Paul Gilbert is Professor of Clinical Psychology at the University of Derby and Director of the Mental Health Research Unit, Derbyshire Mental Health Trust. He is a visiting professor at the Universities of Fribourg (Switzerland) and Coimbra (Portugal) and a fellow of the British Psychological Society. Between 2002 and 2003 he was President of the BABCP. Paul is the author of The Compassionate Mind and Mindful Compassion, also published by Constable & Robinson.

Jan Scott is an internationally renowned expert in the use of cognitive behavioural therapy in the treatment of depression and bipolar disorder. She is a Fellow of the Royal College of Psychiatrists, the International Association of Cognitive Psychotherapists, and a trustee of the Mental Health Foundation. She is currently head of the Psychiatry Department at the University of Glasgow.

Dr Melanie Fennell is the author of Overcoming Low Self-Esteem and Overcoming Low Self-Esteem Self-Help Course. She currently works as the Director of an advanced cognitive therapy course, which is a collaborative venture between the Oxford Cognitive Therapy Centre (OCTC) and Oxford University. One of the first clinician researchers to introduce cognitive therapy to the UK, she was a founder member of the OCTC, an internationally recognized centre of excellence in cognitive therapy and training. As a member of research teams in the Oxford University Department of Psychiatry, Melanie contributed to the development and evaluation of cognitive treatment for a range of emotional problems. A recognized expert on low self-esteem with an interest in depression, she has run many workshops and presented research papers at major international conferences.

Dr William Davies graduated in psychology from University College London and completed his postgraduate clinical training at the University of Birmingham, England. He is a Consultant Clinical Psychologist and head of APT, The Association for Psychological Therapies, one of the UK’s leading providers of training for Mental Health professionals. Dr Davies was previously Head of Forensic Psychology in the Trent Regional Secure Unit and Head of Psychology at St Andrew’s Hospital, Northampton – a national resource for patients needing specialised care. Dr Davies has written and taught numerous courses and workshops, most notably The RAID® Course for working with extreme behavior, and Preventing Face-to-Face Violence, each of which has been attended by well over 10,000 professionals.

Colin Espie is Professor of Clinical Psychology and Director of the University of Glasgow Sleep Centre. He has published over 200 research papers on insomnia and is a leading member of the American Academy of Sleep Medicine and the European Sleep Research Society.

The Complete Guide to Overcoming Depression, Low Mood and Other Related Problems

Paul Gilbert, Jan Scott, Melanie Fennell, William Davies and Colin Espie

Constable & Robinson Ltd.
55–56 Russell Square
London WC1B 4HP
www.constablerobinson.com

Overcoming Depression first published in the UK by Robinson Publishing Ltd., 1997
Revised edition published by Robinson,
an imprint of Constable & Robinson Ltd., 2000, 2009
Copyright © Paul Gilbert, 1997, 2000, 2009

Overcoming Mood Swings first published in the UK by Robinson,
an imprint of Constable & Robinson Ltd., 2001
Copyright © Jan Scott 2001

Overcoming Low Self-Esteem first published by Robinson Publishing Ltd., 1999
Revised edition published by Robinson,
an imprint of Constable & Robinson Ltd., 2009
Copyright © Melanie J. V. Fennell 1999, 2009

Overcoming Anger and Irritability published in the UK by Robinson Publishing Ltd., 2000
Revised edition published by Robinson,
an imprint of Constable & Robinson Ltd, 2009
Copyright © William Davies 2000, 2009

Overcoming Insomnia and Sleep Problems first published in the UK by Robinson,
an imprint of Constable & Robinson Ltd, 2006
Revised edition published in 2010
Copyright © Colin A. Espie, 2006, 2010

This ebook published in the UK by Robinson,
an imprint of Constable & Robinson Ltd., 2013

Copyright © Paul Gilbert, Jan Scott, Melanie J. V. Fennell, William Davies and Colin A. Espie, 2013

The right of the authors to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by them in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988

All rights reserved. This book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, resold, hired out or otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

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ISBN: 978-1-47210-736-7 (ebook)

Important Note
This book is not intended as a substitute for medical advice or treatment. Any person with a condition requiring medical attention should consult a qualified medical practitioner or suitable therapist.

Cover design copyright © Constable & Robinson

OVERCOMING
ANGER AND
IRRITABILITY

A self-help guide using
Cognitive Behavioral Techniques

WILLIAM DAVIES

Table of contents

Acknowledgements

Introduction: Professor Peter Cooper

PART ONE: Understanding What Happens

1   What are irritability and anger?

2   What makes us angry?

3   Why am I not angry all the time?

4   Constructing a system to explain irritability and anger

5   Why don’t other people feel angry at the things that bug me?

6   Why isn’t everybody irritated by the same things?

7   Why am I sometimes more irritable than at other times?

8   Is it always wrong to be angry?

PART TWO: Sorting It Out

9   Getting a handle on the problem: The trigger

10   Why do I get angry? 1: Appraisal/Judgement

11   Why do I get angry? 2: Beliefs

12   Cats, camels and recreation: Anger

13   Putting the brakes on: Inhibitions

14   The bottom line: Response

15   ‘But I’m not always irritable, just sometimes’: Mood

16   Testing your knowledge

Good Luck!

Appendix

Useful Resources

Index

Acknowledgements

Reading through previous Acknowledgements contained in books in this series I see that the form is to thank all the wonderful people that have written about and researched Cognitive Therapy. Quite right too, I hope that is taken as read. More immediately, however, I would like to thank Amy and Helen for the work they put in to typing this book at very short notice, under great pressure, and with very little irritation! (One or two assertive comments perhaps, but probably well justified!) Also to Paul Gilbert for pushing forward what he terms my ‘approachable writing style’ and, just as much, to the publishers for creating a series that is so relevant and important that it makes one enthusiastic to write for it. Finally, although I can’t imagine they will ever read this, an acknowledgement to ‘Danny and Vicky’ who feature in one of the many case studies and who may well be recognised for the well-known characters they are. A special word of thanks to them for the endless entertainment they provide, and of reassurance that their inclusion is not yet another dig at them, but is simply intended to create an entirely non-malicious smile in the reader.

Introduction

Why a cognitive behavioral approach?

Over the past two or three decades, there has been something of a revolution in the field of psychological treatment. Freud and his followers had a major impact on the way in which psychological therapy was conceptualized, and psychoanalysis and psychodynamic psychotherapy dominated the field for the first half of this century. So, long-term treatments were offered which were designed to uncover the childhood roots of personal problems – offered, that is, to those who could afford it. There was some attempt by a few health service practitioners with a public conscience to modify this form of treatment (by, for example, offering short-term treatment or group therapy), but the demand for help was so great that this had little impact. Also, whilst numerous case histories can be found of people who are convinced that psychotherapy did help them, practitioners of this form of therapy showed remarkably little interest in demonstrating that what they were offering their patients was, in fact, helpful.

As a reaction to the exclusivity of psychodynamic therapies and the slender evidence for its usefulness, in the 1950s and 1960s a set of techniques was developed, broadly collectively termed ‘behavior therapy’. These techniques shared two basic features. First, they aimed to remove symptoms (such as anxiety) by dealing with those symptoms themselves, rather than their deep-seated underlying historical causes. Second, they were techniques, loosely related to what laboratory psychologists were finding out about the mechanisms of learning, which were formulated in testable terms. Indeed, practitioners of behavior therapy were committed to using techniques of proven value or, at worst, of a form which could potentially be put to the test. The area where these techniques proved of most value was in the treatment of anxiety disorders, especially specific phobias (such as fear of animals or heights) and agoraphobia, both notoriously difficult to treat using conventional psychotherapies.

After an initial flush of enthusiasm, discontent with behavior therapy grew. There were a number of reasons for this, an important one of which was the fact that behavior therapy did not deal with the internal thoughts which were so obviously central to the distress that patients were experiencing. In this context, the fact that behavior therapy proved so inadequate when it came to the treatment of depression highlighted the need for major revision. In the late 1960s and early 1970s a treatment was developed specifically for depression called ‘cognitive therapy’. The pioneer in this enterprise was an American psychiatrist, Professor Aaron T. Beck, who developed a theory of depression which emphasized the importance of people’s depressed styles of thinking. He also specified a new form of therapy. It would not be an exaggeration to say that Beck’s work has changed the nature of psychotherapy, not just for depression but for a range of psychological problems.

In recent years the cognitive techniques introduced by Beck have been merged with the techniques developed earlier by the behavior therapists to produce a body of theory and practice which has come to be known as ‘cognitive behavior therapy’. There are two main reasons why this form of treatment has come to be so important within the field of psychotherapy. First, cognitive therapy for depression, as originally described by Beck and developed by his successors, has been subjected to the strictest scientific testing; and it has been found to be a highly successful treatment for a significant proportion of cases of depression. Not only has it proved to be as effective as the best alternative treatments (except in the most severe cases, where medication is required), but some studies suggest that people treated successfully with cognitive behavior therapy are less likely to experience a later recurrence of their depression than people treated successfully with other forms of therapy (such as antidepressant medication). Second, it has become clear that specific patterns of thinking are associated with a range of psychological problems and that treatments which deal with these styles of thinking are highly effective. So, specific cognitive behavioral treatments have been developed for anxiety disorders, like panic disorder, generalized anxiety disorder, specific phobias and social phobia, obsessive compulsive disorders, and hypochondriasis (health anxiety), as well as for other conditions such as compulsive gambling, alcohol and drug addiction, and eating disorders like bulimia nervosa and binge-eating disorder. Indeed, cognitive behavioral techniques have a wide application beyond the narrow categories of psychological disorders: they have been applied effectively, for example, to helping people with low self-esteem and those with marital difficulties.

At any one time almost 10 per cent of the general population is suffering from depression, and more than 10 per cent has one or other of the anxiety disorders. Many others have a range of psychological problems and personal difficulties. It is of the greatest importance that treatments of proven effectiveness are developed. However, even when the armoury of therapies is, as it were, full, there remains a very great problem – namely that the delivery of treatment is expensive and the resources are not going to be available evermore. Whilst this shortfall could be met by lots of people helping themselves, commonly the natural inclination to make oneself feel better in the present is to do precisely those things which perpetuate or even exacerbate one’s problems. For example, the person with agoraphobia will stay at home to prevent the possibility of an anxiety attack; and the person with bulimia nervosa will avoid eating all potentially fattening foods. Whilst such strategies might resolve some immediate crisis, they leave the underlying problem intact and provide no real help in dealing with future difficulties.

So, there is a twin problem here: although effective treatments have been developed, they are not widely available; and when people try to help themselves they often make matters worse. In recent years the community of cognitive behavior therapists have responded to this situation. What they have done is to take the principles and techniques of specific cognitive behavior therapies for particular problems and represent them in self-help manuals. These manuals specify a systematic program of treatment which the individual sufferer is advised to work through to overcome their difficulties. In this way, the cognitive behavioral therapeutic techniques of proven value are being made available on the widest possible basis.

Self-help manuals are never going to replace therapists. Many people will need individual treatment from a qualified therapist. It is also the case that, despite the widespread success of cognitive behavioral therapy, some people will not respond to it and will need one of the other treatments available. Nevertheless, although research on the use of cognitive behavioral self-help manuals is at an early stage, the work done to date indicates that for a very great many people such a manual will prove sufficient for them to overcome their problems without professional help.

Many people suffer silently and secretly for years. Sometimes appropriate help is not forthcoming despite their efforts to find it. Sometimes they feel too ashamed or guilty to reveal their problems to anyone. For many of these people the cognitive behavioral self-help manuals will provide a lifeline to recovery and a better future.

Professor Peter Cooper

The University of Reading

PART ONE

Understanding What Happens

1

What are irritability and anger?

We are probably right to put irritability and anger together because they are so often associated with each other. Nevertheless they are somewhat different. Consider the following stories:

I was in the pub one evening with a couple of friends, just sitting near the back door to the pub, talking. It was a November evening and it was quite cold outside. Somebody came through the back door and left it just a little open so that I had to get up and close it. I didn’t mind too much. About a quarter of an hour later somebody else came in and did the same thing, didn’t quite close the door properly. So I got up again and closed it. A little while later a third person did the same thing. I closed the door, but gave him a good hard stare. Mind you, I don’t think he noticed because he was walking to the bar by that time so I was staring at the back of his head. It happened a fourth time a bit later on – the thing is, the self-closing mechanism on the door had broken. Anyway, this time I said to the bloke who’d come in, ‘Don’t you think you should close the door behind you when you come in?’ He just looked at me as though I was some kind of oddball and went and ordered himself a drink. It was when the fifth person came in that I really went to town on him. By this time I had sunk probably four or five pints. He did exactly the same as all the others, left the door just slightly open. The thing that really got me about it was that they don’t seem to care, they just seem so intent on getting their own drinks inside them that they don’t give a damn about anybody else in the pub. Anyway, something snapped in me. I didn’t actually hit the bloke but I jumped up, started shouting and swearing at him, jabbing my finger in his chest and generally calling him all the names under the sun. He was only a small bloke. And the funny thing was he had only done exactly the same thing as the first one. Simply left the door a little open.

Compare that story, told by a 28-year-old man, Steve, with the following one from David, aged 45.

It was a Wednesday evening and four of us went down to town for a meal in an Indian restaurant. That’s me, my wife and the two kids. Anyway, we parked the car in a back street, it must have been about eight o’clock in the evening, walked round to the restaurant and had a very good meal. It was the first time we’d been there, we were all on good form, had a good laugh and a joke about everything, even at how thick and new the carpets were, and altogether had a thoroughly good time. Anyway, about half-past nine or ten o’clock, we’d just turned the corner of the street we’d parked the car in when we heard an almighty crash and the sound of breaking glass. Except it hardly sounded like glass, it was a stronger, louder sound than that. We looked down the street, and there was some bloke with his head stuck through the passenger window of our car, and another bloke standing by him. I didn’t grasp what was happening for a moment; then I realized that the sound we had heard was the window glass breaking, and these two were in the process of stealing the stereo from my car. Anyway, I felt that mixture of stuff that courses through your body when these things happen, shouted but not very loud, and set off after these two. One bloke saw me after a couple of seconds and just ran off. That left the guy with his head still through the window, engrossed in prising my hi-fi out of the car. He still had his head through the window when I got there. I just grabbed hold of him and pulled him out – I didn’t care if his head caught on the bits of broken glass or not – and manhandled him, not at all gently, on to the floor. By this time my wife was there and telling me to take it easy, and one of the kids had already got his mobile phone out and was dialling for the police. The lad I’d got out of the car was never more than sixteen, but I just had him on the floor and could cheerfully have throttled him. What did they think they were doing, just thinking they could go up to somebody else’s property and take it? Anyway, I just sat astride him, threatening him and telling him what a useless piece of machinery he was until the police came. Half a dozen people must have gone past us during all that, but I couldn’t care less. When the police arrived they did at least seem to take my side, took all the details and took him off in their car.

Which of those two stories would you say illustrated irritability and which one anger? To my mind, irritability is shown in the first one and anger in the second. But there is another question, perhaps a more important one, posed by these two examples, and that is: which of the two men was justified in his reaction? Or, if you think that both were justified in their reactions, which was more justified?

The ‘justified?’ test

Personally, I would say the man in the second example was more justified: the man who caught somebody trying to steal his stereo. But maybe I say that because I have been in pretty much the same situation, coming back to the car after a nice meal out, only to find the window broken and the stereo gone. And I must say, if I had been able to get hold of the person who had done it, just at that instant I don’t know what I would have done to him. So I feel that I can’t really blame David.

On the other hand, I have also inadvertently left a door open and probably irritated somebody thereby – especially if I was the fifth person to have done so that evening. So I would say that perhaps the guy who reacted aggressively in that scene was a bit over-aggressive. Maybe in an ideal world Steve could have toned it down a bit and simply asked persons two, three and four to shut the door after them. But there again, he’d got a few drinks inside him, so possibly his inhibitions were weakened a bit by the time person number five came in. And also he said that customer five was a small bloke, so perhaps that had a bearing on events too.

One of the main judgements we make whenever we see someone behaving in an aggressive or hostile way is whether they are justified in doing so. If we consider that they are justified, then we probably won’t describe that person as irritable; we reserve the term ‘irritable’ for people who are hostile, angry or aggressive without good cause. If we think the person is justified in being angry or aggressive, then we tend to see nothing wrong with that. So, if we see David as justified in his anger, we probably won’t blame him for pinning the thief to the ground until the police arrive. We might see that as a proportionate response. If, on the other hand, he had started banging the 16-year-old’s head up and down on the pavement while loudly cursing him, we might have seen that as disproportionate and unjustified.

So, if we really want a definition of irritability it will be something along the lines of: an unjustified negative response to a situation. Unjustified in whose eyes? In ours, of course. And therein lies a problem, because everybody has a different judgement as to what is justified and what isn’t. What is more, sometimes our judgement goes a little hazy. I can still remember the first time I saw the film One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, in which Nurse Ratchet torments a group of mentally ill patients led by Jack Nicholson. Certainly the patients were full of antipathy towards Nurse Ratchet after about an hour of the film, but not half as much as the audience. At this point, after Nurse Ratchet’s particularly savage treatment of one of the patients, Jack Nicholson could stand it no longer, grabbed hold of her, had her on the floor and was throttling the life out of her. Half the audience in the cinema was on its feet, shouting encouragement and just hoping he would finish the job before the two male nurses rushing to Ms Ratchet’s assistance could get there. He didn’t, the authorities got the better of him, and we all trudged unhappily out of the cinema.

Even though Nurse Ratchet’s behavior was extreme, perhaps Jack Nicholson’s response was somewhat disproportionate. Of course, in a case like this our judgement is clouded by the events being on the silver screen rather than in reality. But this ‘temporary clouding of judgement’ is exactly the problem; because, unfortunately, it happens not just on the silver screen but in real life as well. On those occasions we get repeatedly remorseful and self-critical. We say we ‘over-reacted’ or ‘don’t know what got hold of us’. We feel that our response was out of all proportion to the event; it was not justified.

These are themes that will run throughout this book. How do we get ourselves always – or nearly always – to respond to negative events in a way that is in proportion to them? In a way that we, and others, would say is justified?

It is worth lingering a little on these questions of definition. The word ‘irritability’ implies a minor kind of response on the part of the irritable person, probably verbal, usually not physically aggressive. Even so, we tend to react against irritable people because we think that their response is not justified. Anger, on the other hand, might lead to a much more forceful response. The man who pinned the thief to the floor was angry. Nevertheless, we don’t necessarily react against people who are being angry, so long as we see their anger as justified.

In fact, we sometimes like to see people getting angry, so long as they are on our side. Margaret Thatcher was often referred to as ‘handbagging’ her counterparts from other European countries in order to stick up for those in Britain perceived as their rights. I, for one, never heard many people complaining about that at the time. Her successor John Major, on the other hand, was painted as a much more grey character (literally in the case of the satirical Spitting Image programme): so grey, in fact, that he would be unlikely to get openly angry with too many people. Whether this perception was accurate is another matter but, accurate or not, it seemed to count against him. What is more, this negative perception of John Major was exacerbated by rumours that he could also be rather irritable in private – a shade on the snappish side when perhaps it wasn’t warranted. Again, whether this perception was true is another matter, but it does illustrate the point that what people dislike is not the fact of other people getting angry, it’s the fact of other people reacting in a way that is not justified, or out of proportion to the situation.

Anger, irritability and frustration

Just to finish off this chapter, see what you make of the following two stories.

The first was related to me by Anne, a woman of 34, telling me about how she was getting on with her 12-year-old daughter.

The biggest rumpus Rachel and I have had this week was Tuesday evening. Of course, it’s half-way through the holidays and she always gets on my nerves in the holidays anyway. But Tuesday was particularly bad because I’d been going on at her all day to tidy her room. It was a terrible mess, she could hardly set foot in it without tripping over something – and it smells when you walk in there, I’m sure she’s got some food that’s going off buried under all her clothes on the floor. Anyway, I’d been going on at her all day to tidy her room and she just wouldn’t do it. There was always something she had to do first. So, it was about seven o’clock in the evening, I was downstairs and Rachel was upstairs. I’d just got back from the shops, I’d only been out five or ten minutes. Anyway, the house was quiet so I thought that maybe Rachel had decided that she’d better do what her mum says and get on with tidying her room. So I went upstairs ready to praise her and tell her what a good girl she was and how pleased I was with her and how much better the room looked and so on. When I got up there I could see that Rachel wasn’t in her room and the place looked just as much of a tip as it ever had. Anyway, to cut a long story short, there was Rachel, in the bathroom, sitting in the bath washing her hair. Well, I just flew at her. It was absolutely the last straw. She hasn’t lifted a finger to help all holidays, she can’t even be bothered to tidy her own room, and there she is sitting in the bath like a little madam washing her hair with my shampoo! I just ranted and raved at her for a good ten or fifteen minutes, just shouting and screaming. All the frustrations of the holidays came out in that time. The poor kid looked absolutely petrified, and as for what the neighbours thought, I’ve no idea.

Justified? Perhaps not.

And what about this one, in which Paul, 46, told me about his son John, also aged 12?

You see, the thing is, all I’ve ever tried to do is to do my best for him. And I have learnt the hard way that if you don’t pay proper attention to education and schooling then you’re the worse off for it as you get older. So I’m always going on at him about how important it is to pay attention in school and do his homework properly when he gets home. But he knows better, of course, and he tells me that he can concentrate better doing his homework in front of the television. And I’ve seen him doing it. He sits there, mouth half open, staring at the screen and just every now and again looking at what he’s meant to be doing. And he thinks he’s got me fooled doing this. He thinks that I believe he’s doing his homework. So anyway, Monday was like that, Tuesday was the same, just the same as any other day, and on Wednesday I told him to show me his books after he’d packed them away and said he’d done all the homework he had to do. And so I was looking at his exercise book, for maths; he was meant to have done twenty sums in it. And he’s got all the numbers 1 to 20 down there, and some of them he’d done, though God knows whether they were right or not, but I could see that more than half the sums he was meant to have done he just hadn’t. He hadn’t even tried to. There were just blank spaces where the answers were meant to be. So I saw red and I just walloped him. He was sitting just opposite from me looking stupid and frightened and I just walloped him. I hit him straight across the face so he all but fell off the chair and I didn’t waste my breath on him, I just told him to get straight upstairs to bed. And I’ve not spoken to him since, and that was three days ago.

Justified? Well, again, maybe not. But it is all too easy to be critical of those two parents, or say that their reactions were out of proportion to what triggered them and therefore were not justified. Sometimes people get to such a pitch that they can no longer tell what’s justified and what isn’t; and both of those parents described, quite truthfully, genuinely wanting to do the best for their children. Sometimes the level of frustration that builds up is unbearable. This was not the first such incident for either of these parents. Both had tried all sorts of tactics without success. And now they saw themselves still as having no success – but also having been pushed into doing things they didn’t like doing.

SUMMARY

•   Irritability and anger take lots of different forms. Both are emotions that most people have felt.

•   There’s nothing wrong with being angry in itself; sometimes it is clearly justified. It is when we overreact, responding in a way that is out of proportion to the situation, that we lay ourselves open to criticism. And sometimes we ourselves are our harshest critics.

•   The very term ‘irritability’ implies that the reaction is unjustified. It normally suggests that a person is being snappy and bad-tempered when there is no call to be so. As such it fails the ‘Justified?’ test; people are almost always criticized for being irritable. Again, we may be our harshest critics in this respect.

•   There are times when, through frustration or for other reasons, we lose our sense of perspective. It’s on those occasions that we find ourselves unable to judge what is justified. And then we see ourselves doing things which we feel are justified at the time but which later on – once our true sense of judgement returns – we are horrified that we did.

A final thought

Most of us feel rather critical of irritable and unjustifiably angry people, almost as if they were doing it deliberately to make our lives miserable. And, certainly, it is no fun at all living with an irritable and unjustifiably angry person. One point that is sometimes forgotten, however, is that neither is it any fun being the irritable and angry person! Many, many people have their lives virtually ruined by their own irritability and anger. So it is both for them and for those around them that this book is written.

2

What makes us angry?

It is important to know just what makes you angry, because when you come to doing something about it this will be a very important starting point. Clearly, if you know what things make you angry, you can either avoid those things (if possible!) or work out how you would prefer to respond when they happen.

So what kind of things are we looking for? It is said that we are all different, but in fact there tend to be certain themes which produce anger in most people. And remember, we said in Chapter 1 that there is nothing wrong with anger in itself, so long as it is in proportion to the event. What makes us feel bad is when we act out of proportion to what is happening: when we are ‘snappy’ in the face of no reasonable provocation, or angry in response to something that would normally just mildly irritate most people, or completely ‘lose our cool’ in response to something that most people would just get somewhat angry about.

Irritants, costs and transgressions

So what makes most of us angry? There are three main categories: irritants, costs and transgressions.

Irritants

The number of irritants in life is boundless. I was talking recently to Pam, who said she could no longer stand the way her husband ate. Simply the noise his mouth made in chewing his food drove her round the bend. Moreover, as so often happens, now she had noticed this, she was waiting for it every mealtime; and that made it ten times worse. It had become a symbol for all that was wrong with him (self-centred, greedy) and with their marriage (she saw him as a different type of person from herself).

People sniffing, coughing, blowing their noses can also be irritating. This certainly used to be the case for me. I sometimes run training events where I spend three days with perhaps a dozen people. Occasionally one of that dozen will have a chronic, hacking cough which lasts for the duration of these three days and longer, for all I know. Certainly I used to find that very irritating indeed. A cough can be so loud; and sometimes its owner seemed deliberately to cough just as I was coming out with an extremely good point! So then I’d have to repeat it and the effect was spoilt. (I cured myself of this sensitivity when I realized that, very often, the owner of the cough would have been perfectly entitled to stay at home, off sick, for the three days. I was therefore able to re-interpret his coughing presence as a compliment to myself: evidence that he simply could not bear to miss out on the event. Whether this is actually true or not doesn’t really matter to me; I feel it is true – or at least it could be true – and that keeps me satisfied.)

Neighbours are another excellent source of irritation. Apartments and town houses give everybody great scope for irritating each other. When we were first married, my wife and I lived in a house where we could even hear the neighbours turning on and off their electric switches at the wall sockets, as clearly as if they were in the room with us. That in itself hardly counts as an irritant, but there is plenty of potential for serious irritation: loud music, raised voices, banging picture-hooks into walls, do-it-yourself activity, playing ball games in the street (and on your garden) and so on and so on. Not infrequently people’s lives are made a complete misery by the sheer level of irritation provoked by their neighbours.

Costs

The cost to you of somebody else’s behavior may be a literal, financial cost, or it may be a cost in terms of time, or in terms of loss of ‘face’, or indeed any other loss. The common thread here is that, by virtue of what they do, someone costs you in some way; and that makes you angry. Examples include parents being angry when their children break things (because of the financial cost of replacing them); or your spouse being angry because you have crashed the car (again because of the cost of repairing it, or the increased insurance premiums that result).

Interestingly, these kinds of causes of anger sometimes illustrate a ‘hangover’ effect. Sue told me how angry she was that her 13-year-old son had broken a mug by dropping it on the kitchen floor accidentally. When I asked her exactly why it was that she had become angry she said, ‘Well, it’s the cost of replacing these things; he goes around as though money grows on trees, thinks that whatever he breaks will just automatically get replaced.’ I found this strange, because Sue was very far from being poor, and was well able to replace a broken mug or two. But she had not always been wealthy; at one time in her life it would have made a significant impact on her finances to have to buy a new mug, and that cast of mind had stayed with her. Old habits die hard. And there is another possible explanation, too; but we will come on to that later.

Judy was telling me how she had taken her 5-year-old daughter to a hospital outpatient clinic. She got there promptly for her 2 p.m. appointment but was not seen until approximately two hours later, 4 p.m. What especially enraged her was that she realized after a while that every single person in the clinic had been given an appointment for 2 p.m., and the clinic was due to run from 2 p.m. to 5 p.m. approximately. Therefore, the hospital authorities had deliberately arranged the session in such a way that some people would be waiting for three hours. The costs to Judy were several, including the loss of time in which she could have been doing some of the many tasks that were pressing on her at home; the necessity to entertain her 5-year-old daughter constantly for two hours to prevent her getting bored and restless; and the loss of face implied by the hospital authority’s apparent attitude that it didn’t matter if she was kept waiting for one, two or three hours.

Alan, an electrician, was angry because he was asked to do too much at work. His boss asked in a very straightforward way, something like, ‘Have you got time to fit in an extra call to a customer who needs their light switches sorting out?’ and was quite prepared to take no for an answer; he could always ask another of the electricians. Nevertheless, Alan was still angry because of the cost to him of the request. What was that cost? The way he saw it, he could choose one of two: either he suffered the cost of time, whereby he did an extra job that he couldn’t really fit into his schedule; or he suffered the cost of guilt in turning down a straightforward request from his boss. Clearly Alan needed to learn some deep assertiveness techniques, so that he could feel entitled to say ‘no’ without feeling guilty about it.

I have met a lot of people who get very angry and irritated when their partners contradict them in public. The cost here is usually loss of face – especially when the contradiction implies that the first speaker was telling a lie, even if only a harmless little lie to exaggerate and make more interesting an otherwise boring story. Nigel, however, was driven wild by the very smallness of the contradiction. He gave me the example of an occasion when he and his wife were chatting with friends and he was recounting a story of something that had happened the previous Wednesday. As soon as he uttered the word ‘Wednesday’ his wife interrupted to say, ‘No it wasn’t, it was last Tuesday.’ It is difficult to imagine that he could be made so angry by the cost of such an interruption: there is, after all, hardly any loss of face involved in mistaking a Tuesday for a Wednesday. Perhaps it was just a case of a simple irritant (having his flow of thought interrupted) – or possibly it was something different: a transgression.

Transgressions

A transgression involves the breaking of a rule. Possibly Nigel held to the rule that husbands and wives don’t contradict each other in public – not at all an unusual rule to have. Therefore, when that rule was broken, repeatedly, he got angry, repeatedly.

Another very common rule that good friends and partners have is that confidences should not be broken. In other words, if your partner knows something about you purely by virtue of being your partner, then he or she should not go around telling other people about it. This might include intimate details about your health, your likes and dislikes, or simply something they know about your experiences or opinions which you would not share with anybody except your nearest and dearest. To break such confidences is almost universally viewed as a taboo, a major transgression – and one of the very quickest ways you can get on the wrong side of your partner.

Obviously, the example in Chapter 1 about the man who got angry with the youngster he caught trying to steal his car stereo is also an example of a transgression. In that case the youngster was not just breaking a rule held by the man in question, he was breaking the law: a very formalized transgression.

These three categories are not mutually exclusive: there are many cases that cross the boundaries. For example, if your partner flirts with someone he or she finds attractive, that is normally viewed as a transgression; in other words, it is against the rules for many people. But it also involves a cost – loss of face, the impression that your partner is somehow dissatisfied with you and seeking consolation elsewhere. (Of course, this may not be true; but it is easily and often seen that way.)

Another cross-boundary example was the case of Sue’s son, who accidentally dropped a mug on the floor and broke it. Perhaps it was, as his mother claimed, the cost of replacing the mug that made her angry; but, given that she could afford to do that without even noticing the price, that seems rather unlikely. A more probable explanation is that she was angry because he had transgressed an unspoken rule, namely that one takes a reasonable amount of care not to inconvenience others in the household. The ‘sheer carelessness’ was what made her angry.

SUMMARY

•   It is important to know the sort of things which make you angry, because you will use this knowledge to benefit yourself later on.

•   Typically, there are three categories of event that make people angry: irritants, costs and transgressions.

•   There are plenty of irritants: people leaving doors open repeatedly, neighbours making a noise, even the way people eat or cough.

•   Likewise, there are plenty of things that people do that have a cost for us: our children breaking things and the consequent financial cost; our partners contradicting us and costing us loss of face; having to do things unexpectedly, which costs us time.

•   You, like everyone else, will have a set of rules that you expect other people to abide by. When someone breaks one of those rules, it is known as a transgression. When you spot a transgression, or think you have, the chances are you will be angry.

•   Some things which make us angry straddle the boundaries between these categories. For example, a child breaking something may make us angry because of the cost involved in replacing it, but also because they have not, in our view, taken sufficient care.

3

Why am I not angry all the time?

It does seem that the world is absolutely crammed full with irritants, people doing things that have costs for us, and people breaking the rules we have made up for ourselves; so how come we are not in a permanent state of anger and rage?

Internal and external inhibitions

Remember Judy, who took her youngster to the outpatient clinic at the hospital and was kept waiting for two hours? She described that event to me as one of the times she has been most angry in her life. There were various factors in the build-up. When she first got there, she saw the waiting room was very crowded, but thought perhaps there were quite a few doctors and nurses working, so that it would soon clear. Gradually she realized that, on the contrary, the queue was moving only very slowly; and when she got talking to some of the others there, she found that every one of them had a 2 p.m. appointment. That caused a major step change in her level of anger, from quite calm to ‘pretty angry’. Not ‘absolutely boiling’, however: that came when, at around 3 p.m., the sole doctor and nurse who were in fact working at the clinic that day stopped to have their afternoon tea. And why shouldn’t they? you ask; most of us perhaps take a short break in the afternoon, and they had been working hard. Why not, indeed; but it was the manner of their doing it that provoked Judy. For they sat in the clinic room chatting to each other with the door wide open, so that all the patients could see them having their break – all the mothers (mostly) with their youngsters getting increasingly fretful while doctor and nurse only too visibly maintained their right to have a cup of tea. Not surprisingly, then, by the time Judy took her little girl in to see the doctor she was purple with rage. So did she give the doctor a piece of her mind? No; she didn’t say a word about it.

Now, this is amazing on the face of it, because if you talk to Judy now, ten years after that event, she still begins seething at the recollection of it. She was so angry. And yet she simply didn’t mention it when she got to see the doctor. Why could that be?

The short answer is: because of her inhibitions. It’s not that Judy is an ‘inhibited’ kind of person, just that there were inhibitions in action that held her back; some kind of self-control mechanism. We can probably guess the kind of thoughts that were going through her mind – things like: ‘If I get on the wrong side of the doctor, will my youngster get the best treatment he is capable of providing?’ Judy, indeed, confirms that this is true, that is exactly the thought that was uppermost in her mind. But she also confesses to a secondary inhibition, namely: ‘You just don’t go around getting angry with doctors.’ Rightly or wrongly, she held this as a rule for herself, a rule that held good even when she was so badly treated by a doctor.

That second inhibition (‘you don’t get angry with doctors’) is termed an internal inhibition: in other words, it is an inhibition which exists entirely internally, in the mind. There is no external threat, like the police coming to arrest her, which would prevent her from being angry with the doctor – purely an internal rule she had for herself.

What about the first inhibition? The one which said maybe her child wouldn’t get the very best treatment if she became angry with the doctor? Yes, that is an external inhibition, inasmuch as it was a fear of the consequences that stopped her venting her anger.

Let’s look back now at the example in Chapter 1 where David came round the corner and saw a teenager smashing his car window and starting to take the stereo out. David caught the teenager, and, sitting astride him on the ground, described himself as being completely overwhelmed with anger against this boy who felt he could simply go and take things that didn’t belong to him. So, now he had him on the ground, at his mercy, why didn’t he throttle him or smash his head up and down against the pavement? Again, the answer is ‘inhibitions’: but were they internal or external? Was it the fear of being hauled off to court himself on a much more serious charge than theft, or was it some deeply ingrained rule that said that you don’t go smashing people’s heads up and down on the pavement no matter what they’ve done?

Who knows? Probably a combination of the two. Either way, the episode certainly illustrates the power of such inhibitions because David clearly was, from his description, absolutely beside himself with rage.

Another example of the power of internal inhibitions – simple rules we make up for ourselves – came from a publican I was talking to recently. He described how one of his customers was arguing loudly with another and was going to hit him. The man who was about to be on the receiving end of the punch took a step back, raised his hands in a placatory gesture, and said, ‘Hey, hey, hey . . . I’m over forty.’ This remark, said the publican, just put a pause into the proceedings while the would-be assailant checked his memory banks to see if there really was a rule against hitting people aged over 40. Interestingly, and no doubt much to the relief of the potential recipient of the blow, by the time he had found that there wasn’t really such a rule the moment had passed and he just stomped off.

Inhibitions as brakes on anger

Inhibitions, then, are in fact wonderful things – rather like the brakes on the car, they prevent us from going too far too fast. Later on in this book we are going to see how you can use inhibitions to your own benefit, so it is a good idea right now to get used to the idea that inhibitions are not just very necessary, they are extremely helpful mechanisms built right into the structure of our brains. It is also worth emphasizing that referring to ‘inhibitions’ in this sense is rather different from referring to somebody as ‘inhibited’, as a term of criticism. What we often mean in that context is that the person is constrained from displaying any emotion, not just anger, so that they may appear cold, detached, self-absorbed and unable to ‘let themselves go’. But in the context of keeping our angry reactions in check, inhibitions – both internal and external – are just what we want.

Let’s take one example of somebody who had not developed his inhibitions strongly enough – someone to whom, as a result, I was talking inside a prison. Brian recounted how one night he was standing at the bar, having a drink with a friend. He thinks he had probably had four or five pints of beer by the time the following incident took place. He says he was just lifting his pint mug to his mouth when somebody nearby jogged his elbow, with the result that a good amount of beer went not into his mouth but all over his face and chest. The next thing he knew, Brian had smashed his beer mug against the bar and pushed it into the man’s face – thereby, of course, inflicting very severe injury indeed. The net result of those few seconds for Brian was a five-year prison sentence. It was a great pity for both men that the assailant had not worked on developing his inhibitions. Again, those inhibitions could have been external (I’ll end up in prison, I’ll be thrown out of the bar, the police will be called) or internal (it’s not right to go around attacking people).

For most people, of course, the consequences of having undeveloped inhibitions are less dramatic than this: just a life which is impaired year after year by upsetting other people! So, there are immense benefits to be gained from learning about inhibitions and all the other techniques that we will cover later. For now it is sufficient to know about them and to know how important they are.

What holds us back?

Now we have seen how inhibitions operate, perhaps we can work out what holds people back in each of the situations we have looked at.

•   Why doesn’t the person who hears loud music from next door immediately go round and complain angrily? Answer: internal inhibition: ‘It’s right to be tolerant towards your neighbours’; external inhibition: ‘If I do that he will probably come round here complaining as soon as I make a noise, and he will probably go around badmouthing me to all our other neighbours.’

•   Why didn’t Pam get angrier with her noisy-eating husband? Answer: internal inhibition: ‘I must try and limit the amount of complaining I do, this is only a small thing’; external inhibition: ‘I have probably got some bad habits too, so if I complain about his eating, he will probably start complaining about all the things I do that annoy him.’

•   When people coughing during my talks used to annoy me, why did I not get angry with them and tell them to shut up or clear off? Answer: internal inhibition: ‘I shouldn’t speak rudely to people who have come to hear me talk’; external inhibition: ‘If I do that then there will be an icy-cold atmosphere for the remainder of the three days while everybody else is frightened to death of accidentally coughing.’

•   Why did Nigel not snap back angrily when his wife contradicted him in public? Answer: internal inhibition: ‘You don’t wash your dirty linen in public’; external inhibition: ‘People will think worse of me if I do that.’

•   Why did Alan, the electrician who was asked to do too many jobs, not say ‘no’ to his boss straight away? Answer: external inhibition: his boss might think worse of him and, come the time for redundancies . . .

SUMMARY

•   The ability to inhibit or control our anger is a very important ability to have. It is by no means a good idea to be ‘uninhibited’ where expressing our anger is concerned.

•   This is not to say that you should never be angry; rather, that you will be able to control your anger. As we saw in Chapter 1, irritable and over-angry people are those whose reaction is out of proportion to the situation that provokes the reaction.

•   Inhibitions are like the brakes of a car: sometimes they stop the car moving, but often they simply ensure the car moves at an appropriate pace.

•   Inhibitions are of two main types: internal and external.

•   Internal inhibitions are the thoughts and moral guidelines we have for ourselves.

•   External inhibitions are the awareness of the consequences that would happen if you were to respond out of proportion to provocation.

4

Constructing a system to explain irritability and anger

The ‘leaky bucket’

If we can put all that we have worked out so far into a diagram, it will help us predict when we are going to be irritable or angry and, more to the point, prevent it happening. So let’s have a look at Figure 4.1, which summarizes what we have said so far about Judy’s case.

Figure 4.1 Kept waiting in hospital

This is actually a particularly interesting example, because many people ask: ‘What happens to the anger?’ In other words, a lot of people assume that unless you ‘get rid of’ your anger, then it somehow just builds up inside you. This is in fact the reverse of the truth. What actually happens is that the anger just gradually dissipates. The best analogy is a leaky bucket full of water. The bucket was absolutely full in this case; Judy was very angry indeed. Nevertheless, over time, all that anger just gradually seeped away, just as water seeps out of a leaky bucket, and now in the ordinary course of things she doesn’t give it a thought. (Nevertheless, if you remind her of the event, it is like pouring some more water into the bucket!)

The key concept is doing what you think is appropriate in the situation. In this case the mother judged that her behavior was indeed appropriate as her child might well have not received the best treatment if she had kicked up a fuss. So, even in retrospect, she still judges that she did right. By the same token, we get angry with ourselves when, in retrospect, we think we did not behave correctly. Again, the important concept is behaving in proportion to the situation, doing what you think is right in the particular situation. (Later on, we will look at why our judgement sometimes goes haywire so that on occasion we let ourselves down very badly.)

Figure 4.2 shows the same model applied to a different situation. The key difference is that here the inhibitions weren’t strong enough to control the level of anger experienced by Sue. The anger therefore simply overcame her inhibitions and produced a response of ‘ranting and raving’.

Figure 4.2 Mug breaks on floor

Actually, this does Sue a slight disservice. Certainly this is the way she described the incident – that she simply ‘lost it’, in other words, simply lost all control. But if that were really true, why did she not pick up the carving knife (they were in the kitchen after all) and stab her son fifty times? Clearly her inhibitions were functioning to a degree, but only at a relatively weak level; or maybe they were functioning reasonably well, but the breakage produced such an immense level of anger that they were still almost overwhelmed.

When the bucket overflows

Let’s pursue this line of thought a little further by considering the case of Steve and the door left open in the pub. This fits into our model as shown in Figure 4.3.

On the face of it, this is an accurate representation of what happened. However, if you recollect the exact situation as recounted at the beginning of Chapter 1, you will see that I have omitted the fact that this was the fifth time the door had been left slightly ajar. On each of the previous four occasions, some extra anger had been tipped into the bucket. So, by the time person number five comes along and adds his ladleful to the bucket, the whole thing is brimful and ready to overflow – and he gives five the whole bucket full of anger. You may also recollect that Steve said when he was telling the story that the ‘victim’ was quite a small man. What if he had been six feet three and built to match? Possibly that would have strengthened Steve’s inhibitions! Most people feel inhibited about picking a fight with someone twice their size.

Figure 4.3 Door left open in bar

This concept of anger building up to the point where it overflows is an important one. Adrian, a senior salesman, told me the how he was repeatedly away from home on business, jetting around the world to various exotic destinations for weeks on end. While he was away his very attractive young wife Jenny took to having one affair after another. Gradually Adrian became suspicious and, after he had confronted her several times, Jenny admitted what had been going on. Though obviously hurt, Adrian thought he could cope and put it to his wife that so long as she told him everything he would be prepared to make a fresh start. So, through the course of the evening, Jenny confessed to the four affairs she had had. She went slowly and tactfully, and Adrian was able gradually to come to terms with what had happened. They went to bed, resolved that they could put it all behind them and make a fresh start.

But Jenny had remembered a fifth affair, and when they woke up the following morning, in the spirit of making a clean breast of everything, she confessed it. For Adrian, this was enough to make the bucket overflow, and they divorced.

What makes you angry?

By now you should be able to start making a tentative analysis of what makes you irritable and angry.

•   You may well be able to identify several triggers; for most people there is more than one thing that makes them angry.

•   You may even be able to quantify the amount of anger that each trigger typically produces, perhaps using a ten-point scale where 10 out of 10 is the angriest you could ever be!

•   Maybe you can identify what inhibitions come into play: both your internal inhibitions (the personal morality and rules you have for your own behavior) and the external inhibitions (consequences that may befall you if you over-react).

•   You may also be able to reflect upon the various responses you have made in the past when these triggers have set off your anger.

There is no need to do all that at this stage unless you want to; later on we will look at how to analyze these elements carefully, and what to do once you’ve analyzed them. It can be very rewarding work. But for now it may be useful to consider the kinds of questions we will be asking.

SUMMARY

•   We can construct a realistic model which explains how anger and our subsequent reactions to it come about.

•   It is well worth doing this because we can then analyze both our own actions and reactions, and those of others. Armed with this awareness, we can then intervene to lessen the anger we experience – and, moreover, to alter the responses we produce. It is those responses that people normally refer to as our ‘irritability’ or ‘anger’.

•   We will be developing this model as we go on through this book. The key headings so far are: the trigger (what triggers our anger); the anger itself (which can gradually build up, like increasing amounts of water being poured into a bucket); inhibitions (which stop us constantly giving vent to our anger); and the response (which can range from nothing at all, when we completely control our anger, through to catastrophic responses when we totally fail to control it.)

•   Importantly, there is no need to ‘let our anger out’. Very often, ‘letting our anger out’ simply makes it worse. Better to let it slowly seep away, like water running out from a leaky bucket.

5

Why don’t other people feel angry at the things that bug me?

If we can really plot things out just as neatly and tidily as described in the previous chapter, then you would think that what triggers one person’s anger would trigger the same response in another person. And, to a large extent, this is true. Most people, for example, don’t like other people shouting and swearing at them. It makes them angry; it is a trigger for their anger. Most people don’t like other folk stealing from them; that too is a trigger for their anger. Most people don’t like sitting in interminable traffic jams. That too makes most people angry, to a greater or lesser degree.

But it is also true that people respond quite differently to some triggers. For instance, one person may get angry at the sight of teenagers playing football outside his house, whereas another may view it as part of community life.

Seeing things differently

And that is the point. It is all to do with how we view the event in question. If we take a hostile view of it, then it will indeed become a trigger for our anger. If we view it tolerantly and benignly, it won’t.

This is not to say that we should view everything in a tolerant and benign way. As we shall see later, anger can be very useful and productive. Nevertheless, for the time being, let us just look at how things normally work.

•   How come one person kept waiting in a hospital outpatient clinic became really angry whereas another person didn’t? Answer: because the first person viewed it as inconsiderate and arrogant to schedule everybody in for a two o’clock appointment in a clinic which lasts three hours, and believes that people should show proper consideration for each other. The second person says, ‘It’s just one of those things,’ and expects no better from people.

•   Why does one man get intensely irritated by teenagers playing football outside his house, while his next-door neighbour doesn’t? Answer: because the first person sees it not only as lacking in consideration because of the amount of noise it creates, but also as a symbol of living in a more downmarket area than he would wish to. The second person sees it as part and parcel of living in a friendly, lively community.

•   Why did one of the group of three men sitting by the bar door get up and confront the person who left it ajar, whereas the other two weren’t bothered? Answer: because that man believed that each person who left the door open was doing it as a deliberate provocation and felt that he was losing face in front of the other drinkers. The other two felt there was no offence meant – just that people coming into a bar are normally more concerned about getting a drink than closing the door.

•   Why does one woman get angry about her husband eating in a very noisy way, while the same thing doesn’t bother thousands of others at all? Answer: because she sees it as a symbol of the difference between their backgrounds, a constant suggestion that they really should not be married at all; for her, it epitomizes the difference between them. For others, how much noise a person makes when they eat has no significance.

•   Why did I at one stage get particularly uptight about people coughing during my talks, whereas later on it didn’t bother me? Answer: because initially I thought that they might not be paying me enough attention, or even be deliberately provoking me, whereas later I felt they were doing well to come to the course when they could be off sick.

•   Why does one parent get angry when their son drops a mug on the floor and it breaks, whereas another simply says, ‘Never mind’, and gets him to sweep it up? Answer: because the first person sees it as wilful carelessness and a disregard of how much it costs to replace things, whereas the second realizes that they can easily afford to buy another mug without noticing it.

•   Why does one man get angry when his partner contradicts him in public whereas another one doesn’t? Because the first man views the contradiction as saying to everybody present that his wife doesn’t respect him, whereas the second man views it as ‘just the way she is’.

•   Why does one mother get angry when she finds her daughter taking a leisurely bath whereas another doesn’t? Answer: because the first mother said to herself that her daughter was only having a bath to avoid tidying her room, whereas the second mother was pleased to see her daughter taking good care of herself.

•   Why does one father get angry with his son when he sees he has not completed his homework, whereas another father doesn’t? Answer: Because the first father says that his son is a lazy good-for-nothing so-and-so who is trying to pull the wool over his eyes, whereas the second father says that any normal 12-year-old is bound to be more interested in watching television than doing his homework.

And so on. In other words, it is not so much the trigger in itself that produces the anger; it is what goes through the person’s mind when prompted by the trigger.

Appraisal and judgement

Returning to our model as set out in Chapter 4, we can now extend it to apply to three of the cases we have looked at, as shown in Figures 5.1–5.3.

This one extra box we have put into our model, headed ‘Appraisal/Judgement’, is a very important one indeed. It means that no longer are we at the mercy of events, or ‘triggers’. Now we can see that it is we ourselves who can decide what to make of these events, how to appraise or judge them. It is our appraisal or judgement which will determine whether we will get angry and to what degree. What is more, we can actually check out our appraisal with that of others. For example, the man in the bar could have said to his two friends: ‘Do you think these people are deliberately leaving the door open to annoy us . . . do you think everyone is laughing at us behind our backs?’ Whereupon, in all probability, he would have been reassured that this was not so, that the door was just not working properly, and this might have prevented him from getting angry.

Figure 5.1 Kept waiting in hospital

There is an important point here. Many people think that because they believe something is true, it necessarily is true: for instance, in this case, ‘Because I believe he left the door open to annoy me, it is true that he did indeed leave the door open to annoy me.’ This is very far from being the case; but it is an easy trap to fall into until we get used to questioning our judgements and checking them out with other people.

Figure 5.2 Mug breaks on floor

Figure 5.3 Door left open in bar

SUMMARY

•   This chapter has added just one more box to our model, but it is an important box.

•   That important box, ‘Appraisal/Judgement’, goes between ‘Trigger’ and ‘Anger’, and may totally prevent the trigger producing anger.

•   Later, we will look at ways of examining and altering our appraisals/judgements. For the time being, it is enough to know that simply because we think something is true, that does not actually make it true.

•   We are now working towards a comprehensive model with which to examine events that make us angry out of proportion to what one would reasonably expect.

6

Why isn’t everybody irritated by the same things?

This sounds like pretty much the same question we asked in Chapter 5, and in a sense it is. But bear with me, because there is a significant difference. You will remember that, in Chapter 5, we asked the question: ‘Why do some triggers make me angry but not other people, and vice versa?’ and the answer was: because you might appraise and judge the situation one way, and other people might appraise and judge it another way. The question we are really addressing in this chapter, to put it in its fullest form, is: ‘Why do I appraise and judge a situation in one way, whereas somebody else might appraise and judge it in quite a different way?’

Beliefs and judgement

So, how come you appraise and judge a situation one way while some other people appraise and judge it in another way? The answer is: ‘Because of the basic beliefs we have all developed over the years.’ These beliefs can be of several different kinds, for example:

•   beliefs about how other people are, what the world is like, even about how we compare with other people;

•   beliefs about how people are meant to behave, how people ‘learn lessons’, what’s important in life, and so on;

•   beliefs about how other people would see a particular situation, including possibly how a jury in a court of law would see it.

How do these beliefs fit in with the model we developed in the previous chapter? Clearly, our beliefs are going to influence:

•   our judgement and appraisal of the trigger;

•   our anger;

•   our inhibitions;

•   our feelings of anger;

•   our response.

So now our model has another element in it, as shown in Figure 6.1.

Figure 6.1 A model for analyzing irritability and anger

It’s probably easiest to see how this works if we go through an example or two.

What about the man in the bar, sitting with two friends, who finally jumps up and confronts the fifth person who comes in and leaves the door open? How come it was he who jumped up, rather than one of his two friends?

Working through our model, we can see that the trigger was just the same for all three of them: so that can’t be the difference.

What about the appraisal or judgement each of them makes? This will be affected by their beliefs about what other people are like. If one of them believes that people, generally, are ‘all selfish bastards who don’t give a damn about anyone except themselves’ he will probably interpret the situation differently from someone who believes that people ‘are all basically good, though sometimes their goodness needs bringing out’. So maybe that was the key difference between Steve (the one who jumped up and confronted the newcomer) and Ben and Chris (who didn’t).

Now we can move on to our next box, marked ‘Anger’. We can see that, primed by his beliefs about people in general, Steve’s brain is already more likely to be angry than either Ben’s or Chris’s; and it will be ‘recommending’ to Steve that he makes a response in keeping with how he feels. At this stage, too, beliefs come into play. If Steve believes that ‘people only learn anything if you give them a good bollocking’ then the chances are that his brain will be recommending something different from those of Ben and Chris, who believe for the most part that ‘the only way people learn anything is when they are allowed to sit down and think things through’.

From here we move on to ‘Inhibitions’. By now we can see that Steve, who thinks that people are ‘all selfish bastards who don’t give a damn about anyone except themselves’ and that ‘people only learn anything if you give them a good bollocking’, is already thinking in terms of a pretty hostile response. But possibly his inhibitions will tone it down. If he believes that ‘you don’t show your anger in public’, that might keep him under control. Equally, if he believes that ‘if you confront somebody they are liable to attack you’ then that too will restrain him, so long as the person leaving the door open is bigger than he is. On the other hand, if he believes that ‘if somebody deliberately provokes you then you’ve got to show them who’s boss,’ this is unlikely to do much to keep his anger in check.

Finally, then, we come to his response. We can see that beliefs are going to play a part here. If he believes that ‘It’s all right thumping somebody but you don’t ever use a weapon,’ his response is clearly going to be of a different order than if he believes that ‘If you’re going to pick a fight with somebody you have to be tooled up.’

So we can see in this example that the beliefs Steve holds are going to affect him at every stage. And these beliefs are nothing to do with the situation in question; they are beliefs he holds day in, day out. So if Steve wanted to radically alter the way he is, the way he feels and the way he reacts, he could work on his beliefs, perhaps bring them a bit closer to those of Ben and Chris. We’ll see how later on.

What about Anne and her 12-year-old in the bath? Anne, you’ll remember, got really angry with her daughter because she wasn’t tidying her room. Anne’s next-door neighbour, Elaine, also has fairly young children and she has always reacted differently to them in the face of stress. So let’s have a look at how our model would compare Anne and Elaine.

Again, the trigger or situation would have to be just the same: how would Elaine react if her 12-year-old had been resolutely not tidying her room, and how would this compare with Anne’s reaction?

Let’s have a look at the judgement or appraisal that each would make in the face of this event. Anne’s judgement is influenced by the fact that she believes that her daughter ‘deliberately does everything she can to annoy me’. Elaine, on the other hand, believes that ‘Children don’t annoy you deliberately, but they are naturally selfish and only lose that as they get older’. Anne, therefore, is inclined to see her 12-year-old’s behavior as deliberate defiance, designed to provoke her; Elaine, on the other hand, views her daughter’s similar behavior as a piece of thoughtlessness typical of a child of that age. As a result, Anne is inclined to be angry, Elaine much less so.

As a result of this belief, Anne’s angry brain is already recommending some kind of angry response. Unfortunately, Anne also believes that ‘You get nowhere by coddling kids,’ with the corresponding implication that ‘a firm hand’, either metaphorically or literally, is what is required. Elaine thinks differently. Even when she does get angry (which, you will be pleased to hear, she does sometimes) her basic belief is that ‘Children need a good example set for them.’ So, while she doesn’t mind confronting issues with her children, and them knowing that she is angry and hearing it in her voice, she does try hard not to ‘shout and scream at them’, and certainly doesn’t believe in smacking them.

What about inhibitions? Anne believes that if her neighbours hear her ‘going over the top’ in terms of shouting or smacking her youngster they will report her to social services. She says this is one of the main things that makes her able sometimes to control her temper. Elaine believes that it is simply not right to shout and scream at young children, and certainly not to hit them.

In terms of response, Anne thinks that ‘A good smack never did anyone any harm,’ while Elaine believes that ‘Adults hitting children is simply bullying.’

Beliefs and behavior

One of the interesting points raised by the example of Anne and Elaine is that it doesn’t matter whether beliefs are right or not, they still influence the behavior of the person who holds them. For instance, Anne may be correct in believing that ‘Kids do all they can to deliberately annoy you’ and Elaine may be wrong in believing that ‘Children are just selfish by nature and grow out of it eventually.’ It really doesn’t matter who is right and who is wrong: both are heavily influenced by their own beliefs. You sometimes even see the paradoxical situation where Elaine’s child may be annoying her quite deliberately but, because Elaine believes what she does, she not only leads a calmer life but also sets a better example for her child.

Let’s look at another example, this time involving flirting. Fiona and Graham live on a new housing development, and Graham has quite serious problems with jealousy. Hannah and Ian are another young couple who live nearby. Fiona and Hannah are good friends and are very similar in many respects. Unlike Graham, however, Ian has no problems with jealousy.

On several occasions Graham and Ian have faced more or less the same ‘trigger’. From time to time both couples find themselves at the same party – in fact, very often they will actually all go to the party together. Both Fiona and Hannah are warm, friendly and extrovert young women who like to have an uninhibited time simply in terms of dancing, drinking and feeling the pleasure of having friends around them. Graham and Ian appraise these ‘triggers’ in quite different ways. Graham believes that if a woman is married then she shouldn’t be showing any interest in any other man, and this is what he perceives Fiona as doing. Ian, on the other hand, believes that it is only natural for women to show an interest in men and vice versa. He simply believes that if you are married then ‘You shouldn’t take it any further than the interest stage.’ So, as a result of the same events, Graham becomes angry whereas Ian doesn’t. Graham’s angry brain is recommending to him an angry response, whereas Ian’s is not.

In terms of inhibitions, Graham believes that it is wrong to hit anybody, and certainly somebody you love, so even though angry he will not respond that way. (Interestingly, Ian is not totally averse to getting into fights; he does not believe that is totally wrong. Fortunately, however, he rarely becomes angry.) Graham also believes that if he ‘addresses the issue head on’ then (a) Fiona will think he is a ‘wimp’ for being jealous, and (b) this will put a damper on the fun they might have at any future party.

In terms of responses, Graham believes it is wrong to hit people so that is ruled out. He also believes it is undesirable to shout or to address the issue head on, so he tends not to do this. His beliefs about sulking, however, are not quite so negative; so that is what he tends to end up doing. Ian, on the other hand, believes that ‘Sulking is something women do,’ so even when angry doesn’t tend to respond like that.

It is clear from these examples that our beliefs can have an all-pervasive effect on us – not just on irritability and anger but on every aspect of our feelings and emotions: jealousy, anxiety, depression, anything you care to mention.

Beliefs and other people

Once a year my mother and I go off on two or three days’ holiday, just the two of us (my family stays behind and has a bit of respite). A couple of years ago we found ourselves in Paris, in an extremely nice hotel which we could certainly never have afforded had it not been for a very special offer at the local travel agent. Anyway, once there, we look around for what to do. Tickets available from the hotel include an evening at the Moulin Rouge which is, as you know, a kind of review bar for tourists. It looks good, and of all the attractions on offer it is the only one we have heard of. The only snag is that it is expensive: 900 francs per person for the evening – that’s about £80 or $125. However, this (it seems) includes everything: dinner, drinks, review, the lot. So we sign up, and the next evening off we go. The Moulin Rouge consists of a big stage on which a lot of girls strut their stuff – and an even bigger area where about five million tourists eat their dinners at tables crammed more closely together than you have ever seen before. We are given a terrific table, right next to the stage, are given complimentary drinks shortly followed by the first course of our dinner, and sit back for a good evening. As the show starts, I notice a very small card sitting on the table, pick it up and just manage to read what it says in the gloom. My hazy brain does a slow translation: ‘minimum drinks order 600 francs per person’. I am stunned. Not only having paid handsomely for our two tickets, we are now faced with having to pay another substantial sum for drinks. I am not even sure I have got that much money on me. Everywhere I look I see twenty-stone bouncers, and begin to realize the true meaning of the phrase ‘tourist trap’.

My mother is pretty engrossed in the show. I am feeling sort of nauseous, and, even from the inside, can tell I must look glazed. The Third Act finishes and there is a gap before the band starts up to herald the Fourth Act. At this point I mention, calmly of course, that there is a card on the table that says there is a minimum drinks order of £50 or $85 per person.

And this is where beliefs come in. Me, I believe that all big cities are the same and that if you go to a tourist trap then you expect to get trapped. My mother, she has had good holidays in France so, quick as a flash, she says: ‘No, it’s all right, the French are nice’ – without taking her eyes off the stage. It is a simple belief, deeply embedded and has ramifications for a thousand and one situations that might arise in France. (And, thank goodness, she was right: the card’s strictures didn’t apply to us.)

Not long after the Moulin Rouge experience, I came across another example of an extended version of ‘French people are nice.’ I was walking along a promenade in a quiet coastal resort, and coming towards me was a man of about 25 who clearly had significant learning difficulties. He had a rucksack which was causing him some trouble: he had managed to get it properly hooked over one shoulder, but the other side was sort of pinning his arm halfway behind him. This posture will be familiar to anyone who has ever tried to put a rucksack on; and it’s much more easily sorted out by someone else than by the wearer. So this man simply walked up and stood in front of me without saying a word; and I sorted out his rucksack.

What does that say about this man’s beliefs about other people? ‘Other people are nice.’ So nice, in fact, that if you are having trouble with your rucksack, all you have to do is go and stand in front of a random person and he or she will sort you out. You don’t even have to say anything!

So, not only do underlying beliefs influence just about every moment of your life; but doing a bit of work on your beliefs can pay off handsomely. We’ll look at how to do this later on in the book.

Where do beliefs come from?

Some of you reading this might be wondering where our beliefs come from. Well, clearly they come from our experiences. Many of them come from early experience (our childhood, school and upbringing) and are never revised. Sometimes, for example, people are taught as children that everybody in the world is out for what they can get, so you have to watch your back. Others, although they are not explicitly taught such lessons, pick them up for themselves through observing others. Equally, many people are taught as children that ‘people are basically good’, or have had the sort of upbringing which has led them to believe that this is the case, whether or not it was spelt out for them.

On the basis of these ‘mega-beliefs’ we make rules for ourselves. For instance, if I believe that everyone is out for what they can get, I will have a series of sub-beliefs along the lines of ‘I must keep my wits about me,’ ‘You have to watch everybody like a hawk or they’ll take advantage of you,’ and ‘If you give someone an inch they’ll take a mile.’ Equally, if I believe that people are basically good I will have a series of sub-beliefs along the lines of ‘We must trust each other in order to flourish,’ ‘The best place to relax is in the company of others,’ and so on.

SUMMARY

•   We set out in this chapter to answer the question of why a particular situation would irritate one person and not another.

•   We came to the conclusion that it is to do with our beliefs about ourselves, other people, the nature of the world, how people are meant to behave and how we are meant to behave.

•   These beliefs are developed over the years through our experiences and observations, often based on the things we are told when we are young.

•   We found that our beliefs also underlie our inhibitions. Some people believe that you shouldn’t ever hit anybody, even if it’s called ‘smacking’. Other people believe you mustn’t hit anybody unless it’s someone much smaller than yourself, like your child. Other people believe that it’s wrong to shout. Other people believe that it’s right to talk things through with people even if they are very young. Other people believe that to set a good example is very important. All these beliefs will form part of our internal inhibitions. Others are much more constrained by the likely results of their actions, so believe that it is ill-advised to pick a fight with somebody bigger than you, as you’re likely to get hurt; these beliefs form part of their external inhibitions.

•   People even have beliefs about the kind of responses it’s okay to make. Some people believe that an obviously aggressive response is inappropriate, but sulking would be okay; and so on.

•   All this knowledge about beliefs and their influence forms another important area that we will be able to use to our benefit when we come to Part Two of this book.

7

Why am I sometimes more irritable than at other times?

Up to now we’ve concentrated largely on the question, ‘Why do some people get angry more easily than other people?’ And we’ve come up with lots of answers – or at least, we could work out lots of answers for lots of different situations if we wanted to by going through our model. Some of the answers might be as follows:

•   John gets more angry than Ken because John finds himself in more anger-making situations than Ken does.

•   Laura gets more angry than Mona because Laura tends to judge and appraise situations differently from the way Mona does.

•   Norma gets more angry than Olive because her inhibitions aren’t so well developed.

•   Pete seems to get more angry than Quentin because Pete will countenance more hostile responses than Quentin does. For example, Pete will shout and threaten while Quentin tends to sulk.

•   Rachel gets more angry than Sarah because Rachel believes that other people are basically a self-centred lot who can’t be trusted, so she tends to misinterpret some situations.

And so on.

So, we can now make some more informed and reliable judgements about why some people get more angry than others, or seem to be more angry than others (because of the way they respond when they are angry). And this is good, because if we want to be one of those people who is angry less often we can already see that there are going to be some very powerful things we can achieve. We have a nice model which we can apply systematically in your own particular case.

Moods

But for many people it is the variation in their irritability that really concerns them: in other words, some days they feel really irritable, other days they don’t. If you are one of these people then you will know that this variation causes major problems for people around you, because they never know ‘what mood you’re going to be in’. So they can never relax properly with you, and that in turn means that the feelings of intimacy and closeness that would otherwise develop between you and them simply don’t have a chance to take root.

Moreover, you will also know that this causes major problems for yourself – not just in how it impairs the intimacy of relationships, but also because you continually feel as though you have ‘let yourself down’. If you have these big variations in irritability you will sometimes look back on things you did yesterday, or even earlier on today, and feel embarrassed or ashamed by them. For, although they seemed perfectly sensible and justifiable at the time, now you can see that you were being excessively irritable – you were in ‘a bad mood’. (Actually, they don’t always seem that sensible at the time; maybe you know when you’re feeling irritable, and that’s a very bad feeling. The trouble is that it seems very difficult to ‘snap out of it’ at the time, and indeed it is.)

The good news is that there are all sorts of things that we can do to keep ourselves in a ‘stable mood’. But first we need to focus on the key concept of ‘mood’.

In terms of our model, like ‘Beliefs’, it influences all four of the major boxes from ‘Appraisal/Judgement’ downwards, so that the model now looks like Figure 7.1.

How does this work? First of all, take the way mood influences the way we appraise and judge things. Try thinking of Tim, who does indeed have problems with his moods and who will see things quite differently depending on whether he’s in a good mood or a bad mood. He drew up a table to show just how differently things could look to him (Table 7.1).

Figure 7.1 A model for analyzing irritability and anger

Uma has exactly the same problem with her moods, and she constructed a similar table (Table 7.2).

It’s clear from these few examples that anybody who is in a remotely similar situation to either Tim or Uma will be having a great deal of trouble making sense of their life. One day they’re up, the next day they’re down. One day they’re laughing and joking with people; another day they’re snapping their heads off. Worse than that, it can vary from one half-hour to another. So what kind of things do we have to watch out for to keep our mood steady? Some of the main factors are:

•   Illness: mental illnesses (such as depression) or physical illnesses (such as viral infections) can both disrupt your mood.

•   Routine: it is very important to maintain a fairly consistent routine in terms of times of eating and sleeping, to maintain a steady ‘circadian rhythm’. Otherwise you find yourself in a permanent state of ‘jetlag’, which is very disruptive.

•   Exercise: humans are built for activity, and during phases when we don’t get this we are liable to be that much more irritable.

•   Diet: some people eat lots of sugar-rich food which sends their blood sugar level sky-high and then correspondingly low. Other people feed themselves so poorly that they are effectively suffering from malnutrition.

•   Drugs: routinely consumed drugs such as caffeine, alcohol and nicotine are vastly underestimated in their effect. Recreational drugs can also devastate one’s mood.

•   Sleep: getting insufficient sleep on a regular basis is bad news indeed.

•   Stress: having too much to do, too many pressures on you, tasks you find difficult to achieve, and other life stresses take a severe toll on your moods.

•   Social factors: arguments with friends, relatives and workmates; bereavement, separation and divorce; simply feeling lonely – these are just some of the social factors that can affect our mood.

If you know that you sometimes get irritable, the chances are that there are several items on that list which look familiar to you. The good news is that we can work on them, and later on in Part Two of this book, we will see exactly what to do.

There are tremendous pay-offs here. Most people much prefer someone who is ‘the same every day’ to someone who is ‘downright moody’.

Case study: Georgina

Georgina went through a period of three years in her late teens when, she said, she would ‘snap anybody’s head off who looked at me in the wrong way’. It turns out this wasn’t quite true; there were just some days when she acted this way. Other days she was a thoroughly agreeable young person with lots of friends, a nice family life and occasional boyfriends. It turned out that the reason she was sometimes so irritable is that she was prone to get quite depressed, mainly on account of her boyfriends being only ‘occasional’. When she did feel depressed, however, she was snappy in the extreme, and even people’s attempts to cheer her up provoked an abrasive reaction. Unsurprisingly, some of her friends drifted away, while even the ones that remained tended to treat her with some caution.

The solution to Georgina’s problems was twofold.

•   First, she gradually worked on her depression until she settled in a fairly consistently happy mood. This was difficult, because she had set up a vicious circle whereby her depression caused her irritability, which caused some of her friends to desert her, which in turn exacerbated her depression. Nevertheless, she implemented three significant measures which helped her to be happier.

•   Second, and while she was working on her depression, she also worked on the ‘Response’ box in our model. In other words, she trained herself to ‘button my lip and count to ten’ whenever she felt like snapping.

The net result is that both she and her friends feel that life is now more predictable and, partly as a result, more rewarding.

SUMMARY

•   Sometimes you may be more irritable than at other times. One day you may be in a good mood, the next in a bad mood. The key concept here is ‘mood’.

•   There are lots of factors that influence our mood, notably illness, routine, exercise, diet, drugs, sleep patterns, life stresses and social factors.

•   We can work on these (as we shall see in Part Two) so that, if we want, we can be not only difficult to anger, but reliable and consistent: ‘the same every day’!

8

Is it always wrong to be angry?

Briefly, the answer is ‘no’. However, perhaps it is always wrong to be irritable.

Why is it not wrong to be angry? Simply because the question of whether anger is ‘wrong’ or not doesn’t really arise. Rather like gravity, anger is part of life; so to start questioning whether it is good or bad is to head up something of a blind alley.

This is not the whole story, however. Perhaps we can give a better answer by asking what purpose anger serves. Most of the things that are ‘part of the human condition’ do serve a purpose and one suspects that anger is no exception.

Anger and disapproval

One purpose is to help to produce ‘socialization’ in other people: in other words, to encourage other people to behave in the way we would like them to – or, more accurately, to discourage other people from behaving in a way we don’t want them to. The distinction is not just a question of semantics. It is, in fact, possible to influence a person’s behavior much more by encouragement than by discouragement. This point was encapsulated by the old cartoon depicting a fearsomely old-fashioned school with a notice on the wall reading ‘the beatings will continue until morale improves’, neatly making the point that some things simply cannot be produced by beatings – or anger, or any other negative means. Nevertheless, for our present purposes it is worth noting that anger does indeed serve a function of discouraging behavior that we don’t want.

The trouble with this is that if we happen to be rather intolerant individuals, then we can feel there is a tremendous lot of ‘behavior we don’t want’, which in turn means that we will spend an awful lot of our lives being angry. (In this context the concept of ‘zero tolerance’ seems to me a disastrous one. For the state to discuss, advocate and encourage a principle of ‘zero tolerance’ seems doomed to produce adverse consequences across the board.

On the other hand, if we ourselves are fairly tolerant individuals, and know what behavior we like and dislike in each other, then anger can be a highly appropriate response, though of course in moderation. Maybe ‘anger’ is not really the right word in this context; possibly ‘annoyance’ is nearer the mark. If somebody cares for us and cares about what we think, then to see that their behavior has annoyed us even slightly would be sufficient to influence them.

One piece of good news is that there is much less undesirable behavior than we think. Take the case of Walter and Yvonne, who were out for a day trip to the seaside with their children aged ten and twelve. It was 12.30 p.m., just coming up to lunchtime, when the family was walking past an ice-cream van near the beach. The ten-year-old asked for an ice cream, to which his father replied: ‘No, it’ll be lunchtime in a quarter of an hour.’ The boy was not to be pacified, however, and persisted in trying to persuade and cajole his father to buy an ice cream, refusing even to move on past the van.

His father’s response was to insist: ‘If I say no, I mean no. If you really want one, then you can have one after lunch.’

This was no good; the ten-year-old wanted his ice cream there and then, and achieving this was evidently becoming more important than life itself. His father, for his part, felt that it was important to make a stand and show his son that you can’t always have what you want.

Well, I will spare you the ghastly details, but suffice to say that that was the end of their day trip as any sort of enjoyable enterprise.

I talked to Walter about this afterwards in terms of the personality characteristics being displayed by the ten-year-old boy. What it boiled down to was that he was being very assertive and very persevering, both of which characteristics his father thought were admirable ones he’d want in his son when he became an adult. So, paradoxically, he felt he should be encouraging such characteristics rather than just getting angry when they are displayed!

This is only one small example of how tricky it can be to judge and appraise situations. Much more often than it seems at first sight, the characteristics that are being displayed when we are tempted to get annoyed are ones which, in other circumstances, we would actually value rather than condemn.

What it boils down to is that anger – or at least annoyance – can be entirely appropriate to express disapproval of other people’s behavior, when we really are sure that we disapprove of it.

Anger and motivation

Anger/annoyance also has another purpose, namely to provide us with the motivation to do things we otherwise wouldn’t do.

One of the angriest times I have ever experienced was when our nine-month-old daughter got locked in the car on a very hot summer’s day, with the keys also in the car. Nearby was a man from the emergency rescue service who wouldn’t help us in spite of our being members.

It was the middle of June, Amelia was in her buggy on the back seat of the car, and my wife had inadvertently locked the keys in the car. Distraught, she left Amelia and the car and went out on to the street, with our other daughter who was two, to seek help. As if the gods were really with her, she spotted a man wearing the uniform of the rescue service just fifty yards down the street. She explained her plight, to which the man replied ‘Are you a member?’

Patricia said yes, she was, to which the reply was: ‘Have you got your membership card?’

Patricia said: ‘Yes, it’s in the car.’

And the man’s response was: ‘Well, I can’t do anything without your membership card.’

However, in a fit of generosity he loaned her a coin to phone me up so that I could come with the spare keys. I got there as quickly as I could, gave Patricia the spare keys and went to speak to the ‘rescue’ man.

I say ‘speak to’, but that is perhaps misrepresenting what followed. I gave him a full and thorough account of what I thought of him and his family, lasting a good five minutes and much to the entertainment of passers-by.

Now, if you had asked me one sunny June afternoon to go and advise a representative of a road rescue service on how he should behave if somebody has locked themselves out of – and their baby into – a car, I would probably have said that I had better things to do. It was only the absolute rage I felt that fired me up to enthusiastically advise this particular man.

The same thing applies when we hear stories of people going to help strangers beaten up in the street, or countries declaring war on other countries that are trampling over the human rights of their neighbours.

How much anger is enough?

So, the interesting question arises as to how much anger we need to display in order to influence other people’s behavior. Clearly, there is a vast range available. As we said earlier, if a person cares about you and what you think, then your expression of the slightest hint of annoyance will probably be sufficient.

In fact, different rules hold good for physically violent situations such as war. So, for the moment, let us confine ourselves to non-violent interpersonal situations.

With anger, as with most other things, it is not a question of ‘the more the better’ if you want to be effective. The inverted U-curve, sometimes known as Aristotle’s golden mean, holds good here. If you like graphs, this is the thing for you. It is normally drawn as shown in Figure 8.1. It suggests that a little bit of anger will have some effect; a bit more anger will have more effect; but if you increase the anger too much, then the effect comes down again.

Figure 8.1 The traditional inverted U-curve

Actually, this ‘traditional’ inverted U is not quite what is needed in the case of anger. More accurate is the version shown in Figure 8.2. What this shows is that the ‘best’ amount of anger is just a small amount. If you increase it, the effectiveness decreases. And if you increase it even more, then the effectiveness is negative; in other words, what you are doing is counter-productive, and, far from influencing your target in the required direction, will provoke them to ‘dig their heels in’ or ‘react against you’, or however you like to describe it.

Figure 8.2 Graph showing effective anger

If you don’t like graphs, forget this and think about someone who’s not very good at making a cup of coffee. For the sake of argument, let’s agree that the best amount of coffee to put in a mug is one rounded teaspoonful. So Andy comes along, puts two rounded teaspoonfuls in his mug, adds boiling water and milk, sits down to enjoy it and finds it doesn’t taste very nice. Of course, he doesn’t know why it doesn’t taste very nice because he’s no good at making coffee. So what does he do? He goes and puts in a third teaspoonful, which, of course, makes it taste even worse. And if he’s really hopeless, he may even go back and add a fourth.

Now, the coffee example seems ridiculous to most of us because we know how much coffee to put in a mug. Not to Andy, though, because he’s never made his own coffee before, and he has no idea how to do it. This is an exact parallel with some people and their anger. They start off by displaying much too much anger and find that they don’t get the desired result. So what do they do then? Get even angrier still. To an onlooker this is as bizarre as Andy putting even more coffee in his mug when he already has too much. To the person concerned, however, it doesn’t seem like that. ‘If that much anger didn’t work, then perhaps twice as much will,’ they seem to be saying.

In summary, anger, like pepper, is best in very small amounts, if at all.

Does irritability have a purpose?

What about irritability? Does the same argument hold good there? The answer seems to be ‘no’, because the essence of irritability is that it is unjustified and inappropriate – more a reflection of your mood than of anything anybody else has done.

I have heard it said that the advantage of being known as ‘irritable’ is that it keeps everybody else ‘on their toes’. The implication is that you will always be treated as carefully as though you were at your most irritable, because even when you are in a good mood people put it down to the fact that they are ‘handling you with kid gloves’. So they carry on treating you that way.

For most people this has only a superficial attraction. Most people want to be respected and liked at work and in social situations, and liked and loved at home. While irritability may force others to cover up the manifestations of their disrespect and dislike for you, it does no more than that. There seems no shortcut to acquiring respect, liking and love, short of earning it. Being irritable normally means starting off with an overdraft.

SUMMARY

•   Anger is okay in the sense that most people get angry at some times; it’s something we have to live with.

•   Nevertheless, it does seem that we can influence the behavior of those around us much more by positive means than becoming angry.

•   Even so, anger – or at least annoyance – is a reasonable way of expressing displeasure at what somebody else does.

•   In terms of how much anger is appropriate, it is almost always a lot less then we think. Indeed, too much anger is not only ineffective, it is distinctly counter-productive.

•   Irritability is never justified. After all, it is defined as ‘unjustified anger or irritation’!

PART TWO

Sorting It Out

Part Two of this book is all about solutions.

Having read Part One, you now know a lot about irritability and anger. However, knowing about a problem is not the same as solving that problem. So in this part of the book we examine all the possible solutions.

There are several ways of reading this part. Each chapter title gives you a pretty good idea of what is in the chapter and why you might want to read it. So you can, if you want, go straight to the chapters you think are most relevant to you and read those first. In fact, you will find it works even if you just read those, and omit the others. You can ‘pick and choose’.

Alternatively, you can read steadily from here to the end, including every chapter whether or not it seems relevant at first sight. This isn’t a bad idea, because some of the content may turn out to apply to you even though it might not have looked like it on first consideration. I have tried to include lots of examples (there are twenty-four, in fact), and some of them come up repeatedly; you might well find that you can easily identify with some of these cases.

At the end of each chapter is a summary and a project (or more than one!) to do. It is those projects which are really going to make a good impact for you if you follow them through.

Whichever way you tackle this part of the book, I hope you find it useful.

9

Getting a handle on the problem: The trigger

If you think back to Chapter 4, where we were starting to work on the model of irritability and anger, you may remember that the most basic model looked like Figure 9.1. This diagram doesn’t contain all sorts of boxes that we added as the model developed, but does contain three of the most essential ones. We can see that if any one of these three boxes is altered, then the whole sequence of irritability and anger comes to an end.

Figure 9.1 A model for analyzing irritability and anger

For example, take Gerry, whose trigger is his neighbours playing music too loud. If that trigger doesn’t happen, then the irritability and anger don’t happen. Equally, even if the trigger does happen (the neighbours play their music), he still won’t respond with anger if he appraises it as ‘just them having a bit of fun – the thing to do is live and let live.’ And finally, even if the trigger does happen and he appraises it as ‘those awful people again – they need a good sorting out,’ he will still not display any irritability and anger if he takes himself off to see his friend in the adjoining road or puts his own earphones on.

So, this simple model yields three possible solutions:

1   somehow or other have the neighbours not play their music;

2   appraise it in a different light; or

3   respond in some different way.

In this particular example, which would you say is the best solution? Personally I’d go for either number 1 (ideally) or number 2.

Or what about Anne, who said she completely ‘lost it’ when she found her twelve-year-old daughter washing her hair in the bath instead of tidying her room? Again, there are three possible options:

1   she could have somehow got her daughter to tidy her room (we’ll go into how later on);

2   she could have appraised it a different way (‘Well, at least she’s keeping herself clean’); or

3   she could have responded in a different way, for example by taking herself off, calming down, and telling her daughter (again) that she expected her room to be tidied after she’d finished her bath.

Again it’s a matter of personal opinion, but possibly numbers (2) or (3) would be the front-runners in this case.

And what about Steve, who gave a good roasting to the fifth guy who left the bar door open? In that case he could have

1   removed the trigger (by moving to a different table after the first couple of times);

2   appraised it differently (‘There are worse things in life than having to push a door closed every twenty minutes’); or

3   responded differently, perhaps by asking each person to shut the door.

Possibly either (1) or (3) might be better in this case.

So, even with a simple three-box analysis some reasonably good solutions present themselves.

The odd thing is that in each of these cases the individual concerned had taken on a sort of ‘victim role’, as though they could do nothing about what was happening. So Gerry blamed the neighbours (‘What can you do if you’ve got neighbours like that?’), Anne told the story as just one more example of how ‘difficult’ her daughter was, and Steve saw his experience in the bar as one more example of how ‘ignorant’ other people are.

Keeping a diary

In fact, there’s no need to be a victim: there are lots of things we can do once we have ‘got a handle on’ the problem. In other words, once you know, reliably, what triggers your anger or irritability you are halfway to sorting it out. And really to get to know what triggers it, you have to keep a diary.

The best form of diary to keep, in the first instance, is illustrated by Diary 1. You will see there are just two boxes: one for you to write about the trigger, and the other one for you to write about how you responded. There is one blank copy of this diary included here, and there are ten more in the Appendix (pp. 278–85).

These diaries are very important indeed. Their function is, as I’ve just said, to enable you to get a handle on what makes you irritable and angry. If you can do this, you are halfway home. So exactly how do you fill them in? The answer is: it is best to fill in a diary sheet each time you get irritable or angry, and to do it as soon as possible after the incident. It is also a good idea to make your accounts as complete as possible. On the following pages I have reproduced more or less what was filled in by several people we have already described, when they kept their diaries.

Diary 1

Keep a record of when you get irritable or angry. Fill it in as soon as possible after the event. Note as clearly as possible what triggered your irritability/anger, and how you responded

Example (a)

Example (b)

Example (c)

Example (d)

Example (e)

Example (f)

Example (g)

Reading your diary

Well, never mind reading your diary for the moment. Let’s first of all get good at reading other people’s diaries.

Even before that, let’s recap on what the point of reading these diaries is: it is to obtain insight into what makes you irritable and angry, so that you can take action about it. And, to do that, you will first of all have to develop the skill of reading diaries astutely.

Now let’s take the examples in order.

First of all, look again at example (a), in which Colin tells how he was driven to distraction by his neighbour’s kids playing football in the street. Which of the following possibilities do you think was the trigger:

1   the kids repeatedly running across his grass;

2   the football hitting his window;

3   the thought that his neighbours showed no consideration for him;

4   the belief that kids playing in the street makes the area look poor?

In this particular case the answer Colin gave was both (1) and (2); but what really irritated Colin was that the neighbours had no consideration for people around them, and indeed made the street look like a rough area. So in a way Colin’s anger had more to do with his appraisal and judgement of the trigger, rather than the trigger itself. Nevertheless, if he wants to sort out his irritability and anger he needs to spot the ‘visible’ trigger of the boys playing football. Once he knows this is his weak spot, then he can sort out how to re-appraise it, if that is what he decides on.

If Colin wanted to become less irritated and angry, he could view the children playing outside in a different light. He could view it simply as ‘kids having a good time’ and ‘showing that the street is a lively place to live’. Do you think that is likely to work with this man? No, neither did I.

So what is left? In this case, the main thing is to look in the response box. If you recollect, his response was to take the ball from the kids and storm round and shout at their mother. What other response do you think he might have made? Which of the following do you think would be best:

1   switch on the television, turn the volume up loud until their game is over;

2   every time the kids appear on the street, go round to their mother and put his point of view in as friendly a way as possible;

3   do nothing, just blank it all from his mind?

I would suggest that option (2) is the best one: to go round and put his point of view, amicably, just as often as he likes – preferably, from his point of view, just as soon as the kids appear on the street.

Many angry and irritable people make the mistake of thinking that the best reaction is (3), to ‘do nothing at all’. This is not necessarily the case, particularly if you think that you are legitimately aggrieved. In such cases it is only right to stick up for your rights, assertively. But ‘assertive’ does not mean ‘angry’ or ‘aggressive’.

So, in example (a), perhaps the best bet is for Colin to alter his response; and this is what he did. Nevertheless, the starting point was for him to be clear about what triggered his anger, rather than just thinking he was generally bad-tempered.

What about example (b), where five people, one at a time, came into the bar and left the door open behind them? They came at roughly 15–20-minute intervals and, finally, Steve got so angry that he confronted person number five.

So what was it that really triggered Steve’s anger? There are several possibilities; which one do you think is most accurate:

1   the door being left open and the consequent cold draft;

2   the expression on the fifth man’s face, being so self-centred and not caring about the cold air coming in;

3   Steve’s perception that he was being made to look foolish, having to get up all the time to shut the door that somebody else had left open;

4   Steve’s perception that he was not being given enough consideration by these other people?

Here, the literal trigger is (1), the door being left open and the ensuing blast of cold air. That – possibly in conjunction with the expression on the person’s face – led to Steve’s appraisal that he was being made to look foolish, that he was not being shown enough consideration.

So what could he have done to get rid of the trigger? (After all, getting rid of the trigger is normally what we want to do. If we can get rid of the trigger it stops the whole thing snowballing.) Which of the following would you recommend:

1 move to a different part of the bar, away from the door;

2 don’t look at the person’s face, so it doesn’t annoy you;

3 realize that you are not being made a fool of;

4 don’t worry about whether people are showing you consideration or not?

There is an argument in favour of each of these; which one(s) did you choose? Personally, I would go for number (1), even though it’s not very ‘psychological’. There are some things that most people would find irritating, and sitting by a door that people keep leaving open is probably one of them.

But what do you do, I hear you saying, if there are no other seats in the bar? In that case we have to look at the response. How did Steve actually respond? He jumped up and behaved in a threatening way to poor old person number five, having said nothing at all to the previous four people. So what might have been a better response? Maybe he should have just asked each person coming in to shut the door, in a non-aggressive way? We will look at this again later.

Now, you may have noticed that this bar example is rather different from the previous one. You may feel that there’s more point in discussing the neighbour example, because that is an on-going situation which keeps happening every day or every week, and it’s a good one to sort out a solution for. With the bar example, we seem to be harking back to something that’s over and done with, so what’s the point in going through it all over again?

The answer is that you can get so good at analyzing situations that you analyze them automatically, even as they’re happening. So, whereas Steve may not find himself in an identical situation again, sitting right by a bar door that people keep leaving open, he may find himself in a somewhat similar one. In that case, if he has worked out a way of dealing with it, he will be able to analyze it even as it’s going on and, hopefully, act in a better way.

What about example (c)? This was the case of Pam, who is so acutely annoyed by her husband when he eats noisily. Again, what do you think was the ‘real’ trigger for her annoyance:

1   the sheer decibel-level of her husband’s eating – he should learn to eat more quietly;

2   the fact that he carried on talking to her while he was still chewing;

3   the fact that she saw it as symbolizing their incompatibility;

4   the fact that she had nothing better to do than worry about how much noise her husband made when he was eating?

Numbers (1) and (2) are the literal triggers. So how could we remove them? Earplugs to cut down the decibel-level won’t help. Talk to him while he is chewing so that he isn’t tempted to talk while chewing? Perhaps not.

Really, the problem lies in Pam’s appraisal that the chewing symbolizes their incompatibility. So, ultimately, it is either that – or their incompatibility itself – that needs working on. Nevertheless, she does need to be clear on the initial trigger so that she can take action on it. In the interim she might also ask him to chew a bit more quietly. But that would probably be missing the point.

The next example, (d), involved Sue’s teenage son Ian, who dropped a mug on the floor and broke it. Again, what was the trigger:

1   the mug breaking;

2   the cost of the mug;

3   the loud noise the mug made when it hit the floor;

4   Sue’s appraisal that Ian is careless and needs to be taught a lesson?

Well, number (1) is obviously the ‘literal’ answer, but it is quickly followed by number (4). Clearly, once Sue knows what the triggers are for her thinking like that (‘he is careless and needs to be taught a lesson’) she can prepare a more helpful appraisal and train herself to use it at such times. (Such an appraisal might be: ‘We all drop things on the floor from time to time, youngsters especially. There’s no need to get uptight about it.’)

So, what have we got so far, from looking at these first four examples?

• It is sometimes quite difficult to see exactly what the trigger is, because the ‘literal’ trigger and the appraisal are jumbled together.

• It is worthwhile disentangling these two aspects, because then you can prepare a more helpful appraisal if need be, and be ready to use it next time the trigger for your irritation and anger appears.

• Keeping a diary, on the model of Diary 1, is helpful in doing this.

• Often the key lies in learning a different response, for example tackling the neighbour in a different way, asking people to shut the door, tackling the underlying issue of compatibility, telling the youngster to brush up the broken mug. But the same argument applies; before we can prepare a more helpful response, we need to be clear about what triggers our irritation and anger.

Let’s move on now and have a look at the other examples.

The fifth one, (e), was about Alan, the electrician who was asked to do too much by his boss. What was the real trigger:

1   being overloaded with work;

2   feeling he is being put-upon by his boss?

Clearly the literal trigger is being overloaded with work. Feeling put-upon by his boss is the appraisal Alan makes.

In example (f) Anne lost her temper with her twelve-year-old daughter who was washing her hair in the bath.

What was the trigger for her anger:

1   the sight of her daughter in the bath;

2   the fact that her daughter hadn’t tidied her bedroom;

3   the fact that she felt her daughter was being defiant;

4   the sense of frustration that she wasn’t bringing her daughter up very well?

You will notice that a fourth option has crept in here that has got nothing to do with baths, tidy bedrooms or anything else. And this is sometimes the case. For example, some people will fight and argue simply because they are ‘bored’ or ‘frustrated’ or whatever. So in this case it is a possibility that Anne’s anger has more to do with the frustration of wondering whether she is bringing her daughter up well than anything else.

In fact, frustration in general is frequently a trigger for anger or aggression, as was discovered by Miller and his colleagues back in the 1930s: a finding published as the ‘frustration–aggression hypothesis’.

So what was your best answer as to what the trigger was for Anne? Possibly it was a mixture of frustration (partly to do with whether she is bringing her daughter up well, partly to do with her inability to get the girl to tidy her bedroom) and just seeing her daughter sitting in the bath when she wanted her to be doing something else. Her perception of ‘defiance’ is more an appraisal, following on from the trigger.

And our final example, (g), was to do with Ken, the stressed-out executive. What was the trigger for his irritability:

1   trying to cope with more work than he could reasonably do;

2   his colleague Phil being tactless;

3   just being in a bad mood that day?

From his account it sounds as though it was a combination of all three. Certainly he was overloaded with work, so he was in ‘a bad mood’; but also perhaps the colleague was a shade tactless. Triggers can sometimes be slightly complex, as in ‘my colleague being tactless when I’m overworked and in a bad mood’. Quite possibly none of the three elements mentioned (tactlessness, overwork, bad mood) would cause him to be irritable on its own.

Reading your diary (again)

The previous section will have got you pretty good at reading diaries in general – which means that you are also going to be pretty good at reading your own.

So all you have to do now is keep a diary of most of the times you get irritable and angry, along the lines described. Then analyze it to determine your triggers.

What you a looking for is a (short) list of triggers for your irritation and anger. Here are some that other people have produced:

•   the neighbours playing loud music

•   the kids next door playing football in the street

•   the people next door showing no consideration for their neighbours

•   other people being inconsiderate (as in the bar door)

•   other people putting themselves above me (as in queue-jumping)

•   my husband eating his food noisily

•   my husband

•   my wife

•   my children

•   my partner

•   George, at work

•   my son being careless

•   being kept waiting

•   being contradicted or proved wrong in public

•   being overworked by my boss

•   being dumped by my boyfriend

•   my partner telling other people about things which were just between us

•   my wife flirting with other men

•   being made to look foolish in public

•   my daughter being lazy

•   my daughter being disobedient

•   my son telling lies

•   people stealing from me or damaging my property

•   bouncers

•   policemen

•   being carved up by another driver

•   being crammed in the tube

•   being stressed out

•   being bored

•   being tired

SUMMARY

•   It is important to have a very clear idea of what triggers your irritation and anger.

•   Once you have that, you can either remove the trigger (although this is frequently impossible) or take a range of other actions, which we will cover later on.

•   The best way of identifying what triggers your irritation and anger is to keep a diary; simply trying to recollect what triggers it is surprisingly unreliable. A good diary form for you to use (Diary 1) is included here.

•   When you keep your diary you will find that you sometimes confuse triggers with appraisals (for example, writing the trigger down as ‘half a dozen selfish so-and-so’s down the bar’ rather than ‘half a dozen people coming in and leaving the door open’). Nevertheless, this can be helpful because, once you come to make you final (short) list of what triggers your anger, you may decide that the ‘real’ trigger is indeed ‘other people’s selfishness’ rather than ‘doors being left open’.

•   A list of the triggers that other people have found for their anger is given above; this may be helpful as a starting point when compiling your own.

PROJECT

•   Probably by keeping the diary (Diary 1), get a crystal clear idea of what triggers your irritation and anger. It may be specific (people leaving the lounge door open) or diffuse (my son being careless – which could be manifested in lots of ways), external (someone else doing something, e.g. dropping a mug on the floor) or internal (within you, e.g. being bored, being tired). However you do it, become an absolute expert on what makes you irritable or angry, so that if someone were to ask you, you could give them a vivid description of what does it for you.

•   If possible, remove those triggers. You will find that this is surprisingly difficult. Some triggers can be removed, others cannot. Don’t worry in either case. The following chapters will show you what to do if the trigger can’t be removed. Nevertheless, if you can easily get rid of it, do so.