What You Can Change _. And What You Can't - Martin E. Seligman [66]
Above all, during the interval, change from “ego orientation” to “task orientation.” Think: “I know this seems like a personal insult, but it is not. It is a challenge to be overcome that calls on skills I have.” Visualize yourself as a bomb disposer. Your job is to slowly and coolly defuse the bomb. Make a plan for defusing the attacker.
Feelings. Use the lengthened time interval to become aware of your feelings. Conscious awareness of arousal makes it easier to regulate anger. Use the feelings as a signal to remind you to cope without antagonism.
My muscles are tense. Time to relax.
My breath is coming fast. Take a deep breath.
He would probably like me to explode. Well, I’m going to disappoint him.17
These techniques will help once you are trapped in the situation. But if you find yourself in these situations all too frequently, you need to prevent anger. There are two long-term ways of doing this: progressive relaxation and meditation. Practiced regularly (twice a day), relaxation or meditation prevents angry arousal. (A review of these techniques can be found.) The techniques are just as useful for angry persons as for anxious persons.
Action. Once the interval is over, you must do something. There are alternatives to attacking. Turning the other cheek is one. A huge smile with a humorous story is another (“You know, there’s an old Jewish proverb about . . .”). Creating a rich defusing repertoire is another; it’s a splendid alternative to a repertoire of clever put-downs. In her book Anger: The Misunderstood Emotion, Carol Tavris quotes a telephone operator who is able to bypass the rude ventilation of some of her customers: “I just say, in my most genuine way, ‘Boy, you must be having a rough day.’ They immediately calm down, realize how they must have sounded, and apologize.” Write down and use sets of two good “defusing” lines, each pair tailored for your spouse, your boss, a difficult co-worker, or your children.
In many anger situations, you want to get your own way in the face of a roadblock. There are technologies for how to overcome such roadblocks more effectively than by attacking. They are called “negotiation training” and “assertiveness training.” There are courses and books on these skills, and they work. My preferred book is Sharon Bower’s Assert Yourself.18 Bower breaks down assertion into four manageable steps—she calls them D, E, S, and C—which should be done in order.
D-Describe. Describe—with no emotion and no evaluation—exactly what is bothering you. Don’t exaggerate. Don’t say always when you mean twice. This bloodless step must come first.
E-Express. Express how this makes you feel. Don’t accuse, don’t evaluate the other person, just identify which emotion you feel.
S-Specify. Specify exactly what you want your target to do.
C-Consequence. End by saying just what you will do if your target does not comply. Be accurate. Don’t threaten, don’t menace, and don’t bluff.
Recall the fight between Kate and Jonah. Neither had the DESC skills. But if either had, the fight would not have gotten out of hand.
KATE: Scrape the gunk off the plates before you hand them to me, puhllease.
JONAH: Look, I’m rinsing them off first.
KATE: Rinsing isn’t enough. I’ve told you a hundred times . . .
Here’s the place where DESC would help. Kate should do it right here, when she first feels her muscles tense and her anger rise.
KATE [describing]: The last two times we did the dishes, you said you didn’t want to rinse and scrape the dishes. I said that if the dishes weren’t scraped, they wouldn’t come out clean, [expressing] Your saying this again now makes me feel that you don’t listen to me. And that makes me sad and angry, [specifying] Next time we do the dishes, I want you to scrape them off before you hand them to me—without comment. [Consequence] If you don’t, I’d prefer to do them alone.
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