Managing Anger in an Unforgiving World

“My life is at the mercy of any scoundrel who chooses to put me in a passion!” John Hunter (1700s), British physician known for his bad temper

This statement by John Hunter was prophetic. At a meeting of the board of St. Georges Hospital, he became involved in a heated argument, walked out and dropped dead of a heart attack.

We all know what anger is and we’ve all felt it: whether as a fleeting annoyance or as full-fledged rage. Anger is a completely normal, usually healthy, human emotion. But when it gets out of control and turns destructive, it can lead to problems - problems at work, in your personal relationships and even your health.

Anger can be caused by both external and internal events. You could be angry at a specific person (such as a co-worker or supervisor), or event (a traffic jam, a canceled flight), or your anger could be caused by worrying or brooding about your personal problems. Memories of traumatic or enraging events can also trigger angry feelings.

The Anger Trap In essence, anger is the feeling we get when we desire the world to be different and we don’t get our way.

Rodger Kamenetz, Professor at Louisiana State University, says anger becomes a “trap” when we lose control over its effects on us. This makes us prone to emotional outbursts and depression. And the anger that inspires some to violence in the workplace is no different than the anger that inspires acts of terror or brutality.

Kamenetz warns that anger is a feedback loop, “anger produces  further anger.” The idea that you should “let your anger out” is a dangerous myth. Even if anger is warranted, losing control of it can become destructive. Likewise, anger can cycle into violence.

Anger fed violence gets directed because, “anger needs an object,” says Kamenetz, “it's impossible to sustain our anger without an object.” This is why anger, violence and obsessive behavior are so often linked. Those who are caught in the anger trap, can’t see, in their rage, that violence is actually “turning themselves into what they hate.”

Are You Too Angry?

There are psychological tests that measure the intensity of angry feelings, how prone to anger you are and how well you handle it. But chances are good that if you do have a problem with anger, you already know it.

Generally, you’re having anger problems when you develop a low tolerance for frustration, meaning simply that you can’t take things in stride. And you get particularly infuriated if the situation seems somehow unjust. If you find yourself acting in ways that seem out of control and frightening, you might need help finding better ways to deal with this emotion.

Expressing anger

The instinctive, natural way to express anger is to respond aggressively. Anger is a natural, adaptive response to threats, which allow us to fight and to defend ourselves when we are attacked. A certain amount of anger, therefore, is necessary to our survival.

On the other hand, we can’t physically lash out at every person or object that irritates or annoys us. Laws, social norms and common sense place limits on how far our anger can take us. Expressing your angry feelings in an assertive - not aggressive - manner is the healthiest way to express anger.

To do this, you have to learn how to make clear what your needs are and how to get them met, without hurting others. Being assertive doesn’t mean being pushy or demanding; it means being respectful of yourself and others. Dr. Lynne McClure, expert on anger management, subtitled one of her books “managing anger in an unforgiving world.”

Because we are, legitimately, victims sometimes, people often want to hold on to their anger. She says it can feel good, at least for a while, “because you feel so righteous and justified to be angry.”

But holding anger is dangerous in the long run. If your anger is with a person, talking things out can usually help. McClure explains that if the source of your anger is a “real issue,” something that can be depersonalized, then there’s a chance that a resolution can be found.

A good place to start is for both parties to identify and agree on the concerns they have in common. Angry people tend to jump to - and act on - conclusions. Don’t say the first thing that comes into your head, but slow down and think carefully about what you want to say. At the same time, listen carefully to what the other person is saying and take your time before answering.

Suppressing Anger

The danger is when your anger turns inward - on yourself. Anger turned inward may cause hypertension, high blood pressure, or depression. Unexpressed anger can also lead to pathological expressions of anger, such as passive-aggressive behavior (getting back at people indirectly, without telling them why, rather than confronting them head-on), or a personality that seems perpetually cynical and hostile.

People who are constantly putting others down, criticizing everything and making cynical comments are exhibiting conduct brought on by trying to suppress their anger.

Calming Anger

Anger can be suppressed and then converted or redirected. This happens when you hold in your anger, stop thinking about it and focus on something positive. The aim is to inhibit or suppress your anger and convert it into more constructive behavior. This means not just controlling your outward behavior, but also controlling your internal responses, taking steps to lower your heart rate, calm yourself down and let the feelings subside.

Relaxation

Simple relaxation tools can help calm down angry feelings:

• Breathe deeply, from your diaphragm; breathing from your chest won’t relax you. Picture your breath coming up from your “gut.”

• Slowly repeat a calm word or phrase such as “relax,” “take it easy.” Repeat it to yourself while breathing deeply.

• Use imagery; visualize a relaxing experience, from either your memory or your imagination.

• Slow, non-strenuous, yoga or martial arts exercises can relax your muscles and make you feel much calmer.

Practice these techniques daily. Learn to use them automatically when you’re in a tense situation.

Another relaxation strategy is to give yourself scheduled break times in your day. One example is the working mother who has a standing rule that when she comes home from work, for the first 15 minutes, “nobody talks to Mom unless the house is on fire.”  After this brief quiet time, she feels better prepared to handle demands from her kids without blowing up at them.

Cognitive Restructuring

Simply put, this means changing the way you think. Angry people tend to curse, swear, or speak in highly colorful terms that reflect their inner thoughts. When you’re angry, your thinking can get very exaggerated and overly dramatic. Try replacing these thoughts with more rational ones.

For instance, instead of telling yourself, “oh, it’s awful, it’s terrible, everything’s ruined,” tell yourself, “it’s frustrating and it’s  understandable that I’m upset about it, but it’s not the end of the world and getting angry isn't going to fix it anyhow.”

Logic defeats anger, because anger, even when it’s justified, can quickly become irrational. So use cold hard logic on yourself. Remind yourself that the world is “not out to get you,” you’re just experiencing some of the rough spots of daily life. Do this each time you feel anger getting the best of you and it’ll help you get a more balanced perspective.

Angry people tend to demand things:

• fairness
• appreciation
• agreement
• willingness to do things their way

Everyone wants these things and we're all hurt and disappointed when we don’t get them; but when people demand them and when their demands aren’t met, their disappointment becomes anger.

People need to become aware of their demanding nature and translate it into reasonable expectations. Not every problem has a perfect solution. The best attitude, then, is to focus on how you handle and deal with the problem. Make a plan and check your progress along the way.

Resolve to give it your best, but also not to punish yourself if an answer doesn’t come right away. Using a little silly humor with yourself can also help defuse rage before it starts.

If you can approach a problem with your best intentions and efforts and make a serious attempt to face it head-on, you'll be less likely to lose patience and fall into all-or-nothing thinking, even if the problem doesn't get solved right away.

Do You Need Counseling?

If you feel that your anger is really out of control, if it's having a negative impact on your relationships and on important parts of your life, you might consider counseling to learn how to handle it better.

When you talk to a prospective therapist, ask about their approach to anger management. Make sure this isn’t only a course of action designed to “put you in touch with your feelings and express them” - that may be precisely what your problem is.

Remember, you can’t eliminate anger - and it wouldn’t be a good idea if you could. In spite of all your efforts, things will happen that will cause you anger; and sometimes it'll be justifiable anger. Life will be filled with frustration, pain, loss and the unpredictable actions of others.

You can’t change that; but you can change the way you let such events affect you.

For more information, contact the Michigan State Police Office of Behavioral Science, at 517-334-7745.

Streets in America are unsafe & unforgiving for kids

Speeding cars, children darting into traffic, and streets without sidewalks place youth at risk on America's roads.

"We don't go walking on our street," says Evelyn Moe. "I don't even allow my kids out in the front yard unless I'm out there."

Moe and her husband, Mike, live in the county outside Sumner, Wash., about an hour and a half drive south of Seattle. Tulips and rhubarb grow in the fields near the 3-bedroom home where they are raising their two young boys: Kevin, 4 and Lyle, 2.

"The area that we live in is mostly a rural area with lots of farming nearby," 30-year-old Moe said. "Often, large trucks go by with rhubarb on the back and when that happens, basically, the whole house shakes."

The speed limit on the narrow two-lane street in front of the Moe's home is 35 miles an hour, but often vehicles whiz by exceeding 45. The street has no sidewalks nor shoulder for walking.

"There's just enough room for the cars to go by," Moe explained. "If you wanted to walk there, you'd be walking out in the muddy fields along the side of the road."

"The road winds too," she added, "so there are a lot of blind curves and cars can pop out all of a sudden going pretty fast."

David Perez lives on the other side of the United States from the Moes but has a similar problem: his street isn't safe for his kids either.

The street in front of his home in a tree-lined neighborhood in Durham, N.C. is used as a short-cut for commuters trying to gain a few extra minutes going to and from work.

The speed limit is 25 but people often exceed it, 37-year-old Perez said.

"This year a car ran into the front of the house on the opposite corner of where we live," he said. "The guy was going so fast that if it wasn't for a big tree in the yard, he probably would have ended up in the house."

These street conditions understandably make Perez and his wife, Melannie, nervous about allowing their 5-year-old son, Jordon, to play in the front yard. And unless something is done, the situation is only going to be worse when their 5-month-old daughter, Gabriel, learns to walk.

Making America Walkable

The complaints of the Moe and Perez families are not isolated examples. Rather, they are practically the norm in neighborhoods all across the United States these days.

But how does one person or one family or one community go about making the changes necessary to make our streets safer for our children and for pedestrians in general?

According to Jerry Scannell, president of the National Safety Council in Chicago, national awareness of the problem is the seed of change.

"I think people tend to think of themselves primarily as drivers and only incidentally as walkers and because we're not aware that we're pedestrians and that we deserve consideration, we accept conditions we shouldn't accept," he said. Priority needs to be given to providing places where we can walk safely."

Scannell is the chairman of the "Partnership for a Walkable America" -- a coalition of private, state and federal organizations from all across the United States who have come together with the common cause of increasing public awareness about the unquestionable need for our communities to be safer and more accessible for walkers. Another focus of the Partnership is to emphasize the healthiness of walking -- both the physical benefits it provides for those who do it and the social benefits communities reap from this activity.

In order for change to happen, the public is going to have to ask for it, said Partnership member Bill Wilkinson, who is also the director of the Pedestrian Federation of America in Washington D.C.

"The only thing that's going to make pedestrians be a priority is people getting out there and saying: "'This is not okay in the community I'm going to be living in. I want a place where I don't have to worry about my kids walking to school or me having to drive everywhere I want to go,'" he said. "The public doesn't have to have the answers. They just have to have the indignation to say: 'Excuse me, this isn't what I want. I want a transportation system that is a whole lot friendlier toward the community.'"

Children At Risk

The members of this growing partnership, which includes private, state and federal groups, are particularly concerned about the safety of child pedestrians.

According to figures from the U.S. Department of Transportation (US DOT), 806 children, ages 15 and younger were killed in pedestrian crashes in the United States in 1994. These data also show that on average, 10 boys and 5 girls, in that same age bracket, died each week in a pedestrian crash in 1994.

The incidence of injuries among children due to pedestrian crashes is even higher. Many of these injuries are also quite grave. The USDOT figures for that year show that 30,833 children, ages 15 and younger, were injured in pedestrian crashes. Those figures also show that 340 boys and 250 girls, ages 15 and younger, were injured each week in pedestrian crashes.

The injury and fatality rates for young pedestrians are troubling, but they can be changed, said Partnership member Dr. Alfred Farina, a research psychologist in charge of pedestrian and bicycle safety research for the USDOT National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA).

Dr. Farina said kids need to be taught to be more careful around moving vehicles. He added that many programs to educate children to stop and look left, right and then left once more before entering the street have been successful in reducing the incidence of injury and death in young pedestrians.

"Kids are unacquainted with the dangers of the road and they also tend to think of adults as people who take care of children and that attitude may extend to how they think of drivers," Dr. Farina said.

"We did a study one time about the street crossing behaviors of kids, ranging in age from kindergartners to third graders," he said. What we found was that about 90% of the crossings made by young children were in error. "

One of the most common errors young children make, Dr. Farina said, is to a dart out" into the street without first checking left, right and then left again for traffic. In fact, 46% of the pedestrian crashes involving children, ages 5 through 14, can be attributed to "dart out" behavior.

Another factor contributing to child pedestrian crashes is that many parents tend to overestimate their child's ability to deal with street conditions, said John Moffat, director of the Washington Traffic Safety Commission.

Moffat is a member of the National Association of Governors' Highway Safety Representatives, which is a member of the Partnership.

Pedestrian crashes are one of the biggest killers of children ages 5 to 9," he said. "That's because children often dart out into the road and by the time a driver detects them and is able to stop, it is often too late."

Parents Often Overestimate Cognitive Abilities Of Children

Allowing children to play unattended near a street is also dangerous, according Partnership member Richard Blomberg, the president of Dunlap & Associates in Stamford, Conn., a research organization that specializes in pedestrian safety research.

Parents often say to their children: 'Well, you can play outside, but don't leave the driveway,'" Blomberg said. "We tend to look at children as little adults and forget that they aren't fully developed yet. Their ability to localize sound isn't fully developed. Their judgment isn't fully developed. Their vision isn't fully developed. We as adults have to have an understanding of the limitations of a child."

Children are often so focused on their play activities that they don't notice cars, said Partnership member John Fegan, the bicycle and pedestrian program manager for the Office of the Secretary of the USDOT.

"If a ball or something rolls out into the street, they just run out after it without thinking about the cars," he said.

"Kids also don't have an appreciation foe the dynamics of how cars work," he added. "A car obviously just can't stop on a dime and kids don't have an understanding of that. I don't think they have a sense of the danger that a car could hit them. And they're rewarded for that belief and that behavior because most likely, they have run across the street many times and have not been hit by a car. But it only takes one time."

Changes That Can Help

Cars parked on streets are another safety hazard for children, according to Fegan.

"We know that children dart out and with parked cars, drivers can't see them," he said. "There are several things we can do to limit that hazard. One would be to change how cars park. Engineers could eliminate street parking or switch to angled parking on one side of the street. Another would be to lower the vehicle speed so there is more time to detect a child and reduce potential injuries if there's an unfortunate crash."

But lowering the vehicle speed assumes there will be adequate enforcement of the law. And removing parked cars from streets assumes developers and engineers will offer different kinds of housing and street designs than they do now.

Both these things and more can be accomplished, according to Partnership member Carol Tan Esse, program manager for pedestrian and bicycle safety research for the Federal Highway Administration.

"If people want a walkable community, they need to let the engineers and architects and developers know," she said. "In the end, the consumer dictates the market."

In Praise Of Sidewalks

According to Blomberg, many community developments these days simply aren't safe for children.

"I consult with several school districts to help make their school busing safer and some of the problems are zoning laws that don't make any sense," he said. "One of those laws is if you build 13 or fewer homes, you don't have to put in sidewalks. And if you add homes later, you still don't have to build sidewalks. So guess how many homes each developer builds initially? And then two years later, they're building another 5 or 10 homes and meanwhile, they're grandfathered and there are no sidewalks."

Many of these neighborhoods later have problems transporting children to school, Blomberg said. The roads there are narrow and winding with lots of blind curves and since they don't have sidewalks, children are forced to walk and wait for the bus in the road.

This problem is not isolated to Connecticut, said Partnership member Charles Zegeer, who is associate director of roadway studies at the University of North Carolina Highway Safety Research Center in Chapel Hill, N.C. He also is a member of the Institute for Transportation Engineers, a Partner organization.

"In many areas of the country, sidewalks are kind of an exception rather than a rule and children are expected to walk to school or to the bus stop in roadways or ditches," he said.

Making our communities more walkable is a shared responsibility, according to Scannell.

Maybe one of the best messages that something like the Partnership can bring forward is that we all have got to come together and share responsibility for this, he said. "If parents did their part and schools did their part and traffic engineers and developers did their part - all of that over time would create a better environment and one in which our children would not only be safer, but come to value walking more."

This article was written for the Partnership for a Walkable America by Emily Smith of the University of North Carolina Highway Safety Research Center
Phone: (919) 962-2202
FAX (919) 962-8710