Satisfied
Client of
Anger Busting™
To: James A. Baker
From: Satisfied Client of Anger Busting™
*This document
has not been edited or changed in any way. It is as received
by me. I hope you enjoy reading it as much as I did. Jim Baker
My Adventures
With Anger Management
“You know, I
haven’t taken the medicine or used the eye drops you prescribed.
I’m too busy! Listen, what I want to know is, why can’t I
see better? Look, I’m starting to get pissed off—you aren’t
doing anything to help me!”
I smile and calmly
explain for the twenty-third time what the problem is, why
the medicine is necessary, and why she isn’t seeing better.
“It’s medicine, Mrs. Smith—it’s supposed to help you. Why
do you think they charge so much money for it? If you don’t
take it, you won’t get better!”
After another
thirty minutes back and forth, my 10:00 grudgingly agrees
to “think about” whether she’ll take the medicine and drops.
“I never heard of a doctor who doesn’t make you better!”
I smile and she
leaves. My technician hears me sigh and roll my eyes. It’s
12:00 and the rest of my morning’s going to be angry.
Well, tough. I look forward to the day ending, fifteen angry
people, ten phone calls, and twenty dictated letters from
now.
Seven hours later
I’m on the road. Someone cuts me off--@%#&! Idiot! But,
aside from screaming inside my car, I just keep motoring on.
Someday, he’ll get in an accident, hopefully fatal. Improve
the gene pool a bit! A grimace and a laugh and I continue
on my way.
I get home. I’ve
got a long day of smiling at people when I just want to scream
at them, morons on the road, stuff piled up at home and at
work. I’m tense, seething, and every nerve in my body
seems to be firing at once.
And then, someone
at home says something. Anything would be the wrong thing.
And I explode:
screaming, profanity, cutting remarks, sarcasm,
and maybe something kicked or punched to punctuate my scintillating
monologue. And I notice my family looking at me like I’m a
raving maniac. Why?
And later, my
wife tells me I overreacted. And I don’t agree. I mean—yeah,
I guess asking me to find my travel receipts wasn’t necessarily
a felony. But overreacting? To the day I had?
You had to be
there to get it!
* * *
One evening I
took out a 3/8” ballistic glass panel at my wife’s business.
The panel was part of her office door, which some moron locked
(the moron was me, in fact)—my car keys were inside, I was
late to pick up my daughter, and I’d had a less-than-perfect
day at the office. When I found out that the key was not instantly
available (my wife was driving in with it), the correct thing
seemed to be to break in the door. Since I wasn’t thinking
logically, I let my ANGER made the decisions for me: my 230
pounds hit the door like a hammer. The rest is history.
Oddly enough,
my wife didn’t see the logic behind my taking out her door;
nor did the many people who come and go at the Tennis Center.
I think that “Neanderthal” was probably the most complimentary
term applied to me for a few weeks. I don’t need to review
the scene at home—any reader who’s ever been outside in minus
40 degree weather can imagine the situation.
Clearly I was
in trouble: very big trouble. And I couldn’t really explain,
even to myself, why it made sense for me to smash in the door.
I certainly wasn’t in fear for my life or rescuing someone
else. I actually felt ashamed and bewildered about why things
had happened the way they did. In my business, “bewildered”
is not a thing I usually let myself feel. Usually, my mind
has something to do with my behavior; in this case as in many
cases in the past, my mind was somewhere else as events unfolded
around me.
You had to be
there to get it.
* * *
Desperate situations
call for extreme remedies. I found myself typing “anger management
training” on my browser screen and up popped a long list of
links. The first on the list was “angermanagementseminar.com.”
I read the short blurb—it sounded good, to the point, no touchy-feely
BS. I clicked on it and started reading the home page, taking
things in as rapidly as anyone terrified of losing his family
can do.
Literally, my
life was on the line here. I clicked on the “contact us” link
after putting in my e-mail address, and e-mailed my query.
“I have a problem. What do I do now?” I figured I’d look at
some other sites, but decided to check my in-box. There was
an e-mail from James Baker, and a life-changing dialogue began.
First, the questions:
no drugs, no alcohol, no physical abuse of persons
(objects were broken at times), no associated psychiatric
diagnoses. I seemed to be a perpetually angry man with a major
problem with self-control (well, at home with the people who
matter the most, not in the office) and a very bad temper.
Second, the beginnings
of a solution emerged. No profanity was allowed. That one
surprised me—why profanity was one of my real talents! The
answer was staring at me from the computer screen. My hearers
don’t necessarily have a problem with profanity—I have a problem
with self-control. Profanity is a fuel which gets my anger
going, like an accelerant poured on a flame. Then, other directives
came thick and fast: no sarcasm, no criticism,
no arguing, no “free” advice, no yelling at motorists, no
hostile touching, no rapid-fire corrections of other members
of my family. What about my mission as a role model and educator
of my children? Didn’t they need to hear from me on a second
by second basis how to improve (or at least yell at motorists
more effectively) and become like me?
For a moment,
it all seemed overwhelming. And then I began to get it: confrontations
get my anger started. My problem was rooted in a lack of any
braking mechanism—I accelerated and kindled my rage until
I crashed and did something so rotten that it stopped me short,
or everyone around me just ran away. Either way, the outcome
was inevitably going to be bad for me and everyone around
me.
What would I
do with a brand new sports car with no brakes? Leave it in
the garage, of course. I could see that my anger had a similar
dynamic, and a similar remedy applied.
In a way, this
stuff made sense.
* * *
The next item
of business was to take the on-line course, which I did. I
won’t go over that in detail. Take it, if you haven’t done
so already. It is $45.00 well spent. I found it practical
and oriented toward a solution to the problem of dealing with
anger. I freely admit that I have deeper problems which will
need a great deal of work in the years to come; getting the
anger out of the way is critical to buying me the time to
solve those problems.
An early indication
that this anger management stuff was working came 48 hours
after my initial query. I’ll quote my e-mail written at the
time:
“ Now, part 2--incident
3 days ago. I was at the computer working on a lesson, when
I heard a tremendous crash which I knew meant that something
or someone went down the stairs. From the wailing, I knew
it was my 23 month old. Ordinarily, I'd have let out a loud
"F---!" and blasted out a blue streak of profanity
as I tore upstairs. I decided to try something different--pretend
to be a doctor at home. So I went up quietly, did a quick
assessment of the little guy (who went down in a tent, the
result of a game gone wrong)--scared, but not seriously hurt.
“Upstairs my
12 year old son is pounding his eight year old brother who
he blames for the accident. The boy is sobbing uncontrollably.
I raise my voice in a tone I've heard police and firemen use
on scene, and said, "The baby is NOT hurt. The baby is
all right."
“At that point, I discovered something interesting--everyone
is looking at me for guidance. My wife goes down to the baby,
and I separate the boys. I calm the eight year old down by
holding him, speaking in a level tone of voice, reiterating
that his brother is fine. I had him squeeze my two fingers
for thirty seconds as hard as he could with each hand and
then relax, and repeat several times, an old relaxation technique
I use with patients. After about a minute, he was coherent
and I set the game up again in a safer location. Obviously,
my 12 year old son has learned to use me as a role model.
”But, I discovered
that rage doesn't address my scared and powerless feelings--actually,
being the calmest guy in the room also made me the most powerful
guy in the room. Interesting discovery (as a doctor in the
office, I always pretend to be calm) at age 48.”
The take-home
message for me was to behave differently than I would have
in the past, to act like the person I hope to be immediately.
Phrased differently, if I act the way I once did, I will get
the same results I did in the past. That is not the same as
becoming a different person—modifying my self will take a
great deal of time and effort. Modifying my behavior allows
me to get the help and support of the most important allies
I have: my family.
* * *
I relearned some
interesting things. I was reminded that Walter Cannon, the
eminent American physiologist, did important work on the activity
of the autonomic nervous system (the “fight or flight”
model of behavior) and its control by the Amygdala.
The amygdala is a structure at the base of the brain which
takes over in emergencies and drives you forward into a crisis
or backwards out of one; the conscious mind is cut out of
the loop for a few seconds. That’s just long enough to take
out a glass door panel! This made perfect sense to me—I aced
physiology in grad school and med school.
Now some of the
other recommendations from the course began to make sense.
Banned behaviors, no profanity, avoiding angry confrontations,
relaxation techniques—all were oriented toward defeating the
tendency of the amygdala to step in and take over any tense
situation. It seemed to make sense that I had a Schwarzenegger
amygdala in a Dustin Hoffman body.
I was also focused
on practically assessing how other people were communicating
with me (as children, parents, or adults), and I with them.
I learned to recognize signs of anger in myself and others
in order to arrest anger in myself and deflect it in others.
I noted the four different styles of expressing anger
(I show all three of the “bad” styles in different environments)
including “assertiveness,” which is appropriate expression
of disagreement. I also learned about the Jo-Hari window as
a way of assessing how I came across to other people. Finally,
I learned about the importance of body language, tone of voice,
and speech content in communicating with other people (the
60-30-10 model); it still surprises me how little my words
matter as compared with my expression and voice.
If all of this
reads like Sanskrit to you, take the course. There is an intellectual
foundation beyond “Don’t do bad things!”
Ultimately, I
learned two extremely valuable techniques from the on-line
course. I call them my Ninja Anger Avoidance techniques. The
first one is, “silence”. Don’t come back when someone says
something provocative a reply in a microsecond. That’s your
amygdala’s response timeline. Instead, sip on that nice hot
cup of “Shut the heck up!” you’ve been brewing. I add a benign
smile and a chuckle for flavor. It tastes better than a fight.
The second effective technique is “agreement”. “Huh, you know
I think you’re right about that!” Again, use the benign tone
of voice and the smile. It takes minutes of training to perfect
these trouble avoidance maneuvers; the results can last a
lifetime.
There are other
things I’ve learned about myself which I will struggle with
for a long time to come. I don’t compliment people and don’t
believe compliments when they come my way. I rarely forgive
a wrong done to me and never forget it. I often replay angry
moments in my mind to figure out how I could have been even
better at being angry. I still seethe about things that happened
decades ago, which affects me even now. I use sarcasm and
cutting humor to express anger in disguise. I carry resentment
around with me all the time—thus, things that happened last
week or last year influence how I will react to something
that happens two seconds from now. Until it plays out, I don’t
see the connection and the people around me don’t either.
Only my amygdala knows for sure!
The model I use
day to day is that of the battery. I can store anger efficiently
like a new battery takes electrical charge easily. I can carry
that charge for unlimited times, and release it full-force
in a fraction of the time it takes me to think, “What’s going
on here?” My goal each day is to begin with a discharged battery
and try to remove any anger that I feel before it accumulates
in my battery. Sometimes the discharging mechanism goes on
“overload” and I need to get up and leave for a while.
I never used
to walk away from a dispute or an argument. I was at my best
giving it to the other person right in the face! The interesting
realization I’ve made through the course is that anger is
an addiction. My body craves the energy, the chemicals flowing
in my blood and extracellular fluid, the nerves firing like
machine guns. Like most addictions, the anger is not under
my control but it does influence my behavior: thus,
I am out of control when I am angry. So, while I’ve
missed out on most of my genetically-determined addictions,
anger remains part of my inheritance.
I wait for what
tomorrow brings with both worry and anticipation. I hope to
do better than I did today. To those who’ve never smashed
in a door and don’t understand the problem with uncontrolled
rage, I’d say,
“You have to
be there to get it.”
The Anger Busting
Workbook
by James. A. Baker
A ForeWord Magazine
"Book of the Year" Finalist
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