Chapter 5
Anger: The High Price of Losing Your Cool

His Holiness The Dalai Lama was asked whether it was ever useful or legitimate to get angry with someone else. He sat in silence for several minutes, exactly like a chess player meditating on the consequences of all the possible moves, and then, having exhausted all the possibilities, he simply said, “No.”
--GUY CLAXTON, The Heart of Buddhism

Alvin, a 53-year-old lawyer, came to me because of his miserable marriage. He said that he often had heated rows with his wife, Peggy, who frequently nagged him and complained. He also reported bitterly that Peggy would never keep the house clean enough or prepare meals as he would like them prepared. Upon discussion, it turned out that he judged his wife’s performance by perfectionist standards. Although Alvin said he was finding his marriage intolerable, he revealed, in answer to my questions, that he most definitely did not want a divorce and was afraid that Peggy would leave him.

A Demanding Spouse

What was really wrong with Alvin’s marriage? Since she frequently complained and threatened to leave, I asked Alvin what Peggy was so unhappy about.

“I don’t know,” he replied sullenly.

“Well,” I asked him, “if she were here right now, what would she say was making her so unhappy?”

“That I’m always correcting her.”

“And do you always correct her?”

In answer to this, Alvin irritably began again to recite his wife’s shortcomings, especially her failure to clean and cook to his satisfaction. The root of Alvin’s problem was his anger at his wife, which sprang from his demandingness.

Alvin was not at first aware that he was a demander. However, there was a pattern visible in his remarks about his wife. This pattern implied that he was ruler of the universe and his wife his subject. Such an outlook is, of course, ludicrous, but it was implicit in Alvin’s tone of injured resentment and the uncompromising way he described the issues between them.

Made explicit, Alvin’s attitude amounted to the following:

  • Peggy MUST keep the house clean, and she deserves to be punished because she doesn’t

  • Peggy OUGHT to prepare meals just the way I want them

  • Peggy SHOULD understand me (by “understanding” him, Alvin meant that she should agree with his point of view)

Underlying these demands, preferences that reflected Alvin’s tastes, values, and hopes were evident:
  • I WOULD LIKE the house cleaned and the food prepared to my specifications, and it’s disappointing that they're not

  • I PREFER that Peggy see things my way

Alvin has a legitimate right to such preferences. His preferences weren’t his emotional problem. Alvin’s disturbance arose when he escalated his subjective preferences into godlike commands: “Because I’d love it if you kept the house cleaner, prepared meals to my taste and didn’t hassle me, you MUST do as I say!”

Alvin had an attitude very common in troubled marriages: “Why should I be the one to change? If she treated me better, I wouldn’t be so upset. She SHOULD be the one to change.” I persuaded Alvin—and he took a lot of persuading—that this attitude was irrelevant and impractical. If he did not want a divorce, then he was stuck with Peggy, and realistically there was no likelihood that she would start behaving according to his ideal picture of how she “should” behave.

Alvin’s “musts” were without foundation. No reason exists that Peggy or anyone else MUST do as Alvin likes. If Alvin actually did run the universe, with Peggy as his slave, his demandingness would have been reasonable. You might think it was pretty crazy for Alvin to view himself—a very limited, imperfect person—as ruler of the universe. Yet such a view is the essence of all anger.

A Disabling Emotion

Anger is not an involuntary emotional response to a specific situation. Anger arises from a philosophy—a way of viewing the world. At its core, anger represents an outlook of grandiosity, self-righteousness, commanding, and condemning.

Many mental health professionals disagree with this view, that all kinds of anger are generally bad for you. Most therapists classify anger as “appropriate” or “inappropriate” according to context, and they usually argue that, when appropriate, it is healthy to express anger (“let it out”) and unhealthy to suppress anger (“bottle it up”).

Recent research, however, contradicts this popular view, and suggests that all anger, expressed or suppressed, is harmful to your health and damaging to your relationships with other people. Among the many difficulties associated with anger are:

  • Increased likelihood of heart attack, stroke, and hypertension

  • Greater difficulty in solving problems constructively

  • A tendency for the anger, which may start in one area of your life, to overlap and extend into other areas

  • Preoccupation with thoughts of revenge

  • Adopting an antagonistic attitude which needlessly alienates other people with whom it’s advantageous to have cordial dealings

  • A predisposition to violence, especially child abuse

But doesn’t expressing anger help release a lot of pent-up frustration? It’s true that an outburst of anger may sometimes momentarily provide relief. But psychological distress often takes its toll on the body, and some preliminary evidence suggests that expressed anger causes more physical damage than suppressed anger. There is, however, a third alternative to suppressing or expressing your anger: Don’t make yourself angry in the first place!

The “expressive” approach implies that anger is something inside you, like a gallbladder. If your gallbladder bothers you, you could have it removed, and then it won’t bother you anymore. Similarly, if you can get your anger out, it won’t be inside you any more, causing distress.

This view is hopelessly mistaken. Anger is not a physical entity. It’s a feeling generated by an attitude or belief. You don’t free yourself of feelings by expressing the attitudes and beliefs that create them. That usually reaffirms and strengthens those attitudes and thus makes the feeling more likely to return.

Consider an opposite sort of feeling, like love—a feeling that we often want to continue. It’s clear that the more you express feelings of love, tenderness, and caring, the more loving, tender, and caring you are likely to become. No one would suppose that by expressing such feelings you were “letting them out” and thus losing them.

It’s exactly the same with the self-destructive feeling of anger. If you express your anger, you reaffirm and solidify your angry attitude, and make it more difficult to dispel. If you refrain from expressing your anger, this may be the first step towards avoiding anger entirely.

Problems With a Preteen

In my psychotherapy practice I continually encounter people with hostility problems: parents angry at their kids, kids angry at their parents, and husbands and wives angry at each other—and at their lovers, not to mention their spouses’ lovers.

Leanne was 41 and had a 12-year-old daughter, Sally. Leanne came to see me because she was afraid she might one day explode at Sally’s delinquent behavior. Sally was playing hooky and lying with increasing frequency.

“I can’t understand why Sally lies like she does. After promising every night that she’ll go to school next morning, she doesn’t do a thing about it.”

I asked Leanne what she was doing to help Sally get going in the morning.

“Well, I tell her that if she doesn’t get to school I’m going to murder her.”

“I see. And how does she respond to that?”

“She pulls the covers over her head and pretends to be asleep.”

“How do you feel at that moment?”

“I start to boil inside.”

“Where does it get you to boil inside?”

“Where does it get me? Here, I guess.”

“That’s right. Your anger hasn’t accomplished a thing with Sally. Even worse, you’re working yourself into a frazzle.”

“Yeah, I am. I am.”

“And it seems that the more you rant and rave in the morning, the more Sally tries to escape under her covers.”

“You’re right, I guess. But I just don’t know what else to do. I’m beside myself.”

The first objective with people in Leanne’s situation is to help them clearly understand that they are making themselves angry, and that their anger causes additional problems for them.

Leanne had a practical problem: what to do about her daughter. Her emotional problem was her anger. I managed to convince Leanne that once she had tackled her anger, she would then be better placed to do something about her practical problem.

Eventually, after Leanne had trained herself to avoid anger, we worked out a feasible strategy for changing her daughter’s behavior through a system of rewards and penalties. For example, if Sally got up on time one morning, she would be allowed to watch a desired video that evening.

It turned out that the idea had already occurred to Leanne of using rewards and penalties, and she had even attempted this, but she had not been consistent because of her anger. Effective bribery requires a cool head.

Delays, Demands, and Distress

Heather, a 35-year-old woman with long blonde hair and a woebegone look, consulted me because she frequently felt melancholy and lacking in motivation.

“I never feel like getting out of bed in the morning,” she told me sorrowfully. “I just don’t feel that anything’s worthwhile.” As well as feeling generally depressed, Heather often became seriously upset and prone to fits of weeping.

After careful questioning, I concluded that Heather’s dissatisfaction was mostly focused on her six-year-old marriage. In most respects, the marriage seemed fine. Heather’s husband Peter was loving, supportive, and communicative. But she felt she just could not stand his compulsive lateness.

As long as she had known Peter, he had never gotten to appointments on time. As much as he apologized and resolved to be prompt thereafter, he always appeared at best twenty minutes late. Needless to say, this created serious problems, not only for himself but also for Heather. In addition to being late for movies and social engagements, Heather missed flights and first acts of plays because of him.

Over the years Heather had tried a number of strategies. For a while she refused to go anywhere with him, but that practically destroyed their social life. Helping him get ready was a failure because he claimed she was underfoot and delaying him even further. Constantly prodding and reminding him only seemed to make him more prone to lateness, and always ended with Heather having a temper tantrum. She tried lying about the times of appointments, and once or twice this worked, but it ended by giving Peter an additional reason to be late: he began to factor her lying into his calculations and to estimate that the true time of an appointment was later than she said it was.

In response to my questions, Heather admitted with great embarrassment that because of Peter’s chronic lateness, she was resenting him to the point where she was seriously considering divorce.

Heather’s practical problem was that she was often inconvenienced by her husband’s lateness. Her emotional problem was that she was making herself miserable because of the anger she directed against her husband.

Heather’s demands included:

  • Peter MUST treat me more considerately

  • He MUST be on time

  • He MUST not ruin my plans

  • He MUST not keep my friends waiting

  • He SHOULD be more caring

  • Because he is so responsible in other areas of his life, he SHOULD act more responsibly in this area

During my second session with Heather, I taught her the Three Minute Exercise method. She proved to be one of my more conscientious clients, and for a while was practicing the Three Minute Exercises three times a day. As her thinking became more realistic, her anger diminished.

Eventually she was able to do fewer Three Minute Exercises yet still not upset herself about the inconvenience Peter was imposing on her. She then weighed the pros and cons of her marriage more realistically, and decided that Peter’s advantages considerably outweighed his disadvantages.

Heather’s Three Minute Exercise

Here’s an example of one of the many Three Minute Exercises that Heather wrote out and thought through until she had thoroughly uprooted her “musts.”

  1. (Activating Event): Peter treats me inconsiderately by arriving 30 minutes late for our appointment.

  2. (irrational Belief): Peter MUST treat me more considerately.

  3. (emotional Consequences): Anger, fury, rage.

  4. (Disputing): Why MUST he treat me more considerately?

  5. (Effective new thinking): There’s no law of the universe stating that Peter MUST treat me more considerately. I strongly prefer that he does, but I don’t run the universe and I can’t control Peter. Since he’s an imperfect human with free will and free choice, he’s going to act inconsiderately at times. Everyone is imperfect, and persistent lateness is Peter’s kind of imperfection. That’s very unpleasant but hardly a horror! Although I distinctly do not like such inconsiderate behavior, I can stand what I don’t like. Rather than eating myself up inside about it, I had better face the fact once and for all that whenever we make an appointment with anyone, the probability is that Peter will be late. How unfortunate! But the reality is that enjoying the advantages of my marriage means also suffering the disadvantages.

  6. (new Feeling): Displeasure rather than anger.

Two months of therapy helped Heather feel more accepting of Peter’s problem. However, she did occasionally experience brief setbacks by demanding that Peter be better at keeping appointments. But immediately, without fail, she took out paper and pencil and did a Three Minute Exercise. These few minutes of concentrated reflection changed her anger to simply keen displeasure about living with the problem.

How To Be Cool

Dealing with your own anger, resentment, or hostility involves three steps:

  1. First, admit that you are making yourself angry. No other person, experience, or situation is. You can recognize that a person, experience, or situation is unpleasant or undesired. That alone doesn’t explain or justify your anger. No matter how obnoxious the object of your dislike may be, the anger is your responsibility. It is never warranted by external circumstances.

  2. Second, identify the demand you are making—the “must” or the “should” you are inventing inside your head—which is leading to your anger about the frustrating person or situation.

  3. Finally, question and dispute this demand ad nauseum, until it loses all plausibility.

Dealing With Difficult People

I can already hear some readers objecting: “Is Heather supposed to put up with this inconsiderate behavior? Are you telling us we have to be meek and mild?”

People who try to justify anger usually speak as though the only alternative to anger is to be passively “meek and mild.” But in fact other alternatives are available, such as calm assertiveness or reasoned compliance. Here are some examples:

  • A state trooper awarding a speeding ticket is typically neither angry nor passive. He is calm, firm, and assertive.

  • A professional boxer is not “meek and mild” in the ring, but he is generally not angry. (He may sometimes calculatedly taunt his opponent, if he thinks that the opponent may get angry and thereby become less effective.)

  • An army private is rather compliant in the face of her sergeant’s commands. It would simply be foolish for her to behave otherwise, for example, to angrily protest: “I’m a sensitive, feeling individual, so consider my uniqueness before ordering me around.” A policy of calculated compliance is usually best with most bosses, when dealing directly with the IRS, or with any other very powerful organization that has the ability to harm you.

Meekness is One Useful Strategy

But still, readers may want to challenge my advice to Heather: “Surely people like Peter can be made to change their bad habits! Surely Heather has every right to be angry! Are you proposing the other-worldly notion of ‘turning the other cheek’? Are we supposed to let people walk all over us and never fight back?”

At first all this sounds like a reasonable response, but it frequently serves as a flimsy justification for anger and irrational demanding. Suppose you are confronted by a “difficult” person. Let’s carefully consider some aspects of the problem:

  1. It may just be that there really is “nothing you can do” (nothing that won’t have far more undesirable consequences than putting up with the other person’s obnoxious behavior). If there really is nothing you can do, then you had better calmly face that fact.

  2. It may be that your only real choice is to leave or stay. If you decide it’s best to leave the other person, then why not leave without anger? (When people look back later on the furious rows that occurred at the time a relationship was terminated, they are often glad the relationship was terminated, but they nearly always regret the angry scenes.) If you decide to stay, then you accept the probability that he will continue his obnoxious behavior. Either way, anger doesn’t help. Either way, anger is causing you additional problems. And either way, you are more likely to make the best decision about staying or leaving if you first get rid of your anger and accept the other person’s behavior for the time being.

  3. If there is something you can do (other than leaving), it will not be helped by being angry, and being angry will probably reduce your effectiveness at doing it. (If it’s really true—and this is quite exceptional—that showing anger will be effective in getting the other person to do what you want and will not have worse consequences for you, then it’s better to keep a cool head and pretend to be angry.)

  4. If you get rid of your anger and calm down, you can more realistically survey the available options. You can rationally experiment with different tactics for changing the other person. Remember, getting rid of your anger does not mean liking what used to make you angry, nor does it mean being resigned to it.

  5. If the other person’s undesirable behavior is of long standing, then there’s a strong possibility that he will never change, and if he ever does change it may be slowly, or it may not happen for some years. Even if you hope that he may change significantly in the near future, it would be unwise to assume that he will.

  6. Very often the kind of behavior that flows from anger is almost the worst possible way to get the result you would like. For example, ranting and raving at someone is very rarely an efficacious method for improving their behavior. It usually leads to resistance and resentment in the other person. Even if you are also doing something effective to get him to change, your displays of anger will probably retard his progress.

  7. Surprisingly, angry behavior often fuels the other person’s unpleasant behavior (See the discussion of vicious circles in chapter 4). You may find that, simply because you are calm and reasoned all the time, the other person will spontaneously start to improve. Of course, this may not happen, but it happens often enough to be worth mentioning.

  8. Sometimes a consistent display of love and affection (or, in the case of a non-intimate relationship, of amiable respect) is effective in modifying the other person’s obnoxious behavior. Angry feelings would almost certainly sabotage that effort.

  9. Yes, Heather does have a right to be angry. We all have a perfect right to be foolish in any number of ways.

  10. There are some circumstances where turning the other cheek may be an effective method for resolving a problem. It’s a bad idea to make ‘turning the other cheek’ into an absolute principle. But where it might work, why not try it?

You may be wondering what happened to Heather. Accepting the reality of Peter’s lateness and avoiding anger, she became much less distressed. After several months in which she demonstrated that she did not demand that Peter MUST be on time for appointments, she was able to discuss with him, in a calm and good-humored way, different possibilities for coping with his lateness. One method—more symbolic than anything else—was for him to pay her a fine of one dollar for every minute he was late. After some weeks of this, Peter’s lateness was still a problem, but the average time late had been reduced, and occasionally he would appear on time, much to the pleasure of both of them. Finally, Peter became a client of mine and successfully tackled his lateness. (For his first three therapy sessions he turned up very late—I callously billed him for the time.)

The Case of the Repulsive Relative

Ernie, 28, had a good marriage with a first baby on the way. He came to me because of his anger problem—he described himself as having “a short fuse.” Ernie was a well-liked “captain” (head waiter) at an elegant New York restaurant, yet he was almost fired on two occasions when he exploded at customers who, he complained, were playing “head games” with him.

Over the course of his five years in that job, Ernie generally got along well with his manager. On unexpectedly busy nights, she would sometimes make a last-minute request that he stay later than originally scheduled. Regrettably, Ernie responded angrily.

Worse yet, he once came upon a police officer writing him a parking ticket. In a rage, Ernie foolishly punched the policeman. What probably saved Ernie from criminal prosecution was his thin, diminutive, non-threatening appearance.

During therapy, Ernie practiced his Three Minute Exercises conscientiously, and did quite well in uprooting his anger. His wife reported to me, during a brief phone call after his fifth session, that she was gratified he was doing so well, and thanked me profusely for my help. Ernie terminated therapy after one more session.

A few months later, Ernie called for further therapy. The anger he had so successfully dealt with was rapidly reappearing. When clients have a relapse like this, my hunch is that they’ve stopped doing their Three Minute Exercises regularly. As a result, their “musts” creep back into their thinking. This was, in fact, what had occurred in Ernie’s case.

This time, Ernie’s most pressing problem involved a new protagonist. In two weeks’ time Ernie’s in-laws, Leroy and Gloria, would be arriving from the West Coast for their annual month-long stay. It was understandable, after I had heard his description of Leroy, that Ernie wasn’t thrilled with the prospect:

“You wouldn’t believe it. He’s oblivious to the rest of the world. He does what he wants, when he wants to, without the slightest concern for anyone else’s privacy or feelings. He’s inconsiderate, thick-skulled, and he has body odor.

“Last year Gloria was seriously considering divorce, but she has her own problems. She’s insecure and is afraid to leave after thirty years of marriage.

“Leroy doesn’t believe in using deodorant. He claims it’s unhealthy since it’s made with aluminum. But he’s sitting at the dinner table and he stinks. And did you ever see anyone who brushes his teeth in the living room while everyone else is watching TV? This drives me up the wall. Or he’ll be talking to you and flossing his teeth. Would you believe that I can tell him that he’s an idiot and curse him up and down, and it won’t bother him? But he’s driving me crazy.

“We were out the other day and we needed some film, so we decided to stop at one of those large chain pharmacies. Leroy was chomping down a bag of cookies and a very courteous salesclerk came over to help us. Chewing a mouthful and a half, Leroy asked for film. The salesclerk immediately recoiled, got very short with Leroy, and dispensed with him as quickly as she could.

“After we left the store I confronted Leroy: ‘Do you think the salesclerk was a little brusque with you?’ He admitted that he had noticed it. But when I asked him why he thought she was, he hadn’t the foggiest notion. I gave him my interpretation and he sort of acknowledged that I might be right, but showed no interest in changing. I blew my stack.”

We then uncovered some of Ernie’s “musts”:

  • Leroy MUST show some interest in making his behavior less unpleasant to others

  • Leroy MUST act like a respectable human being

  • Leroy MUST not be so dense

  • Leroy MUST not be an embarrassment in public

  • Leroy MUST not be a slob

Ernie’s Three Minute Exercise

Here is one of the many Three Minute Exercises that Ernie did:

  1. (Activating event): Leroy shows no interest in changing his obnoxious behavior.

  2. (irrational Belief): Leroy MUST see things my way, the right way.

  3. (emotional Consequences): Anger.

  4. (Disputing): Why MUST Leroy see things my way?

  5. (Effective new thinking): It would be wonderful if Leroy saw things my way, but no clause in the U.S. Constitution says that he MUST. I distinctly do not like it when he acts inconsiderately, but I can stand what I don’t like. Since he’s human, that means he’s very imperfect, so I can expect him to act imperfectly and even idiotically. Since I don’t run the universe, I don’t control Leroy. He has free will and free choice so he’ll act the way he chooses, not the way I think he MUST. It will be very unpleasant living with him for a month, but not awful, terrible, or horrible. Ripping myself up inside hurts me much more than his obnoxious behavior ever could. At worst, his boorishness would only be a great pain in the ass, but would not give me the high blood pressure that I’m giving to myself. And if it gets worse than I care to put up with, I could tell him to stay at a motel or deny my home to him for future visits.

  6. (new Feeling): Very displeased and frustrated, not angry.

Ernie quickly got back into the habit of spending three minutes each day on writing his Three Minute Exercises. He thereby minimized his own agitation about Leroy’s obnoxious behavior.

Ernie continued to find Leroy highly objectionable to live with, but realized he wasn’t likely to influence Leroy single-handedly. So Ernie and I devised a two-part strategy to persuade Leroy to seek therapy.

Ernie began to remind Leroy repeatedly of all the people he was annoying or alienating, including his wife Gloria, his daughter (Ernie’s wife), friends, business associates, and sales help. Now that Ernie was over his anger, he felt able to deliver an ultimatum to Leroy without flying into a rage: Either modify your obnoxious habits or stay elsewhere next year.

Leroy accepted Ernie’s ultimatum, reluctantly sought therapy, and rather begrudgingly started to change. Soon, Leroy began to notice the somewhat pleased comments he received from those who knew him, and he became a little more enthusiastic about changing.

Leroy has not transformed his entire personality, but he has changed enough to make living with him for one month each year a relatively pleasant experience for Ernie and his wife.


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Dr. Michael R. Edelstein
Clinical Psychologist, San Francisco
415-673-2848 (24 hours)
DrEdelstein@ThreeMinuteTherapy.com
www.ThreeMinuteTherapy.com