If I Were Not Such a Coward, This Is How I Would Handle My Anger
Nonviolence requires courage
In my last post, I wrote:
Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT) and Forgiveness have helped many people. For some, they may be the very best approaches to choose. Yet after learning about them, I wanted to know whether there were other approaches to anger. I was looking for an approach that respects and honors anger rather than teaching how to manage or manipulate it.
My search turned up two psychologists who have developed novel approaches to dealing with anger. These approaches require emotional courage to implement but for some people, they may be preferable to either CBT or forgiveness.
In this post, I share one of those two approaches.
Marshall Rosenberg grew up with violence. A week after his family moved into their inner-city Detroit neighborhood in 1943, there was a race riot. Thirty-four people were killed and 433 were wounded.
There weren’t many Jews in the schools Rosenberg attended. He experienced antisemitism and learned to use his fists to defend himself. It wasn’t easy.
Many people with a similar biography learned to accept violence as a part of life. But Rosenberg took a different path. He wanted to understand the causes of violence. He became a psychologist. But psychology, as he was taught to practice it, didn’t satisfy him.
Rosenberg felt that diagnosing patients created distance between himself and the people he was seeing. Labeling people as having mental disorders disrupted his ability to give his clients the empathy they needed to heal.
Nonviolent communication
Rosenberg developed the theory and practice of Nonviolent Communication (NVC). There’s more to NVC than I’ll be able to cover in this post, but let’s explore what NVC says about anger and how to respond to it.
According to Rosenberg, the usual ways we express anger—hitting, blaming, hurting others and wishing them ill—are too superficial. He wants us to get to the core of our anger. Once there, we can express what is truly happening within us.
The first step in this process may be the hardest one to take. In line with Dr. Lisa Feldman Barrett’s theory of emotions that I wrote about in my last post, we need to understand that no one made us angry. Someone else’s behavior might provoke our anger, but it doesn’t cause our anger. Our anger is caused by our interpretation of events.
For example, let’s say someone is habitually late for meetings with you. You might be hurt and want assurance that the person cares about you. Or you might be frustrated because you want to make every moment of your day count. Or you might be happy and calm because you welcome a few minutes of solitude. The other person provoked these feelings. But the feeling was caused by the meaning and value you placed on the other person being late.
No one makes you angry. It’s your thoughts that make you angry.
If you can fully internalize this truth (and again, this may be the hardest part of the process) NVC then asks you to take the next step. Stop dwelling in your thoughts. Instead, become aware of the underlying need the anger is pointing to. Once you are aware of the underlying need, you can communicate it.
Rosenberg put it this way:
Instead of engaging in “righteous indignation,” I recommend connecting empathically with our own needs and those of others. This may take extensive practice, whereby over and over again, we consciously replace the phrase “I am angry because they…” with “I am angry because I am needing…”1
Nonviolent communication in action
For example, after inquiring and learning that the person was late because they lost track of time while scrolling on their phone, instead of snapping angrily, “That’s rude!!” you can say, “I really value spending time with you. When you didn’t show up, it made me wonder whether you value spending time with me as well.”
Even as I write this, it makes me uncomfortable. In real life, I’m much more likely to say nothing, repress my feelings, and then wonder whether the person values spending time with me.
Noticing I was angry because I felt hurt, recognizing that my hurt comes from a concern that the person might not want to spend time with me, and then verbalizing that concern so we can have a conversation about it—that takes a kind of emotional courage that’s hard to muster.
Do I have what it takes?
I aspire to behave with this level of emotional awareness and courage. But the truth is, I often don’t succeed. In most of my relationships, I’m afraid to reveal myself. If I told someone I was concerned they didn’t value spending time with me, they might not respond truthfully. I’d feel vulnerable. Or they might communicate that they don’t place a high value on spending time with me. And that would hurt.
Upon examination, repressing my feelings is a bad decision. It’s worth it to me to experience a bit of vulnerability if the payoff is a more honest relationship. If I discover that the person doesn’t value spending time with me, that’s important to know. It would hurt to hear it, and I would mourn the loss of my prior, untrue, beliefs about our relationship. Yet it would free me up to live in the real world and avoid future hurt and unrealistic expectations. I would know to put my energy elsewhere.
It appears I have more to lose from emotional cowardice than I do from emotional courage.
Even though I know all this intellectually, I still find it difficult to implement. In my next post, I’ll share an approach that helps get underneath why it might be so hard and provides tools that can potentially make it easier.
A quick re-cap…Here’s how the different schools of thought we’ve examined so far might respond to becoming angry when someone is very late for a meeting:
1. Martha Nussbaum, drawing upon the tools of philosophy, tells us not to take these sorts of status injuries so seriously. If it was the president of the United States who was late, I wouldn’t take offense. I’d be honored the president was willing to meet with me. Experiencing this behavior from a peer, however, I’m insulted. The insult is a status injury.
Faced with this status injury, the voice in my head might say “What makes you think your time is more valuable than mine? I deserve more respect!” Nussbaum would likely recommend ignoring these petty thoughts and communicating to the other person that she would appreciate it if they made more effort to be on time in the future—and she’d leave it at that. Status injuries are not worth any more of our time and effort.
2. The forgiveness approach would ask if you were ready to forgive the person for making you wait. If so, you would go through a process whereby you would leave your anger behind and replace it with feelings of benevolence and kindness toward the person who was late.
3. Cognitive Behavioral Therapy would give you techniques to moderate your anger. It would help you find a calm, rational way to communicate your feelings. Similar to the recommendations from philosophy, in a calm and collected manner, you would request that the person make more effort to be on time in the future.
4. Nonviolent communication would inquire as to the source of your anger. For example, you might notice your anger is covering for a concern that the person might not care about you. You would communicate this concern to the other person, opening the possibility of finding out whether your concern is justified.
Marshall Rosenberg, Nonviolent Communication, 3rd Edition, Puddle Dancer Press, 2015
Our thoughts, rather than external events, are what truly cause our anger. It requires a significant shift in perspective and a deep level of emotional awareness to recognise and communicate the underlying needs driving our emotions.
Dan, I always look forward to your posts. Recently I've recommended to my husband that he subscribe to your publication.
As a coach I'm surprised how often my clients aren't able to recognize what feeling is evoked from a particular circumstance, or what need is not being met. If we can begin to educate ourselves in that realm of the human condition maybe non-violent communication would become easier for us. It does take courage as you so eloquently suggest.