Mr. Cool
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[0 Comment]Watch the nightly news or listen to a conversation around the coffee machine at work and you'll hear the same question: "Why have people lost the ability to control their negative emotions?" The outbursts range from the incivility of a major league baseball player spitting in an umpire's face to the life-threatening rage of a terminated employee who returns to the office with a loaded weapon.
It seems anger is having a field day, and relationship specialist Gary Smalley is concerned about it. Anger has the power to kill, he says, and too often the victim is a marriage. Smalley has seen too many spouses turned into enemies—and too many families fractured beyond repair—because of anger.
But if we started doing just a few things differently, he says, we could reverse the trend. That's why he devoted much of his latest book, Making Love Last Forever (Word), to the problem of anger. Smalley speaks not only from what he has observed in his years as a counselor, but also from his own experience of reaching the meltdown point. Here is his strategy for disarming your anger before it explodes and hurts someone you love.
People seem to be reacting to situations with an intensity that is way out of proportion to the circumstances. Why do relatively insignificant events trigger such extreme reactions?
People have a tendency to avoid dealing with hurtful situations when they occur. Instead, they try to bury the pain. But it just builds up inside them and eventually turns into anger. Anger is a secondary emotion, which means it begins as something else—usually fear, frustration, hurt feelings or major disappointment. We can try to bury our anger, but it's always buried alive. And it's just a matter of time before it comes out.
When I explain this to people, they start looking back over their lives and a lot of issues come into sharper focus. They say, "Wow, I was hurt by something my parents did years ago. I didn't realize it, but I'm still really angry at them."
What made you decide to focus much of your current work on combating anger?
It was two different things. First, I've seen too much damage done in the lives of the couples I've counseled over the years. And the other reason is that I have suffered the devastation of anger in my own life.
When I was in my 30s, I was working on the staff of a para-church ministry—a job I really loved. I started noticing some things in the ministry that I thought needed to be addressed, so I challenged the leaders on a few matters. But instead of welcoming my input, they rejected me.
Up until then, I had never known what it felt like to be rejected. And since I didn't understand it, I responded by pressing a little harder, thinking they just weren't hearing what I was trying to say. But the more I pressed, the more negative they became toward me. I ended up being squeezed out of that organization.
Originally published in: Marriage Partnership, 1997, Spring
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