A professor of mine kept a sign on the wall of our classroom that stated in bold, black letters, "Feelings are facts." A very simple statement yet one of the most difficult to truly accept and know with the heart as well as the mind. Like tornados, rainbows, volcanoes, and sunrises, feelings hap pen regardless of whether they're justified, deserved, legitimate, appropriate, or convenient. Struggling against our feelings is always a costly battle and often a losing one.
As you begin the process of searching for another job or source of income, start with the emotional facts of your situation. If you're angry, you're angry, and no amount of talking to yourself and others about how your former employer had no choice, given the state of the industry or the company or the world, will make the anger disappear. Nor will telling yourself that it was time to leave anyhow or trying to convince yourself that you never really liked the job anyway.
You're angry, and you're probably anxious about the future, and you may be or become depressed. In the long run, it is much better to confront these emotional facts than to try to make them disappear immediately and magically. Our feelings help us discover what we want; they are important messages to ourselves, which we disregard only at our own peril. Feelings do not tell us, however, where they come from, whether or to whom to express them, or how to behave in order to feel better. To answer these questions, we must think long and hard about ourselves and the situation we face, struggling to reach understanding, make sound decisions, and take reasonable action. But we can accomplish none of these desirable goals unless we start by accepting the raw facts of our feelings the unpleasant and difficult ones along with the welcome ones.
Fighting Anger
A wide range of thinkers, experimenters, and clinicians have studied and written about anger, and a wide range of ideas, attitudes, and prescriptions has resulted from their labors. Unfortunately, there is little agreement on the nature and value of anger or on how individuals and societies should deal with it.
Some psychologists, anthropologists, and sociologists consider anger to be a basically outmoded form of physiological response dating from the time when humans had to cope daily with physical threats to their well being like lions, tigers, bears, or other humans encroaching on their territory. When fighting or fleeing were requirements of everyday life, says this school of thought, the physiological arousal of the fight or flight response helped both the species and the individual survive. Experts who adhere to this school of thought tend to look for ways to lessen the physiological and emotional arousal that accompanies anger the arousal that in a sense is anger. Some psychiatrists, for example, believe that psychoactive drugs may ultimately be the best way to deal with strong, chronic feelings of anger, which they believe no longer serve the survival needs of either the individual or the species.
At the opposite extreme is the get it all out immediately and directly and candidly school of thought about anger. Experts who recommend expressing anger immediately and warmly tend to see anger that has been pent up, blocked, twisted, or misdirected as the source of a wide variety of psychological and physical problems ranging from self loathing and guilt to headaches and cancer. Curiously, the appeal of these extreme ways of thinking about anger is the same in both cases: they appeal because they are simple and offer relatively easy solutions to the anger problems that all humans face. Unfortunately, anger is anything but simple: its origins, its interactions with other feelings, and the cultural rules that tell us how it may be expressed acceptably in different settings are quite complex and vary considerably from one individual to the next and from one context to another.
A second shortcoming of the extreme views, as well as of many views that lie in between, is that they have evolved primarily from studying either intimate and familial relationships or street anger anger between strangers in urban settings. Remarkably little thought and research has focused on anger experienced in, or arising from, work settings. The tendency to disregard workplace anger reflects two facts of which those who experience such anger should be aware. First, the expression of anger is taboo in most organizations, particularly anger directed upward in the hierarchy. In fact, many people in organizations consider feelings of anger at work, as well as expressions of anger at work, indicative of personal shortcomings.
Second, those who study anger and deal with it in the clinical practice of psychotherapy generally have little or no personal experience of working within the management hierarchy of large organizations. Thus, psychiatrists, psychotherapists, and psychoanalysts often behave as if accounts of workplace dilemmas and passions were relevant to a client's emotional state only insofar as they reveal patterns that can be traced back to childhood or tensions arising from internal conflict. They typically dismiss the possibility of externally generated and maintained conflicts based in the reality of a client's current workplace circumstances.
This theoretical and clinical orientation does make a great deal of sense for many clients and many of their problems. The therapist's job, after all, is to help a client change him or herself, not reality. Also, many emotional problems of the workplace are rooted in childhood experiences and internal conflicts; the way an individual responds to the stresses and traumas of employment within the modern organization does reveal patterns of emotional response set long before the start of working life, and for many clients the solution of work related problems lies in changing long established, personal patterns of thinking, feeling, and acting.
