We could all use anger management

Anger is not always bad. As fuel, along with fear, for our fight-and-flight mechanism, it’s kept our species alive. Besides, it’s reasonable. It’s a stupid, crude, vulgar, vicious world. If anger is not an appropriate response to it, what is?

Still, it can get you into trouble. At home, your family may resent your tantrums, and grow cold to you. At work, if the company hierarchy and the prevailing etiquette between supplier and client don’t keep it in check, you could find yourself out of a job, or out of business. Anger’s fine, in its place, but there are limits.

“Anger management,” born in the U.S. in the 1970s, is now well established in Japan – where, notwithstanding, notes Josei Seven (Nov 19), more and more people are getting angrier and angrier about more and more things. Terrorism rampages unchecked, 15 years into a “war on terrorism.” The government is clueless. Corporations are corrupt. My boss is an idiot. My subordinates don’t cooperate. I work like a slave and can barely feed my family. We’re all stressed beyond what our nervous systems can tolerate. Somebody stepped on my toe on the train station platform – he’s lucky I didn’t fling him onto the track, as others in similar situations are doing in increasing numbers lately, Josei Seven remarks.

How can we control the rising rage within us, at least to the point of keeping our behavior consistent with civilized norms? Anger management consultant Shunsuke Ando offers advice that seems as much folkloric as scientific: take slow, deep breaths; count from 100 by threes: focus your attention on objects in the room, noting their appearance, location and other anger-cooling trivia. If all else fails, make some excuse and leave. Be alone. Review the situation. Am I over-reacting? Is it all their fault? Maybe I’m not quite perfect either?

The jarring facts of life justify anger. The facts of social life limit its expression. If we all displayed all the anger we feel justified in feeling, society would melt down. We all know that, and yet, when push comes to shove, knowing it doesn’t make us feel any less angry. If anything, it fuels our anger with a dose of helplessness. Impotent rage, bottled-up rage, is the most destructive rage of all. Even realizing that the fault, or the failure, is our own, and we have no one to blame but ourselves, doesn’t help much – it only directs our anger inward. Anger at oneself may be fairer than anger at a scapegoat, but it’s no easier to live with, no less poisonously stressful.

Hence Ando’s contention that the ultimate point of anger management is not settling who’s right and who’s wrong but of freeing yourself from anger even if it is the other person’s (or “society’s,” or “the system’s”) fault. After all, is your anger going to right the wrong? It’s not likely. “The key to anger management,” says Josei Seven, summing up Ando’s views, “is changing yourself rather than others. You don’t win that way, but at least you don’t lose.”

It’s easy to say. The difficulty of putting it into practice amid an infinity of provocations big and small, major and minor, is guaranteed to keep the anger management consultancy business thriving through the worst recessions.

© Japan Today