Workplace Relationships and Personal Relationships

Paradoxically, we have many laws and procedures to protect individuals from each other during divorce, but we provide little protection for individuals against large, powerful organizations during termination. The laws governing employment termination vary from state to state, but in many states an employee who has faithfully and effectively served an organization for dozens of years can be let go without cause, explanation, prior notice, or severance benefits. In recent years, even the limited protections afforded by federal legislation through the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) have been eroded by unfavorable court rulings and by highly placed government appointees basically hostile to the aims of the legislation. Thus, when an organization decides to terminate an employee, the decision is often final: not open to negotiation, legal review, or procedures to ensure fairness and some degree of reciprocity.

The differences between workplace relationships and personal relationships result in differences between what works in dealing with work place anger and what works in dealing with anger in personal relationships. Open, immediate, and warm expression of anger at the workplace is likely to be self defeating, and in many cases of termination, the employee is given little or no opportunity to express anger directly to those responsible. Therefore, if terminated involuntarily, you are likely to have lots of anger with no place to go. If this anger is not to poison other relationships or turn into self punishment, you must find a use for it and an outlet for the tension it generates.

Aristotle considered anger a sign of injustice. We feel angry, he suggested, when we believe we have been hurt unjustly or unnecessarily. Similarly, Harriet Lemer, a contemporary psychologist, says that anger "exists for a reason and always deserves our respect and attention."' Anger, then, can be viewed as a call to action, which is precisely what our physiological state of arousal prepares us for. Anger alerts us to the fact that something is threatening our physical or psychological well being, and it tells us that we need to do something to restore ourselves to safety or sanity. For the terminated employee, the question is: what actions will best serve this goal? Expressing anger directly, immediately, openly, and warmly can have positive results in personal relationships, where you are dealing with someone of relatively equal power in the context of an ongoing relationship in which both parties have a stake in working out a livable resolution. But in the workplace after termination, an honest display of emotion is more likely to make matters worse for you than to improve them.



Your display of anger will not result in reconsideration of the decision to terminate, and it may provoke retaliation in the form of bad recommendations, unwillingness to help you find another job, or refusal to help you get the best termination settlement possible from top management or from the folks in "Human Resources."

So, rather than expressing your anger to those responsible for your termination, sit down with a piece of paper or tape recorder and express what you feel. Also write about what you would like to do to those whom you blame for your firing. Go ahead, say it you'd like to kill your boss (or whomever), and you'd like it to be a long, agonizing death. Or, maybe you'd like to reverse roles and fire your boss; wouldn't it be great to see how she would react! For many people, the best way to do this exercise is in the form of a letter to your boss, top management, or the human resources person who conveyed the news of your termination. You might want to write several letters, one to each person involved. Do not, however, under any circumstances send any of the letters or recordings to their targets. Their purpose is to help you discover the depth and direction of your anger and to give it an immediate outlet that will not damage yourself or others whom you love.

In dealing with angry feelings, it is always helpful to remember that the following processes are distinct from one another, even though they may become hopelessly confused during episodes of intense anger:

1. Being angry.
   
   
2. Feeling angry experiencing and acknowledging angry responses.
   
   
3. Interpreting angry feelings.
   
   
4. Expressing angry feelings.
   
   
5. Acting angry.
   
   
6. Taking action to reduce unpleasant levels of anger arousal.
   
   
7. Rectifying/changing situations that evoke anger.
   

Our feelings of anger the physiological changes that we experience as anger are always mediated by intellectual processes. First, we become angry (i.e., have the physiological response), and we can either acknowledge and experience the response as anger or we can deny that we are angry, a process that often occurs unconsciously and may involve masking anger with other feelings such as anxiety. If we allow ourselves to feel angry, we then interpret the anger, which often amounts to assigning blame or finding an external cause for our feelings. "I feel angry" is a fact. "I feel angry because you fired me" (or failed to appreciate my efforts or forgot to run the errand I requested or took by baseball glove without asking, etc.) is an interpretation of the fact of my angry feelings.