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| Beyond Anger Management Techniques | Educational Resources | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
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In this article:
WHAT WE DO WITHOUT REAL LOVE: GETTING AND PROTECTING BEHAVIORS If we don’t have enough Real Love in our lives, our subsequent behavior is then often determined by our need to be loved and our fear of not being loved. Without Real Love, we do whatever it takes—Getting Behaviors—to fill our sense of emptiness with Imitation Love. To eliminate our fear, we use Protecting Behaviors. The Getting Behaviors include lying, attacking, acting like a victim, and clinging. The Protecting Behaviors include lying, attacking, acting like a victim, and running.
Lying We use lying as a Protecting Behavior when we make excuses, shade the truth, or do anything else to avoid the disapproval of others. We don’t lie because we’re bad; we lie because we’ve learned from countless experiences that it works. People really do disapprove of us less when we hide the truth about our flaws, and we’ll do almost anything to keep from feeling that withdrawal of acceptance. We use lying as a Getting Behavior when we do anything to get other people to like us—when we tell people about our accomplishments but not our flaws, communicate positive feelings that are not true, change our physical appearance to attract people to us, or tell people what they want to hear so they’ll like us. We don’t think of these behaviors as lying, but they are, because we don’t tell other people we’re manipulating them. We lie so often that we don’t even realize we’re doing it most of the time. Attacking (Including Anger) Attacking is any behavior that motivates another person through fear to behave in a way we want. We attack people when we criticize them, physically intimidate them, withdraw our approval, make them feel guilty, and use our positions of authority at work, at home, and elsewhere. We use these behaviors to get Imitation Love—usually in the form of power—and to protect ourselves from fear. The most common form of attacking is anger. With anger we can get people to give us attention, respect, power, flattery, approval, even sex. When we don’t have enough Real Love in our lives, we feel empty, alone, and helpless. When we’re angry, however, for a few moments we feel a little stronger and less helpless. Acting Like a Victim If we can convince people that we’ve been injured and treated unfairly, they’ll often stop hurting us and may even give us their sympathy, attention, and support. That’s why we act like victims. Victims communicate—verbally and with their behavior—with variations on the following three themes: (1) Look what you did to me; (2) Look what you should have done for me (and didn’t); and (3) It’s not my fault. Victims have excuses for everything and blame everyone but themselves for their own mistakes and unhappiness. We all act like victims at times. Whenever we’re confronted with a mistake we’ve made and say, “I couldn’t help it,” we’re acting like victims. When we complain that we’ve been treated unfairly by other people, we’re acting like victims. Running If we simply move away from a source of pain, we’re
less likely to be hurt. Withdrawing from conversations (verbally and
physically), avoiding people, and leaving relationships in a state
of fear or anger are all forms of running. When people say they’re
shy, what they’re really saying is, “I’ve felt empty
and afraid all my life, and I’ve learned that when I allow people
to see who I Clinging Clinging is obvious when a child grips tightly to his mother’s skirt, but as adults we also cling emotionally to the people who give us attention, hoping we can sometimes squeeze even more out of them. We may do this by flattering the people who do things for us, or by being excessively grateful. Sometimes we’re clinging to people when we tell them how much we love them and need them—we hope our words will encourage them to stay with us and return our expressions of love. Effectively, we’re begging for more Imitation Love. One of the greatest obstacles to our happiness is that we believe we actually understand the cause of our anger. Our mistaken perception makes all anger management techniques ineffective. Our most common belief is that other people and circumstances make us angry. We demonstrate that belief daily when we say or think “You (or he or she) make me so mad.” That belief is uniformly wrong, but we hang on to it for at least three reasons. First, the evidences seems to support our belief. Our reasoning might go something like this:
Second, all our lives we have observed the people around us blaming others for their anger. Look at the list at the beginning of this article, immediately under the heading, “Anger: A Common Emotion.” From the time we were small children, we have seen people in those situations blaming other people for their anger. It’s only natural that we would follow their examples. Third, blaming other people for our anger is by far the easiest course available. When I become angry at you, I really have two choices:
For most of us, the latter choice is far easier and therefore more attractive. Regrettably, it is precisely because we believe that other people make us angry that we continue to become angry. If I believe that other people make me angry, I will always be angry until other people stop making their foolish mistakes, and that will never happen. I am now absolutely trapped. It is therefore critical that we dispel the deadly myth that other people cause our anger, because only then can we be freed from this trap and create the possibility of the happiness we all want. There are many proofs I could offer to demonstrate that other people never cause our anger—which you can find in the books Real Love, Real Love for Wise Men and Women, and Real Love in Parenting—but allow me to present just one of these proofs here. Imagine that you’re hungry and have only two dollars left in the world. Putting the money on a table, you’re getting ready to go out and buy something to eat. Suddenly, I burst into the room, grab the two dollars, and run away before you can stop me. Almost certainly you’d be angry, and you’d probably say that I caused your anger. Most people would, and that claim seems to make sense. After all, you were fine until I came in and took your money. When I did that, however, you immediately became angry, so I must be the cause, right? No. Let’s prove that. Now imagine a different scene. Again I burst into the room, grab the two dollars that are sitting on the table and run away before you can stop me. But this time you have twenty million dollars in the next room—all yours. How would you feel this time? The loss of two dollars becomes insignificant when you have twenty million, so it’s unlikely that you would be angry. In fact, you might even try to stop me and ask if I could use another two dollars. We’ve just proven that I didn’t “make you angry” in the first scene. We know that’s true, because on both occasions I did exactly the same thing—but you chose to react differently the second time. If my taking two dollars made you angry, you would have been equally angry on both occasions, but you were not. The truth is, you became angry the first time only because you didn’t have twenty million dollars. This is much more than a cute metaphor. We can see the truth of this principle in real life. Every day other people do rude, thoughtless, selfish, inconsiderate things around us, many of which affect us. People inconvenience us, disappoint us, or attack us, and on each such occasion it’s as though they’re taking two emotional dollars from us. If those are our last two dollars, their behavior is a big deal, but if we have twenty million emotional dollars, losing two dollars becomes meaningless. When we have enough Real Love in our lives, we feel as though we have twenty million emotional dollars with us all the time. With that greatest of all treasures, the little inconvenient things people do become relatively unimportant. With Real Love, we have everything that matters. Without it, we become afraid and protect ourselves with anger. Our anger is caused by a lack of Real Love in our own lives, not by what anyone does in a given moment. Anger is a response to emptiness and fear, usually a lifetime accumulation of those feelings. With sufficient Real Love, we simply don’t need anger anymore. You've now gained a deeper understanding of the real causes of anger—one that's better than all anger management resources for mental health out there. Keep reading to learn how you can go beyond anger mangement techniques to eliminate anger from your life. To learn more about where your anger comes from and how to replace it with peace and happiness, download a free chapter of Real Love and Freedom for the Soul: Eliminating the Chains of Victimhood. |
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How
to Eliminate Anger—Anger Management Techniques 
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