HOW OFTEN DO you get furious and justify yourself saying ‘it’s only human to be angry’? Or that it’s ‘better to give vent to anger than bottle it up’? There’s no doubt that expressing anger is healthier than suppressing it and inviting high blood pressure, ulcers, insomnia, fatigue, palpitation or heart ailments. But do you know what’s even healthier? Getting rid of that debilitating emotion: anger.
Umm, is that even possible, you would ask. Is it possible to purge anger from one’s system?
Yes, it is, says American psychiatrist Dr Wayne W. Dyer. But it isn’t easy; you will have to work hard to eliminate it. “The only antidote to anger is to eliminate the internal sentence — ‘If only you were more like me’,” he writes in his 1976 bestseller, Your Erroneous Zones.
What is anger?
It is important to understand what anger is before you look for an ‘antidote’ or work on flushing it out. The Vietnamese monk, Thich Nhat Hanh, uses the example of a house on fire to explain anger. (Click to read: Rein in your anger before it ruins you). Dr Dyer, however, gets straight to the point by making a few hard-hitting observations. Some of these are:
(i) Anger serves no purpose. Being human does not mean you have to possess anger. “It is an erroneous zone, a kind of psychological influenza that incapacitates you just as a physical disease would.”
(ii) Simple annoyance or irritation is not anger. Anger is the immobilizing reaction you experience when your expectation is not met. It takes various forms, such as rage, hostility, verbal abuse, sarcasm, ridicule, physical violence, temper tantrums, or the silent treatment. “Anger is immobilizing and it is usually the result of wishing the world and the people in it were different,” writes Dr Dyer.
Form of insanity?
(iii) Anger is a choice as well as a habit. It is “a learned reaction to frustration, in which you behave in ways you would rather not. In fact, severe anger is a form of insanity.”
(iv) Anger does not simply happen, it is the result of thinking. When something doesn’t go the way you want, you tell yourself it shouldn’t be that way, and then select a familiar, angry response. The hope is it might help you get your way.
(v) Three things you are likely to always experience are annoyance, frustration and disappointment. This is because the world will never be the way you want it. Instead of letting these trigger your anger, try to think new thoughts. Replace your anger with more fulfilling emotions.
Irony of anger
(vi) There are cases where anger helps you get your way. For instance, if your two-year-old insists on playing in the street, your raising your voice will help. This is entirely justified. But what you must ensure is that you are only faking anger, not getting genuinely upset.
(vii) If you do not master a controlled display of anger, your kids will take the upper hand. The more you get upset, the more they will misbehave. “The irony of anger is that it never works in changing others; it only intensifies the other person’s desire to control the angry person,” says Dr Dyer.
(viii) In any relationship, anger encourages the other person to behave or act as s/he has always done. The provoker knows s/he can set the other person off at will, so s/he will revel in exercising “vindictive authority” over the angry individual.
The ‘antidote’
Once you understand what makes you fly off the handle, it is easier to work on what Dr Dyer calls an ‘antidote’. According to him, when you choose to be angry with someone, “you are withholding from that person the right to be what he chooses”. You are obsessing over just one thing: why that person cannot be more like you.
“But others will never be the way you want them to be, all of the time,” he writes. “Much of the time, people and things will not go the way you would like them to go. That’s the way the world is. And the likelihood of it changing is zero. So, every time you choose anger when you run into someone or something you don’t like, you are deciding to be hurt or in some way immobilized because of reality. Now that’s really silly. Being upset about things that aren’t ever going to change.”
Dr Dyer suggests what would be the sensible thing to do. “Instead of choosing anger, you can begin to think of others as having a right to be different from what you’d prefer. You may not like it, but you don’t have to be angry about it…. The choice is yours,” he writes.
Alter your thinking
Not expressing anger does not make you different from a person who raves and rants and let it all out. This is because you are plagued by the same demons — that people and things should be the way you want them to be. “This is faulty logic and eradicating it is the secret of getting rid of your tension… the ultimate goal is to think in new ways that will not create the anger,” says Dr Dyer.
One new way would be to think: “If he wants to be a fool, I’m not going to choose to be upset. He, not me, owns his dumb behaviour.” Another would be to think: “Things aren’t going the way I think they should. While I don’t like it, I’m not going to immobilize myself.”
Challenge yourself
You can learn not to give other people’s behaviour and ideas the power to upset you, writes Dr Dyer. “Instead of being an emotional slave to every frustrating circumstance, use the situation as a challenge to change it, and you’ll have no present-moment time for anger.”
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