both physical and emotional energy, just when we are most in need of either protection or healing.
But it is hard to remember the positive nature of anger today. Not only are we bombarded by media stories depicting the awful power of uncontrolled anger, we are also surrounded in our daily life by examples of people desperately trying to pretend that they have risen above this primitive animal emotion. This is not surprising when we consider that most of us were brought up to believe that anger was the response of the unenlightened savage to frustration, threat, violation and loss. As more civilized beings, we were urged, both directly and indirectly, to ‘keep cool’ and ‘turn the other cheek’. Our reward, we were assured, would be a place in heaven – plus fortune, power and happiness in this life as well!
But, many of us, newly empowered with self-awareness and the skills of confidence, are now challenging this myth. We realize that ‘gritting our teeth’ ruins our health, ‘grinning and bearing it’ destroys our relationships, and being ‘too nice’ inhibits our ability both to succeed at work and put right the wrongs of this very unfair world.
However, in making the attempt to reclaim the positive power of anger, I have noticed that disappointment and disillusionment are commonplace. The old habits sometimes seem impossibly hard to break. So, against our better judgement, many of us still find ourselves:
– unable to feel angry, even when we think we should, and so continuing to suffer abuse of our rights
– ‘going over the top’ with rage at the most inappropriate times and places
– taking out our frustration on our nearest or dearest or those least able to defend themselves
– crying when we would prefer to bawl and shout, or at least argue assertively
– rendered speechless and motionless with fury
– getting stuck in a depression when faced with loss instead of becoming angry and healthily completing our grieving
– being too cowardly and passive in the face of other people’s anger and then torturing ourselves with guilt and shame
– unable to control our own anger, even when those who irritate us may be too young, old or sick to handle our outbursts
– haunted by nightmares or daydreams of spiteful and violent revenge
– running to the doctor with headaches, ulcers and hypertension caused by holding in tight the steam boiling within us.
If the bells of recognition have started ringing, this is certainly the book for you!
Why I Have Written This Book
You may be comforted to know that I have a very personal interest in this subject because I am still struggling myself! I certainly don’t pretend to have completely mastered the art of managing anger well, though I know that am getting more and more skilful as the days go by.
In common with very many people I know, I was never taught the art of handling anger as a child – even though the adults around me knew that, because of neglect and injustice, I had plenty of reason to feel more than my fair share of it. So I found myself naturally locking my feelings defensively within myself. On the outside, I became predominantly ‘sweetness and light’, and as I grew up, I graduated from being a schoolgirl collector of ‘Good Conduct’ badges to an enthusiastic but basically cynical do-gooder. Then in my mid-twenties, a serious attempt to take my own life led me to the world of therapy, which mercifully released me from my depression by giving me the permission and space to feel angry.
But, with hindsight, I can see that this therapy was not enough. I needed guidance on how to handle this hitherto alien emotion. It is true that I was able to find some constructive outlets. I used my angry energy to battle on behalf of forgotten clients in the field of mental health but, more often than not, I displayed and vented my anger aggressively. I often obtained the results which I was seeking, but, needless to say, I found that both my personal and professional relationships suffered under the strain.
When, in my thirties, I experienced another major personal crisis in the shape of a marriage breakdown, I became even more aware of how my inability to handle my anger was hurting not just me, but my children as well. So once again I began to strangle and repress it, with the result that my physical health suffered almost disastrously. Luckily, however, in the course of my search for additional professional stimulation (to dull my personal pain), I discovered Assertiveness Training. At last I found a method of help which actually gave me alternative strategies to use in order to help me cope with my own and other people’s negative feelings. Motivated largely by my own personal needs, I began to adapt and expand the ideas of AT and integrate them into my counselling and self-help work. Using also my knowledge and experience of other therapies such as Transactional Analysis, Gestalt and Dramatherapy, I then began to formulate my own strategies under the heading of Assertive Anger. These became further tried and tested as I began to run courses on this specific subject.
More recently, I have become very aware that the mismanagement of anger is not just a problem for the small minority of people who may need the help of a therapist. As I began to expand my work outside the field of mental health, and specialize in helping with the more ‘everyday’ problems which face the majority of us in the daily course of our lives, I found that almost everyone I met seemed to have some degree of difficulty in handling anger!
Is this a problem of our age, I wonder? Many therapists and counsellors are beginning to think it could be and that, judging by the behaviour of many young people, there could be worse to come. The Director of the Samaritans in Great Britain has cited depression, resulting from unexpressed anger, as one of the most likely causes for the alarming rise in teenage suicides. Similarly, other professional social observers of the young are often heard to blame a build up of anger for the frightening outbreaks of riots and hooliganism.
If the problem is so widespread, we should all be very concerned because, as a society, it seems we have never been in greater need of the positive power of anger and, never under greater threat should this emotion be mismanaged. Mass anger about the injustices in our world and about the threats to our precious planet is, in my opinion, both appropriate and laudable. We should welcome it, because it could help motivate us to preserve what we value. However, if it is allowed to turn negatively inwards, it will weigh us down with disabling apathy and despair – and, if it is directed aggressively outwards, it could destroy us all.
What This Book Offers
While I am not suggesting that a change in the way in which we handle anger can be a cure-all for all the personal and social evils of the world, I do believe that it could dramatically improve very many people’s ability to cope with them. So in this book I have first explored some of the facts and fiction about anger, then introduced a model for managing it both positively and constructively. As I said earlier, I call this model Assertive Anger. A brief outline of its main features can be remembered easily by using the following mnemonic:
Assertive
Non-Violent
Goal-directed
Ethical
Responsible
