A Gestalt therapist's perspective
So many people come to therapy thinking they need to "manage" their anger. They've been led to believe (or have convinced themselves) that anger is a problem in some way, that it's an immature, dangerous, unacceptable thing. The solution they arrive at is to try and control it. They work very hard at not feeling it at all. They become tight, they shut down, they intellectualize it, they push it away. The problem is of course that that approach doesn't work for long. The anger doesn't go away; it simply finds another way of expressing itself.
As a Gestalt therapist, I start from a very different position. You can't control when anger emerges. Something happens (a stimulus), a thought arises, and an emotion follows. Those first few steps are largely automatic. What you can influence is what you do next (your behaviour). And behaviour, more than we often realise, changes the environment which in turn produces new thoughts and new emotions. The leverage is absolutely there, just not where most people would expect it to be.
Moving from "I won't be angry" to curiosity
The biggest thing that I see people do is move away from the rule of "I'm not going to be angry" and instead become curious. What about that event actually produced that feeling?
"I'm not going to be angry" is a strategy (one we typically acquire early on) for staying safe or acceptable. Curiosity about the particular incident is a completely different thing. It treats the anger as information rather than something to be got rid of.
"Why" versus "what is it about this?"
That's the distinction that gets to the heart of the matter. It's the difference between a simple description of a phenomenon and an explanation of the phenomenon.
Clients often get stuck between two questions that sound similar but lead in very different directions:
- "Why did that make me angry?" leads to explanations, rules and history. ("People shouldn't do that." "My father always ignored me.")
- "What is it about that event that made me angry?" is the actual contact. It's the specific word, the tone, the action or the absence of action that made the impact.
A simple example
Here's a simple example I use: you see a man kick a dog and you're angry.
- The "why" version: "You shouldn't kick an animal."
- The "what is it about" version: "That isn't fair to the dog, and I feel utterly helpless watching it."
What the anger is usually about
The first response lays down a rule. The second response describes what actually happened: a sense of unfairness and helplessness. Once the client can make that distinction the anger tends to become much clearer and less all-consuming. It's focused on a particular thing rather than requiring a wholesale defence against the experience of feeling anything.
If we're just looking at "what is it about this" then the conversation invariably moves down below the surface event to something more fundamental: respect, trust, commitment, fairness, safety or being taken seriously. The late text, the unfinished sentence, the broken agreement, the kicked dog is the surface trigger. What the anger is actually about is the underlying thing that has been interrupted or breached.
The reframe is now useful: you're not really angry about the incident per se. You're angry about the lack of respect (or lack of trust or lack of fairness). The incident still counts, it's just not the whole story. The object of your anger is now clearer and the person is in a better position to decide what they want to do about it.
