Court Ordered Anger Management
There is nothing like an intimidating title to get your stomach churning, is there? Not to worry, there are only two distinct regions of your brain that we are going to be concerned with and you will not require any background in or understanding of biology or anatomy in order to follow or understand the topic
All of our emotions arise from the interplay between two sections of our brains. Understanding how these two parts of your brain interact with one another will help you to understand why the exercises in later lessons can be so powerful in taming the tiger within.
The most important anger management tip to take from this chapter is that anger is technically not an emotion; rather it is a protective response to a perceived fear or threat. Think about it, have you ever gotten mad about something that on some level did not feel threatening to you? Someone cuts you off, someone tells you to do something you don't want to do, a loved one says or does something that feels controlling or just plain mean. All of these situations can be experienced as threatening. And when threatened, our instinct is to protect ourselves or something very bad could happen to us. Thats where anger and aggressiveness come in.
With that in mind, lets begin by looking at the first section of the brain involved in anger, the Limbic System.
Buried deep in the center of your brain is an area called the limbic system whose function is the generation of vivid emotions. Scientists can surgically stimulate the limbic system of laboratory animals and create spontaneous outbursts of fear and aggression. We are going to refer to this part of your brain as the “emotional brain”.
Even though it is quite small, your emotional brain does has many sophisticated functions, including having a memory of important emotional events that have happened to you.
The other area of your brain to be concerned with is called the cerebral cortex, a large mass of tissue that surrounds the emotional brain and is divided into four regions or lobes. The section we are most concerned with are called the Frontal Lobes and are, not surprisingly, located in the front part of your brain. We are going to call this part of your brain the “thinking brain”. Your thinking brain is the part of you that is conscious, alert, and is in contact with your daily surroundings. It is the part of your brain that makes decisions, thinks, observes, plans, anticipates, responds, organizes information and creates new ideas. The thinking brain is inherently logical and tries to find a cause for every effect and an effect for every cause. By and large, this analytical, probing, questioning, part of your mind that you think of as being you. Most importantly for our purposes, the thinking brain can modulate some of the instinctual reactions of your emotional brain.
In sharp contrast to the thinking brain, you are unaware of most of the functions of your emotional brain. Scientists who have studied the emotional brain tell us that its main concern is self-preservation. Ever on the alert, the emotional brain constantly asks the primal question: “Is it safe?”
As it goes about it job of ensuring your safety, your emotional brain operates in a fundamentally different manner from your thinking brain. One of the most important differences is that the emotional brain has only a sketchy awareness of the external world. The thinking brain is able to synthesize all incoming information into a coherent whole.whereas the emotional brain seems to rely more on very broad categories of information. Ever have a gut feeling about something, but couldn't quite put your finger on why you felt that way? Thats your emotional brain at work.
There are three very important things to keep in mind about the emotional brain:
1) It has a memory whose job it is to record all important threatening things that have happened to you. Your emotional brain makes judgements of the good or badness of situations and people based on its memories. This is why one situation may be very triggering to one person but not to another.
2) It stores information into very broad categories. All higher level synthesizing of information happens in your cerebral cortex while your emotional brain works on very broad categories e.g., man/woman. Certain words or situations are viewed as either safe or not safe. Your emotional brain works on such a basic level that it is oftentimes unable to differentiate between reality and fantasy. Ever wonder why you get so emotionally involved in movies when you logically know that you are watching pictures on a wall of people pretending to be someone else? Its because your emotional brain can't really tell the difference between those pictures and reality. Your emotional brain even has a hard time telling the difference between what is happening on the outside vs. what is happening on the insided. Ever woken from a dream feeling very sad or angry? Thats again because your emotional brain can't tell the difference. It just reacts to whatever is thrown its way. Its up to your thinking brain to sort out the details and to temper the reactions of the emotional brain.
3) It gets incoming sensory information before the thinking brain does. This means that before your thinking brain is even aware of something happening your emotional brain has run an analysis and decided whether a situation is threatening or not. Why would your brain be designed this way? Think about it, if you are out walking in the woods one day and a bear jumps out at you, you don't want to calmly mull over your options, you just want to GET THE HECK OUT OF THERE AS QUICKLY AS POSSIBLE!!
When threatend in some way your emotional brain has four responses to choose from:
Attack
Submit
Freeze
Run
Let’s look at an example from everyday life. Suppose you are at home watching tv when there is a knock on the door. Opening the door, you find its your neighbor Sally who has dropped by to say hi and to visit a bit. Instead of greeting her with open arms you find yourself resenting the interruption. In fact, even though she has never done you any wrong, something about her has always made you feel on edge. What is that? As it turns out, she bears more than a passing resemblance to your second grade teacher who not only seemed to have an uncanny knack for picking on you when you did not know the answer to a question, but would also embarrass you in front of the class for not having the correct response. You do not make this connection consciously, all you are aware of is feeling on edge and ready to snap at your neighbor anytime she is present. However, your emotional brain, incapable of telling the difference between your teacher and your neighbor, recognizes the similarities and has you on a level of high alert.
The emotional brain's reactions are not limited to physical similarities. It can react similarly to loved ones based upon a tone of voice, a certain body posture, even certain situations.
If your emotional brain can’t tell the difference between your teacher and your neighbor, why aren’t you having one of the four anger reactions (anger, submit, freeze, run)? Because your thinking brain is able to recognize that this is not your teacher and is, in effect, telling your emotional brain to maintain control. Your emotional brain, ever on the alert, says “Ok, I will not react yet, but she is too familiar for me to completely let my guard down. I am going to stay on alert”. And thus you do not attack, but seem to have a hard time not feeling edgy in the presence of your best friend’s spouse.
This story illustrate an important principle about the emotional brain: it has no sense of linear time. Today, tomorrow and yesterday do not exist. Everything that was still is. Understanding this basic fact about the nature of your unconscious may help explain why you sometimes have feelings that seem out of proportion to the events that triggered them.
There are more connections between the frontal lobes (the name that scientists use for the thinking brain) and the limbic system (the name that scientists use for the emotional brain) than there are between almost any other two parts of your brain. The good news about this fact is that you can often use the thinking part of your brain to override some of the reactions of the emotional part of your brain (we’ll talk more about how to do this later). Think back, surely there have been times when you literally willed yourself to be calm and it worked.
The bad news is that your thinking brain has its own prejudices and mental shortcuts which can influence the emotional brain negatively. This means that if someone you have had no experience with before makes a comment that is ntended innocently, but which your thinking brain interprets as negative it will alert the emotional brain that trouble is potentially afoot and the emotional brain will do its part. You might suddenly find your chest tightening, your heart racing, your fist clenching, etc…Your thinking brain can calm the emotional brain or it can goad it into action.
The last thing you to know about your thinking and emotional brains is that your emotional brain can only take so much stimulation before the dam bursts, sounds the red alert and takes over. This is a condition known as flooding. Sometimes a trigger is so strong that we become instantly flooded. More often than not, flooding builds up over time. You wake up and stub your toe. Traffic is bad, you arrive late at work and the boss gives you a hard time for it. You are dealing with customers who are upset all day, but can't react. The pressure has been building all day. When you get home you find your son has blocked the driveway with his car and you lose it.
Or you and your spouse have a disagreement in which you trade barbs back and forth with the pressure building until you lose it.
Sometimes the pressure doesn't have to build in a single day. Ever have an ongoing disagreement with your spouse so that everytime there is even a hint of that subject coming up you lose it?
The take home point here is that while some triggers are instantaneous, most have been building for a long time and can be interrupted long before they reach the breaking point.
When you become flooded your emotional brain releases certain neurochemicals that literally cut the thinking brain off from the rest of the brain, putting the emotional brain large and in charge. As we have seen before, the emotional brain is not known for its subtleties.
You literally become a different person. You may feel a sense of watching yourself from somewhere in the back of their mind or from across the room. Some people will even report blackouts for this time frame because the thinking brain (which holds our concious memories) is offline.
Flooding is not always an all or nothing proposition. If you are having a bad day and are in a state of continual mild upset your emotional brain will release those neurochemicals which cut off the thinking brain in proportion to the amount of upset that you are experiencing. This only compounds the problem as it leaves you with less ability to really think problems through and makes you more likely to see a situation as threatening and to react accordingly.
On average it can take anywhere from one to 24 hours for those neurochemicals to completely clear out of your brain and for your thinking brain to completely come back online. That is why you may see a problem differently after sleeping on it. However, that only holds true if you are not thinking about the problem over and over again. Remember, the emotional brain can't tell the difference between what is happening outside and what is happening inside and will continue to stay in a state of high alert the more you think about a situation. More on how to deal with that later.
In summary, a variety of factors including our history, our biology, and the way our thinking brain interprets certain situations all go into creating anger reactions. In my 10+ years experience of working with people with anger problems I have developed specific exercises that address that quickly and effectively deal with all these factors. We will cover exercises to lower the trigger point of your emotional brain. We will look at why certain situations are so triggering for you and discover new ways to deal with them. We will explore what stereotypical thinking your thinking brain may be engaging in and find ways to change that thinking. Finally, I will give you scripts for dealing with the most difficult of situations so that you won't have to worry about what to say or how to say it. Now lets get started!!