It’s OK to Be Angry : O.C. Counselor Offers Workshops and Advice on How to Use the Emotion as a Catalyst for Solving Problems and Improving Relationships

Deborah was shocked when the man she loved told her two months ago that he wanted to end their six-year relationship.

So was the recent discovery that her ex-boyfriend has already asked someone else to marry him. “He gave her a $9,000 engagement ring,” Deborah noted bitterly.

The 38-year-old Orange County resident, who asked for anonymity, is as baffled as she is hurt by her longtime lover’s decision to offer another woman the commitment he withheld from her.

But she’s beginning to see that what went wrong in their relationship had a lot to do with the way they fought. Whenever a conflict came up, Deborah’s hot-tempered housemate would “go ballistic,” and she would withdraw into an icy silence, she said. Later, among friends, she would strike back with sarcasm or put-downs certain to cause him embarrassment. Never did their anger lead to communication, understanding or a resolution of conflict.

Deborah now realizes that she has been setting herself up for trouble in all her relationships by burying her anger. But, having been raised by parents prone to violent rages, she never learned that anger could be released in healthy ways.

“Anger is a misunderstood emotion for a lot of people,” she said during a break in a recent workshop on the subject. “People don’t know how to express it appropriately.”

For those who tend to suppress anger--or lose control and unleash it destructively--”it takes a lot of courage and a hard look at yourself” to come to terms with this troublesome emotion, Deborah observed.

She felt she’d taken a significant step toward bringing her own anger out of the closet by signing up for the Coastline Community College workshop led by Rick Potter last Saturday. Deborah was one of about 35 people who ventured out on a stormy day to hear what Potter had to say about how to use anger as a catalyst for solving problems and improving relationships.

Potter, a counselor who specializes in group work with adult children of alcoholic and “dysfunctional families,” encouraged his audience to let go of preconceived ideas about the negativity of anger and look at it as a “neutral emotion.”

“It’s not bad or good; it just is. The proper use of anger is to mobilize us to action when our needs are not being met or we’re being violated in one way or another,” he said.

Harriet Goldhor Lerner put it this way in her book, “The Dance of Anger”: “Our anger can motivate us to say ‘no’ to the ways in which we are defined by others and ‘yes’ to the dictates of our inner self.”

But Potter, who is executive director of a Costa Mesa counseling center called A Safe Harbor, said many people fail to pay attention to the clues anger gives them about their inner self. Some who are in the habit of denying this unsettling emotion build up such a reservoir of anger that they end up letting off steam in indirect ways, often by overreacting to minor irritations. People who blow up at strangers--inconsiderate drivers, slow waiters or inefficient salespeople, for example--need to examine the real source of their anger, Potter said.

They may have to go as far back as childhood to find that source, he noted, and they may have to let go of accumulated anger from the past in order to clear the air in their current relationships.

“You have to go back and settle up with those people (in your past), or you take your anger out on everybody else,” Potter said, adding that people who store up anger are at higher risk of suffering from stress-related illnesses.

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Potter has worked with many clients who had no idea they were harboring anger from the past. “Often, the angrier you are, the less willing you are to admit it--even to yourself,” he said.

Hidden anger tends to come out in insidious ways--through sarcasm, sadistic humor, overpoliteness, disturbing dreams, sleep problems, apathy, chronic depression, excessive irritability, fatigue, teeth grinding, headaches, stiff necks, ulcers.

Potter advised workshop participants who recognize these symptoms to try to determine who or what they may be mad at, then find a productive way to release that anger.

Although a direct confrontation works best for some, there are less risky ways of expressing long-buried anger toward loved ones. For example, Potter asked a number of workshop participants to take part in a role-playing exercise structured around a “family sculpture.”

A 47-year-old volunteer named Andy chose several other participants to strike poses representing the tension between the members of his immediate family that created a dark, threatening atmosphere in his childhood home. Then he went from one person to another, visualizing his alcoholic father, submissive mother, needy sister and eager-to-please boyhood self as he voiced his anger.

He told the man posing as his late father: “I always wanted your attention, and you never gave it to me. I just wanted you to tell me you loved me. Just once.”

And to his mother, he said: “Make your own decisions and live your own life, not mine. I wasn’t born to raise you, to take care of you, and I’m not going to do it anymore.”

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After the exercise was completed and a box of tissue had been passed around, Andy explained that he has been working in group therapy for quite some time on releasing anger from the past, and his efforts have paid off in his relationships at work as well as in his marriage.

He said he used to take his anger out unfairly on employees and his wife, especially when he’d been drinking. “I was a Jekyl and Hyde,” he said. “When I drank, it allowed me to express the anger I felt toward the world in general. I was an obnoxious drunk. I verbally attacked people.”

Once he was able to confront the hostility toward his family that he had been taking out on others, he found himself looking more objectively at everyday situations that upset him and expressing anger more directly. He said he and his wife have learned to talk about conflicts as they come up, which is “a lot more work” than waiting until they reach a boiling point.

“I don’t accumulate anger anymore. I’m not a walking time bomb,” he said.

Potter explained that one of the most important steps toward dealing with anger constructively in current relationships is examining unmet needs. He said many conflicts in relationships can be traced to the ways in which people feel shortchanged emotionally.

For example, if affection is lacking, security is threatened, self-esteem is attacked or boredom sets in, anger is likely to result. But it can help re-energize a relationship by reminding partners to tune in more closely to each other’s needs and guiding them to trouble spots.

If anger is to become an impetus for positive change, it must be expressed in affirmative rather than destructive ways, Potter stressed. He urged workshop participants to resist using such below-the-belt tactics as ridiculing, blaming and threatening. Other common mistakes to avoid: walking away from an argument, apologizing before anything has been resolved, trying to manipulate by withholding affection or approval (“emotional blackmail”), bringing irrelevant issues into an argument and making unreasonable demands.

“Passive-aggressive” types tend to be “silent but deadly” in the way they show anger, Potter added. They procrastinate, become sulky or irritable when asked to do something they don’t want to do, deliberately work slowly or do a bad job on unpleasant tasks, avoid obligations by claiming to have “forgotten,” obstruct the efforts of others by failing to do their share of the work and unreasonably criticize authority figures. These people need assertiveness training to help them deal with anger directly, Potter said.

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He offered the following suggestions on how to fight fairly:

* Withdraw from the field of combat when tempers flare. You can’t resolve a problem in the midst of a blowup.

* Clearly define what the fight is about and stick to the real issue.

* Identify points of agreement as well as disagreement.

* Allow each person to talk, and restate each other’s arguments to make sure they are fully understood.

* Define out-of-bounds areas of vulnerability.

* Decide what each partner can do to help resolve the situation.

* Be prepared for the next fight. Arguments are a natural outgrowth of intimacy; if they are expected, they tend to produce less injury and more learning.

Potter also pointed out that anger often results from irrational perceptions. For example, people get themselves worked up unnecessarily when they assume that drivers who cut in front of them in traffic or take the parking place they wanted are deliberately trying to provoke them. They may make the same mistake in relationships, by jumping to erroneous conclusions or searching for hidden meanings in innocuous comments.

Anger can often be diffused simply by looking at a situation from a different perspective. As Potter said, “changing how we think changes how we feel.”

People in intimate relationships can avoid a lot of “wear and tear on each other,” he added, if they can minimize irrational anger and clearly define what’s at stake when they clash over something worth fighting about.