The Power of Two By Susan Heitler, Ph.D.

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	Using Anger for Good Be master of thine anger. Confucius? You are the only person who can decide what you will do when you feel anger brewing. When you feel angry, if you act out angrily with a harsh voice, mean words, etc, you risk all the dangers enumerated above. If you suppress your anger, you risk that the anger will continue to fester in a resentment that poisons your relationship. Smoldering anger also can break out suddenly into a dangerous blaze. And smothered anger can darken your life by submerging you in a depression. None of these options are good for couples either. What can you do when you feel angry so that this powerful feeling becomes an asset in your marriage? Strategy #1 Stop, Look and Listen As you do on the road when you see a stop sign, stop, look, and listen. Stop When you feel angry be sure to first to stop interacting. If at all possible, remove yourself temporarily from the immediately provocative situation. Give yourself time to cool down. Once you have begun getting angry the more you try to dialogue the more unproductive the dialogue is likely to become. The more angry you are, the more likely that you will over-react to whatever your spouse says or does next. The longer you stay in a provocative situation, the more likely you will "lose your temper," that is, switch into that altered state of mind in which you blurt out things you don't really mean and that hurt the person you love. Look As your anger cools and your automatic search and destroy radar turns off you will find that you can think more constructively. At that point you can try to address the problem again. You may want to think alone for a while. If so, to prevent unproductive angry ruminations it can help to direct your thoughts to several specific antidote-to-anger questions (see below). Look in order to expand your understanding of the situation. When you were angry, your focus was probably fairly narrow, like tunnel vision. As people cool they are able to widen their view of a problem. The additional information you take in will help you to find helpful new perspectives and alternative solutions. Listen Anger virtually always involves frustration about what your spouse is or isn't doing. Your anger means that what s/he is doing doesn't fit with your agenda. If, however, you add to your understanding of what you want an understanding also of your spouse's concerns, this broader view can be both calming and helpful in finding new solutions. Listen to your spouse's concerns Expressing your anger constructively will be easier and more satisfying if your spouse also can listen constructively. If your spouse gets inflammable when you feel angry, even when you use only I-statements and when-you's, you both are likely to need a lot of cooling before you will be able to talk cooperatively about the sensitive problem. Strategy #2 Take Three Steps, then Find a Solution When you suddenly find yourself in an upsetting situation, feeling angry, and need to deal with it then rather than first cooling down, you can take three steps. In this case the Stop sign suggests that you pause enough to think ahead, reminding yourself of the three steps you will be taking. Put words to the feeling. Convey your concerns Ask to find out the other half of the story. Then, look for solutions. After these three steps, looking for solutions will generally flow fairly smoothly. Spinning angry wheels Take three steps
Len: You took my computer to work?! How could you have done that! I told you I would need it at home every night this week!! I can't believe you did that! going on and on, and getting increasingly revved up with each repeat You don't ever listen to me! I couldn't have told you more clearly!	Gerald: You took my portable computer to work?! Say the feeling Oh no! I'm just furious. Convey the concerns I don't know what I'm gong to do. I was counting on using it at home tonight. I thought I had told you that. I have a report due on Friday and I had planned to work on.Gina: receiving the information, and indicating that it has been successfully conveyed. Oh! I feel so badly. Ask for the other half of the story What happened that you took it? Offering the other half of the story I do remember now your mentioning that report. I just wasn't thinking. I was caught up in trying to pack the baby's things for day care this morning, the baby was crying, and I grabbed up the computer on the way out the door. I had a letter on it I needed for work. I sure didn't mean to mess up your work plan. I'm so sorry.
Linda, defensively: You did not tell me I couldn't take it. You said I could. You know I wouldn't have taken it if I didn't think it was OK with you.	Gerald: using bilateral listening, and easing into looking for solutions Well. I guess that's that. I'd better chalk it up to human error. I'm mad though. I had so carefully planned my time. Now when will I get the report started? Maybe I can switch things around. I could go to work earlier tomorrow and work there. I'm exhausted tonight anyway. I wouldn't have been able to concentrate well enough to write clearly.
Len: I'm so furious!! stomping off, and slamming the door behind him	Gina: As for me, I can see I've got to change my morning routines. I get too frantic. That's probably why the baby cries; he picks up on my tension. I need to get up earlier. The extra sleep just isn't worth my panic trying to get out the door. Maybe we could both switch our bedtime to half an hour earlier. What do you think?

Anger begets more anger. As he blows off steam, Len gets himself more and more worked up. The more he blames and criticizes Linda, the more he convinces himself that his feelings are justified. Also, each reiteration freshly re-wounds him, stoking his anger. Meanwhile Linda's defensiveness, intended to fend off Sam's anger, just adds fuel to the fire.

By contrast, Gina and Gerald resist the impulse to keep stirring the pot with ruminating, blaming, and escalating. They know they can feel better sooner by using the three steps. By following this pathway they quickly cool down enough to map a plan of action. They stick with I-language, listen to understand each other's concerns, and emerge with the upset having been converted to an opportunity for writing a better report and improving their morning routines.

Strategy #3 Three magic questions
This strategy can be unbelievably powerful. Once you get the idea of how to do it, you will never need to get stuck in escalating anger again. The main idea is that the best antidote to anger is to shift your focus off of the person you are mad at and on to yourself, not to be angry at yourself, but to understand better what it is that you want.

The tip-off that it's time to use your three magic questions is that you feel anger that is either persisting or escalating. Whether at that point you temporarily step out of the inflammatory situation, or think that you will be able to talk productively staying within it, the questions offer a fresh approach to solving the problem that has triggered your anger. The three magic questions help you get un-stuck from repetitive angry thoughts. Saying over and over what you don't like about what your partner did makes your anger grow. Whether your angry ruminations are silent or aloud, with each repetition of what you didn't' like you are reinforcing your angry stance. The three magic questions direct your attention away from your spouse and back onto yourself. They redirect your thinking from don't wants to do wants. And they re-direct you from trying to control your spouse to using your powers to fix the problem.

Repetitive angry thoughts are always a risk when you feel mad because of the way anger points your eyes outward, directing your energies to blaming thoughts of how bad your spouse is and has been. Overcoming ruminations takes conscious effort to re-focus your attention onto yourself.

As you re-focus on yourself, the three magic questions give you traction so that your mental wheels stop spinning in the rut of ruminations and you return to the road of constructive thinking.

What do I want?
How can I get what I want without having to get my spouse to change?
Other than what my spouse did or didn't do, how did the problem happen?

Let's look at these three questions in more detail.

"What I want is to finish the repairs on the barn so we don't lose animals to the cold this winter."
"What I want is to get back a sense that I am running my life. I think I've been giving control over my time away too easily."
"What I want is to be able to say No to some of our out of town family and friends who want to come visit, or at least to be a less available host."

What could I do to solve my problem and feel better? That is, How can I get what I want without having to get my spouse to change?

"I need to figure out how I can carve out two weeks from the remaining four weeks of summer. If we work together ten-hour days for two weeks we can get the barn finished off before Bart has to go back to school. I depend on his help. If I leave the repairs for weekends, I won't get the barn repaired before the cold weather sets in." "I need to find a motel where in the future we can have our out of town visitors can stay. When visitors are in our house it's too hard for me to keep my focus on what I need to get done."

By looking at what you can do to get what you want rather than staying focused on changing your spouse you will find alternatives. Options are power.

How did this happen? to help you to identify situational factors. If you need to place blame somewhere, find something other than you or your spouse. Identify external factors--fatigue, insufficient communication, being rushed-- that contributed to your difficulty. Not only will this question stop the blame urge; it also can give you good insights into where to look to prevent reoccurrences.

External factors "It's been raining so much. I get demoralized and then make all kinds of mistakes when there's no sunshine for so long."
"The noise from so many visitors in the house gets to me and I get short-tempered."
"I've been angry at my mother. When I'm mad at her, everything else that bothers me begins to loom larger, to get way out of proportion."

Inadequate system "We need in future summers to sit down with a calendar and mark out all our plans before we commit to anything. By agreeing to them one at a time I didn't realize how full the summer was getting."

Remember, the anger alarm goes off in order to

point out a problem that needs to be addressed, indicate to you by the intensity of your reaction how important the problem is motivate you to address the problem

TIP Hold on tightly to your communication skills!
Expressing anger effectively and safely requires that you be especially skillful at the communication techniques detailed in Part I. A quick review may be helpful here.

TIP To stay calm: Take two breaths, and put your mind elsewhere
For an effective pause that allows your thinking ability to catch up with your fast-track feelings, take two deep and cleansing breaths. As you slowly draw in air and release it, focus entirely on your breathing.

When angry, count ten before you speak; if very angry, an hundred. Thomas Jefferson, A Decalogue of Canons for Observation in Practical Life.

Conventional wisdom has long suggested that if you are angry, count to ten. Others say to take a deep breath. While both have their merits, ten can seem like a long number to count to when you are impatient for resolution. And one deep breath, while better than none, is often too short an interval to slow down an accelerating train of angry thoughts.

A word of warning. Make sure those are slow deep breaths. The problem situation will still be there when you are finished. There's no need to rush. Part of the effectiveness of this strategy depends upon the connection between slower breathing and a slower, calmer emotional state. .

The other part of the effectiveness of this technique lies in turning your attention away from your spouse and the situation you are angry about. That's why it's so important to focus on your breathing. When you return to look again at the problem situation, hopefully you will be able to see it in a broader and more constructive perspective. If you cannot yet return to calmly cooperative dialogue, take another breather.

To intensify the helpful effects of a pause, change the topic to one that is neutral or even pleasant for several moments. The pause gives your adrenalin time to drain off and your thinking time to kick in. Changing your thoughts in addition can change your feelings, giving your system an extra boost of physiological soothing.

"Oh, by the way, what time are we eating dinner tonight? If I can stop and do some shopping on the way home that would be helpful." "This heat sure gets to me. I can't believe this is November; it feels like July."

Switching to thoughts of your to-do list or talking about the weather offers neutral subjects for most people. It is a good idea, however, to plan now, when you are not angry, which topics would be safely non-emotional ones for you to switch to. Having these ready in your mental back pocket will make it easier for you to access them when you need them.

TIP Use the 24-Hour Rule
You can save yourselves many arguments by making a 24-hour rule. That is, any topic that arouses irritation in either of you gets a 24 hour cooling off period before discussion. In the interim, most angers evaporate. Issues of consequence can get discussed the next day in more relaxed humor. Like wine, anger mellows with time.

TIP Be nice
Interestingly, when children who are beginning to treat each other angrily are told, "Children, be nice," they almost always know what "nice"is. Moreover, they generally can turn off their internal anger and switch to the nice mode.

Adults who find themselves responding to day to day frustrations with needless anger can be equally surprised to discover that can they tell themselves, "Wait a minute. Be nice." Or, as my mother sagely used to say, "If you don't have something nice to say, don't say anything at all."

Be nice. The outcome will turn out better than if you had ranted and raved.. You won't get revenge, but you are likely to get resolution of the problem, and a far happier household.

If you have been in the habit of getting irritible over minor glitches, the problem is not what your spouse does or doesn't do. The problem may be that you spend too much energy trying to control him/her. And it probably means that you have developed an automatic habit of speaking in an irritated voice when there's something you want. It can take major attention to change habitual irritability, but being unpleasant rather than nice is a changeable reaction pattern. Like being polite rather than rude, pleasantnesss is a matter of training and choice, not an in-born characteristic.

TIP Identify and elimate unnecessary angers
Do you get angry often? If so you may have a bad case of unnecessary-anger-itis, my term for anger in day to day living situations that do not merit getting steamed about. Save your anger for major threats and grievances. For day to day living together, be nice. It gets you more of what you want, and without hurting your loved ones.

Len is mad because something has gone wrong. The message system isn't working adequately, so he has missed a fun opportunity to go water-skiing. When Len gets mad he looks for someone to blame. Blaming, however, does not solve problems. Whether you blame others or get mad at yourself, blaming after things go wrong simply adds to the bad feelings caused by the original difficulty.

Gerald by contrast understands that life is not perfect. Mistakes happen. Mistakes are for fixing and learning, not for fussing and lecturing. A message had been misplaced, and an opportunity for a special day had been lost. Gerald fixed the lost water-skiing by finding another way to have a special day. He learned something beneficial from the incident by realizing that his message system was inadequate and by devising a better alternative. He figured out how to improve the message system so that future messages would be more delivered more reliably.

In sum, needless angers such as getting mad because there have been mistakes makes minor occurrences into needless sources of unpleasantness. To identify your needless angers, keep a list for a week of all the incidents to which you responded with anger.

Note that I did not say "incidents that made you mad." Incidents, like people, don't make you mad. You choose or have a habit of responding with anger to certain kinds of situations.

Once you have a full list, note how many of these could have been handled in better humor-- by explaining what you wanted instead of insisting, by being nice, by fixing problems instead of finding someone to blame, and by reminding yourself after mishaps that "mistakes are for learning." You will be really on your way to a strong and loving home if you can find ways that 100% of your angers could have been handled without irritation or blame.

TIP Ask Instead of Interpreting
When you feel angry about something your spouse has done, you are likely to give yourself an explanation about why s/he did such a thing. As you assign negative intentions or attributes to your spouse for having done this thing that bothered you, you will feel angrier and angrier. You will suffer in anger believing your misinterpretation as if they were true. If the explanation you are giving yourself is one that casts your spouse in a negative light, your interpretation is probably a misinterpretation.

Instead of offering your own interpretations of something your spouse has done that you reacted to with annoyance, ask why he or she did it. Listen to learn from the answer. You may be delightfully surprised.

Tanner again felt himself getting angry at Kate. They had gone grocery shopping together, and she seemed to criticize his purchases on every isle. "She's so controlling!" he said to himself. The more he thought about the shopping trip, the angrier he felt, and the more overpowering and intrusive his wife appeared in his thoughts to be.

Tanner's negative interpretation of his wife's comments as they shop together feeds a growing anger. If instead of interpreting what she is doing, he asks her, the outcome becomes very different. In the chart which follows Tanner asks instead of interpreting. The answer he get leads Tanner and Kate into an important discussion of the major change coming up in their lives.

TIP Set Ceilings
An anger ceiling is the level of anger that you allow yourself to feel and the way in which you allow yourself to express this anger before you take action to cool down. Anger is more escalated, that is allowed to go to a higher ceiling, to the extent that the feeling becomes more intense, and its expression becomes more potentially dangerous to yourself, your spouse or others, and to your marriage..

Everyone sets ceilings on how angry they will act before they extricate themselves from the situation. Some need only to feel slight angry rumblings. At that point they step back to think about the anger, its message, and how to deal most effectively with the provocative situation. Some people hearing themselves speaking in an angry tone of voice, pull back and cool down. Others shout, repeat themselves angrily several times, and then withdraw.

Some couples engage in drawn-out and debilitating angry arguing for hours on end, setting their ceiling at verbal ventilating, and staying up at their ceiling levels for long times. Others escalate quickly, briefly indulge in forays of name-calling and attempts to hurt one another by bringing up sensitive topics, and then stomp off. Others allow themselves to become physical against things (throwing dishes, punching holes in walls). The worst of course is to let yourself become physically violent against your spouse, hitting, punching, squeezing, or choking, and in the mot extreme, killing the person you love.

You are the only one who can determine where you will set your anger ceilings. Prevention, by following the guidelines for cooperative dialogue and climate control, hopefully will keep you far from your ceiling most of the time. If prevention alone is insufficient, and you do escalate to your ceiling, then immediately disengage.

"Back to Chapter V: Anger as a Stop Sign"

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