Some interpretations may serve to reduce anger, while others can intensify it. Note that interpretations can be more or less other directed. "I'm angry because you're selfish," interprets my anger exclusively in terms of your character. This interpretation is likely to intensify my angry feelings for several reasons. First, it blames you for my anger, thus increasing my sense of having been treated unfairly or unjustly. Second, it evokes anger past and anger yet to come because it involves more than the immediate provocation of the forgotten laundry. Third, it places control of my angry feelings in your behavior, character, and attitudes particularly in your character and attitudes over which I have relatively little power.
If I'm angry because you're selfish, I'm doomed to unpleasant feelings of anger until you change radically. Even if you behave differently or in a way that corrects the original wrong (by, for example, immediately returning to the dry cleaners and fetching my clothes), I'm bound to continue feeling angry because your selfish attitude and character haven't changed. Finally, anger is likely to escalate because my expression of anger, based on my interpretation of feeling angry, blames you and will in many cases provoke you to anger in response.
When as part of my expression of anger I act angry, staging a display of angry behaviors such as shouting, aggressive gesturing, using strong language, and calling you nasty names, the result is often that I increase my own physiological arousal, while triggering in you an increased physiological response. The more threatening my behavior my act the more physiologically aroused you become in preparation to fight or flee.
Thus commences what psychologist Harriet Lerner calls "the dance of anger." And as she points out, dances of anger can go on indefinitely, serving primarily to maintain the status quo in relationships. You forget my dry cleaning; I get angry and call you a selfish bastard. You get angry, too. We scream at each other until one or both of us give in or withdraws, and we reach a fragile truce. But the truce breaks down when you forget to fill the gas tank of my car after borrowing it, and we have another fight, replete with name calling and shouting.
Throughout all our fighting and despite all our angry energy, we fail to change the way we relate to one another, so we effectively perpetuate the very patterns that induce so much anger. Just as there are a variety of ballroom dances, there are a variety of anger dances. For example, instead of responding to my anger by shouting back at me, you might with draw sullenly into the next room. The steps may vary, but they still form a dance, and every dance of anger has in common the tendency to perpetuate the status quo in relationships.
Caught in relationships that evoke such anger, many people search for ways to reduce the initial feelings of anger that result in so much unpleasantness: they take action to reduce unpleasant levels of angry arousal.
Drugs and distractions can numb strong feelings and provide immediate relief from unpleasant feelings; fortunately, however, they are not the only ways to reduce the physiological arousal that we find so unpleasant.
Learning more about ourselves and discovering new ways to interpret our angers can serve the same purpose, as well as having additional benefits. Similarly, learning new ways to express angry feelings without necessarily acting angry (i.e., improving our communication skills) can help reduce escalating, reactive feelings of anger. Finally, we can learn new and better ways to rectify the situations in our lives that provoke anger we can learn to use our anger in ways that alter the status quo rather than in ways that perpetuate it.
All productive approaches to anger, however, require us to start by distinguishing among (1) being angry, (2) feeling angry, (3) interpreting our angry feelings, (4) expressing anger, (5) acting angry, (6) acting to reduce angry arousal, and (7) acting to change the situations and patterns in our lives that evoke anger. One purpose of the writing exercise introduced earlier is to make a start at seeing and using these distinctions. The exercise encourages you to feel anger fully and to interpret it in any way you wish, but divorces feeling, interpreting, and expressing anger from acting angry or taking any other actions based on your anger.
