The Many Faces of Anger

the first of a series of Facebook Live presentations I'm gonna be doing over, over from now until the end of the year on various aspects of the work that I do. We'll wait another minute or two because I'm scheduled to start at exactly 11 o'clock. So I want late or on-time people to show up and we'll get started in about 2 minutes and I'll just hang here. And if you have comments, or questions, please put them in the comment box. I'll probably pop them up on the screen so everybody can see what the comments are. And hopefully we won't get too many phone calls during the presentation. Okay, 11 o'clock Pacific time. Yep, and there's my calendar going off. I get rid of that. So my name is Doug Noll. You may or may not know who I am. I am a visionary peacemaker and best-selling author. I was a trial lawyer for 22 years before I left the practice of law, went back to school, earned my master's degree in peacemaking and conflict studies, and in 2000 became a peacemaker and a mediator. And since that time, I have been a student of human behavior, human conflict from a mostly from a neuropsychological perspective, trying to understand the science behind why we behave the way we do, especially in conflict situations. In 2010, my colleague Laurel Kaufer and I started the Prisoner Peace Project. And for the last 11 years have been working really in maximum security prisons, training murderers how to be peacemakers. And we've trained thousands and thousands of incarcerated people. We've been— until the pandemic hit, we were operating in 15 California prisons, a prison in Connecticut, and with a colleague, 15 prisons in Greece. And as a result of the pandemic, of course, the project had to stop doing in-prison work, but we started a distant learning program, and we are now in the middle of post-production where we've taken our entire curriculum, which is about 60 hours worth of material, and put it onto video. And it will— hopefully the curriculum will be available to anybody in the world who wants to start Prisoners of Peace in their local areas by early next year. So if you have an interest in that, feel free to email me at doug@dougnull.com, and I can tell you more about the project. So what's the topic today? The topic today is the many faces of anger. I am not surprised that almost everybody is experiencing anger, and it seems to be even more intense these days. And what I would like to do is to take apart the many faces of anger, show you that there are many different kinds of anger and talk a little bit about, towards the end, about how you can respond to this anger in a way that does not escalate the problem, but really calms things down. And there are ways you can do this that are counterintuitive and counter-normative, but are effective because they're based on how the brain actually operates, not on pop psychology from the 1960s, like active listening or nonviolent communication. Neither of those techniques have ever worked, and for calming angry people down or dealing with anger, and they never will work because they're not based on science. They're based on really the work of psychologist Thomas Gordon back in the '60s who didn't have access to the knowledge about the brain that we have today. So let's get started. So I'm going to shrink myself down and pull up the slides and we'll start going through this. And for people who are interested in getting a PDF of this slide, uh, you'll just contact me and through my website dougnoll.com, and I'll be happy to send you the, send you the deck. Okay, so we're just going to go through these slides, uh, one at a time and looking at the different kinds of anger. So let's start with anger avoidance. Anger avoidance occurs when People are angry, but they avoid their own anger. And they repress their anger, they stop feeling their anger, and they just bury it so they don't have to experience anger at all. And people that are anger avoidant have been taught from the time they're very small that being angry is bad, it's evil, it's wrong. And the problem with anger avoidance is that, number one, the stress that is causing the anger in the first place is not getting resolved or processed, which is going to cause some really severe health problems. And two, at some point down the road, it's going to be like a big water balloon. You fill that water balloon up and you squish it and squish it and squish it and move it around and push it and it's going to explode on you and you're going to have a big mess because there's just going to be this massive explosion of anger that is going to be highly destructive. So the way that we, the way that we deal with anger avoidance is along the same lines as all of these different types of angers, is learning how to listen yourself. If you're the one who has the anger, learning how to listen yourself into existence, and I'll be talking more about that in a few minutes. So that's anger avoidance. The next one is called passive-aggressive anger, and we've all experienced passive-aggressive anger. This is where people say yes and do no. They are angry, but because they feel like they're in a weak power position, they can't express their anger appropriately. Because they might get punished for it. And so you'll see a lot of passive-aggressive behavior in relationships, and you'll also see it in workplace conflicts where people do not want to take personal responsibility, risk, or personal accountability for what is wrong. So they basically display their anger by a smiley face and then backstabbing who they think the offenders are in the background. This, of course, is also a very destructive kind of behavior because, one, it's not transparent, and two, the actual causes of the anger are never really serviced and talked about. Part of the problem is that when we are confronted by anger, most of us become defensive or hostile or counter-aggressive, or we try to justify, rationalize, or solve the problem because we've never been taught how to work with the anger of another person in a way that literally calms that person down in literally seconds. So passive-aggressive anger, very common. And if you've experienced any of this, please feel free to comment and let us know what your experience has been. The next kind of anger is called betrayal anger. This is the anger that you experience when somebody has breached trust with you. They have betrayed you in some way. They have— you put your trust in another person. Could be a relationship, it could be a work relationship, it could be a personal intimate relationship, family, relationship, and somebody has done something that breaches trust, and usually it's, it's going to cause you some kind of loss or injury. And the kind of anger that you have with betrayal trust is deep and intense because you feel like you've been violated. Your identity has been threatened. The rock that you thought you stood on has turned out to be sand. Now, you may be confronted with betrayal anger. For example, somebody may accuse you of breaching trust or betraying them, and your immediate response, assuming that you didn't do that, will be, of course, to defend, justify, excuse, explain, uh, or problem solve. And your— the common experience that you have all had when that happens is that you just make things worse. And that's because the person who is accusing you of betrayal anger doesn't want the problem fixed. The person who is accusing you of anger just wants to be heard. And so that's why when I'm teaching I tell my students, de-escalate, then problem solve. Don't problem solve first. And you'll see on the screen there, I'm going to show this link a number of times, dougnoll.co/listening. Co is— my website is dougnoll.com, but this link is a Bitly link, so it's shortened to co. And if you go to that link, you'll see a page that explains all about my Listening Others Into Existence bundled courses. And it describes the courses and what they will do for you in terms of being able to develop your own ability to stand in the hurricane of, for example, betrayal anger without getting upset, and at the same time calming that very angry person down. The next anger is called— is what I call disrespect anger. And this is the anger that occurs when somebody has disrespected you. Maybe they haven't listened to you, maybe they have ignored you, maybe, uh, they have just simply disrespected you in some way, called you names or insulted you or diminished you in some way. And this is an anger that can be very deep-seated and intense. Likewise, you may be the target of disrespect anger. You might have perhaps unintentionally disrespected someone, and now that person is all over you because the person feels like you have disrespected them. And again, the secret to dealing with disrespect anger, either whether you're experiencing it yourself or experiencing it with somebody who's accusing you of disrespect is to focus on the emotion. So for example, if you felt disrespected by somebody, you felt that anger rise, you would say something to yourself like, "I feel really angry. I feel really disrespected." And you can say it to yourself, or you can also say it out loud, but either way will be effective if you label your own emotions. And there's a whole other processes around disrespect. If you find that you're being disrespected a lot, typically that means that you don't respect yourself. Because remember, you can only be respected by others to the degree that you respect yourself. And again, if another person accuses you of disrespect, rather than trying to deny, fix, justify, problem solve, make things right, First, you need to acknowledge the anger, and you would say something like, oh, you're really, really disrespected. You feel really disrespected. You're really pissed off. You're really angry. And by labeling those emotions, you actually defuse the situation and calm people down. The next kind of anger is paranoid anger. This is, this is the kind of anger where that arises when someone feels like everybody's out to get them and they really get angry about it. This is a difficult kind of anger to deal with because it may be a deep-seated paranoia or fear of danger by other people. So again, the solution to dealing with paranoid anger is not to deny it. Oh, you're crazy. You're not paranoid. I mean, you're paranoid. What are you thinking about? Why are you accusing me of this? Why do you think I'm going to harm you? All the typical responses that you might make to a paranoid anger, of course, just escalate the problem even further. And again, acknowledge the anger. Oh, you're really angry, you're really anxious, you feel unsafe. And by doing that, you defuse the situation. The person feels heard. And their anger diminishes. Then we have sudden anger. We have all experienced this. Sudden anger occurs in people who are highly reactive. They have, they have triggers or programming that they developed over the years as some kind of self-protective mechanism to explode at people in the right circumstances, in the right environment, and the, the right triggers. And the thing that's scary about sudden anger is that unless you really study it, you never really know when it's going to happen. And so it's like you're walking on tenderhooks or on broken glass, and you're tiptoeing around a spouse or a partner or a parent because you never know when they're going to go off. And that creates a lot of anxiety and a lot of stress. So again, like all the other kinds of anger, when somebody is reactive and explodes, don't take personal responsibility for their anger. Don't try to problem solve. Don't try to fix things. The only thing you can do that will work is to listen them into existence. And if you want to learn the actual skills of how to do that, there's the link that you can go to the page that describes the courses and and, uh, answer your questions about what benefits you get when you learn how to listen to emotions. The next kind of anger is shame anger. Shame anger occurs when we feel embarrassed, humiliated, ashamed, or embarrassed. Usually because somebody else is— either we've done something that causes us to have that reaction, or somebody has tried to shame us. And especially if it's unjust or unfair, uh, and we have triggers of shame going back to childhood programming, it tends to produce a deep anger. And shame anger can be directed at you, and you may not even be the cause of it. It's just that somebody got triggered, a person got triggered and started accusing you and of unjustly creating shame in them. Now, because shame is such a strong emotion, and it's one of our basic affects, it's a physiological state that ultimately is constructed into emotion, and because it's very painful, people will not admit to shame anger. What they will do is, is get very, very angry And it'll be unclear as to what's going on. And so one of the things that you need to explore is, is this shame? So you might say, if somebody's really angry, say, you're really angry, you're really frustrated, you don't feel listened to, you don't feel heard, and you feel a little bit ashamed. And if you get the nod of the head and a yes, that's exactly right, then you've hit the nail on the head and you've calmed people down. So shame anger is difficult to detect. But if you see intense anger, uh, typically that intense anger could have a shame element attached to it, and all you need to do is label the shame, and oftentimes you can calm people down pretty quickly. Okay, next one, deliberate anger. So deliberate anger is— we could call it strategic anger. This is where people use anger to manipulate, and they're able to work themselves up into a frothy state and use that anger to scare, intimidate, and coerce others to their, to their bid and their doing. We don't— you don't see a lot of deliberate anger, but there are people out there who are manipulative and exploitative, and they will use anger as a way of conveying information like, I'm tough, don't cross this line, there will be consequences if you, if you cross my boundaries. So again, with deliberate anger, the solution is not to justify, defend, appease, rationalize, or defend. The key is to acknowledge the anger and reflect back the anger, again with these simple words: 'You're really pissed off. You're really angry. You feel...' And whatever they might be feeling. 'You feel like you've been unfairly treated. You feel like you haven't been listened to. You don't feel supported. You don't feel appreciated.' Whatever it is that you think might be causing this deliberate anger, Or you could say something like, you're not getting what you expected. Whatever it is, just keep working at it, labeling back with the 'you' statement until you start getting that calm response. Next anger is addictive anger. Addictive anger occurs with people who get off on, they get high, they get a dopamine release really, when they get angry because they get a feeling of power and superiority. And now it's a fleeting power and it's got a heck of a hangover, but nevertheless, there are people who get addicted to anger because they feel good about— they feel good within themselves about getting angry because it's their way of trying to deal with an intractable problem that they otherwise do not have the capacity to solve. And again, listing the addictive anger into existence is the key to calming people down. And there's the link again to the website. If you go to that page, you'll learn about the skills that you can master that will help you deal with all of these different kinds of anger. All right, what's next? Habitual anger. You've all met grumpy old men, and habitual anger occurs with people who have just gotten into the habit of being grumpy and mad all the time. And they're probably not even aware that they're grumpy and mad, but what happens, of course, is that people start to avoid them because they're unpleasant to be around, and that just makes them even grumpier angrier, and of course more lonely and feeling more abandoned, which just feeds the anger. Nobody loves me. And they just get into this cycle. You can help people break out of that anger by acknowledging their anger. You're angry. You're really frustrated. Life didn't turn out the way that you thought it should, or this didn't work out the way that you thought, and you just feel like whatever you do doesn't work and you're just really unhappy. And that kind of reflection, amazingly enough, will help people who have habitual anger move out of it into a place of calm. And once they start experiencing that calm state again, their habituated anger will tend to go away over a period of time. We have moral anger, which we've all experienced. This is moral indignation. So something or somebody says something that violates our sense of right or wrong, our sense of how the universe should be ordered, our beliefs or deep-seated values, and we get this moral anger, which can be very deep-seated. What's happening usually with moral anger is that there has been a belief that has been challenged, a deep-seated belief that's been challenged, and rather than examine whether or not the challenge has any validity or not, we become morally righteous and indignant that somebody should have the temerity to challenge what we believe to be sacred or sacrosanct. And if you look at most of the political polarization that you see today, A lot of it is based on moral anger, and that moral anger stems from people having a belief structure that they don't want to have challenged. They're going to tie into their beliefs and hold on to them regardless of their factual validity, and when those beliefs are challenged, they get righteously indignant, and then, then that pulls, pulls you back into the other kinds of anger, like addictive anger. Because now it feels good to be angry, you know. You know, I feel like I'm powerful because I'm angry, and I'm standing 10 feet tall because I'm angry, and this moral anger is justified because they can't get away with it, or they're bad people for what they do. And it makes you feel a little bit better. So there's the component of addictive anger that gets into it. If you have to deal with moral anger, it's the same thing. Address the anger. You're really angry. You feel like there's been an injustice. You feel like, uh, you feel really pissed off that somebody is challenging your beliefs. You feel like there's been a, a wrong that can't be righted. And by simply reflecting back the anger and the emotions underneath the anger, you can oftentimes calm a morally indignant person down which then gives you the opportunity to start having a conversation about what it is that caused the anger in the first place. And these are all skills that I teach, uh, in my course Lifting Others Into Existence, or Developing Emotional Competency. And there's the link again. I urge you to, if this stuff is interesting to you, I urge you to check out the courses and see whether or not they're going to work for you, especially if you're dealing with anger on a, on a too regular basis. The next kind of anger is, of course, the most intense kind of anger, which is hate. And this is where somebody has an abiding loathsome— they loathe somebody. Their hatred is intense, it's deep, it can't be mitigated, and the hatred is just driving people to break relationships, engage in destructive behavior, and ultimately, of course, tear themselves up because hate can be extremely destructive. Hate is difficult to deal with because it's so embedded and so deep that even if you— even by labeling the hate, saying you really hate that person, you feel intense hatred, you're enraged, you're indignant, you feel like this is incredibly unjust, you feel like everything you know has been violated. Those are the kinds of things that I would say to somebody with intense hatred as a peacemaker. You will calm them down. Uh, will you calm them down permanently? It depends, but you can at least calm them down long enough to have a conversation around where the hatred comes from and whether or not the hatred is really serving the person who is expressing the hatred. And oftentimes they'll find out that, no, the hatred really isn't serving me, and they're just using the hatred as a way of dealing with the pain, for example, of betrayal or outrageousness of a moral hatred or moral anger. So again, the secret is to focus on the emotions, not the words. All right, so I've described the secret sauce for dealing with all of these different kinds of anger. So now I'm going to just lay it out for you so that you can understand what it is. Now, just because I give you these, the secret doesn't mean that you can master it. And I, again, that's why I've created these courses, because, because there's a lot of knowledge you need to have in order to deploy this secret effectively. But just to keep it simple so you understand what we're talking about, there are 3 steps. The— what you're going to do is listen the anger into existence, and you're going to do this in 3 ways. First, you're going to ignore the words. You've heard angry words over and over and over again. You don't need to listen to them anymore. If you ignore the words, you're not likely to get triggered, and you're going to free up bandwidth that will allow you to do the next two steps. Now, learning how to ignore the words takes a little bit of practice and some coaching because we're so attuned to what other people are saying. We think that's what the meaning is, but studies have shown that the verbal content of a human communication is less than 7%. Of the overall information being conveyed by one person to another. 93% of all communication is nonverbal. So we can afford to ignore the words for a few, a few minutes or even a few seconds. The second step is to learn how to read the emotions. And you might think to yourself, oh, I could never read the emotions of anybody. I'm really horrible at that. I don't even, I oftentimes often don't even know what I'm feeling. Well, the truth is that we all, by we I mean all human beings, have an innate ability to read and understand the emotions of other people. And this is something that evolution has granted us because long before there was language, humans had to be able to communicate with each other and they did it non-verbally, and we had to be able to instantly understand the the emotions and motivations of the people in our clans. And of course, when we met strangers, whether or not those people were friends or foes. And if we misread the emotions, we got cleaned out of the gene pool. So today we have brains that are highly sensitive to reading the emotions of other people. The problem is we've never been trained how to use this innate capability because for 4,000 years, we've been taught that emotions are bad. Emotions are evil and we should ignore our emotions and try to be rational. And of course, that myth going back thousands and thousands of years is wrong. Neuroscience tells us we're 98% emotional and only 2% rational. So you, the trick here is to learn how to read the emotions. And of course, that's one of the fundamental things I teach in my course, Developing Emotional Competency, because it's foundational to everything else. The third step, and this is also very counterintuitive, is to reflect the emotions back to the angry person with a simple you statement. And you've seen me describe this throughout the presentation today, just using a you statement. You're angry, you're pissed off, you're anxious, you're scared, you feel disrespected, you feel like you've been treated unjustly. And of course, with your reflection, you're going to— your tone of voice is going to be appropriate to the circumstance. But what you're not going to do is you're not going to use the old active listening stuff that doesn't work, like, "What I think you're feeling is..." Those I statements have never worked. If they did work, I wouldn't have to teach what I'm teaching, because I'd be using them myself as a peacemaker. And believe me, people pay me a lot of money to walk into intense conflicts and I need stuff that works. And I can guarantee you that I statements do not work and they never have and they never will for a whole bunch of different reasons. The most significant of which is that when you use an I statement, you're soothing your own anxiety. You're distancing yourself from the other person by using an I statement leading to passive voice. That's language of disconnection. And instead of approaching the angry person, you're actually retreating from that angry person and self-soothing yourself against your own anxiety around their anger. Worst thing you can do. Better to step forward into the storm and use a you statement. You are angry. And you will be amazed at the reaction you get. You would think, well, that's rude, or it's patronizing, it's manipulative. Or if anybody told me I was rude or angry, I'd just, I'd hit them because I would feel so disrespected. 'Every time somebody tells me that, I do a little experiment with them and I literally listen them into existence.' And when we're done, I said, 'How did that feel?' And they said, 'Well, that felt really great. I felt really listened to.' And I said, 'I just did exactly— you said you were going to hit me, but you didn't, so it must have worked.' And their jaws drop and they say, 'Wow, that's really amazing. I would have never guessed.' And of course we would never guess because this is all based on new neuroscience, not even the studies aren't even 13 years old. So reflect the emotions with the you statement. And when you get a nodding of the head and a yes, then you've calmed them down and then you can move on to any kind of problem solving or further conversation that you think might be useful. So that's the secret. Listen to other people, listen the anger into existence by ignoring the words, reading the emotions, and reflecting the emotions with view statement. So here is the link again for the full course that can teach you all of these skills and much, much more. I really have taught this to many, many people. I've taught this to people as diverse as incarcerated people in maximum security prisons to members of the Congressional Budget Office, teaching them how to de-escalate members of Congress. So it works on every human brain, every culture, And it's extremely powerful. And if you learn to master these skills and have to deal with anger, you will find that you have a powerful new set of tools that can make your life much more peaceful, much calmer. Uh, I've had parents tell me that after learning these skills and using them on their 2 and 3-year-old toddlers, that tantrums disappear in literally months, never to reappear. I've had parents tell me that they've used this with their Asperger's children to great effect, calming people down. I have had spouses write to me and say they've used this on their, their partners, their spouses who have— are on the autistic spectrum to great effect. I've had caregivers talk about how they've used these skills with people who are suffering from different forms of dementia or Alzheimer's to great effect. So it's extremely powerful. And if you really want to change your life and transform your life, take a look at the course and think about learning the skills that I teach in it. Okay, well, that's it for today. 34 minutes, about as far as I wanted to go with you. And please feel free to reach out to me at my email address, which is Doug Doug Noll dot com. Doug at Doug Noll dot com. And that is going to be the end of our session. Thanks for joining.