When Someone Takes Their Anger Out On You

Okay, well, it's pretty close to 11 o'clock, so let's get started. My name is Doug Noll. I'm a visionary, a peacemaker, an author, a teacher, trainer. I'm a professor. And I teach people how to listen others into existence. And when you learn that skill, all kinds of transformative things begin to happen in your life. In today's Facebook Live, I'm going to show you what to do when someone takes their anger out on you. And we've all had this experience where all of a sudden somebody just explodes, and maybe that person's anger is directed to you, maybe it's directed to somebody else, but you're the target. And the question is, what do you do when that happens? And that's what this session is going to be all about. If you have questions, type them in the comments and they should show up for me to be able to answer. And along the way, I'll be posting links of resources that you can find on my website so you can learn more. I also have a new ebook out called The Owner's Manual for the Superpower that I'll be talking about, and you'll see links for that coming up every now and then. So you can just take a note of that and go, go to that link and grab your ebook that will show you the owner's manual for the superpowers I'm going to be talking about. So let's get started. I'm going to change the view here. So that we've got the slides up, and let us begin. And so in a moment, I am going to show you the perfect response to someone who takes their anger out on you, but first we want to go through, uh, we want to, we want to look at some of the things that happen And let's take this off for a second. Do, do, do, do, do. Take that off. Hide. There we go. All right, but first what we want to do is talk about what is going on. So How many of you have ever had a problem where somebody's taken their anger out at you? Just type a 1 in the comment box if you're listening. So maybe, maybe you got this situation. You've got somebody who is really, really, really mad and they are just, they are just going at it with you, just furious, enraged. And so what's happening and what's going on here? And how did you respond? So maybe the first thing that happens is that you become anxious. Very common reaction to when somebody is taking their anger out on you because you don't know what's going to happen next. Anxiety is the fear, it's an anticipatory fear of something that's going to happen bad in the future. And so of course we're going to feel anxious if we don't know how to respond to somebody who's taking their anger out on us. Maybe you're surprised. This is quite common. Somebody all of a sudden explodes on you out of the blue and you're totally shocked and startled. Very common. Maybe you're scared. Oftentimes when somebody gets angry It's, of course, anger is a form of boundary violation, and people use anger to protect themselves and to create fright so that they control, manipulate, or otherwise protect themselves. And so if somebody gets very angry with you, takes their anger out on you, then their intent is to scare you, and that's exactly what happens. Maybe you become defensive. And you sort of starting— start to retreat, and you obviously don't want to engage, and maybe you even want to run away. Uh, you know, many times the emotions become so intense that it's painful, very uncomfortable to hang around, and all you want to do is get out of there. I mean, I mean, before I learned all the skills I'm going to be showing you in a little while, that's exactly what I would do. I would run from conflict. And I would feel anxious and scared and felt incompetent. I didn't know what to do. I didn't know how to handle it. And running was my way of dealing with conflict, especially conflict in personal relationships. Maybe you shut down and withdraw and you just go numb so that the anger can't even touch you. You don't even feel it because you don't feel anything inside yourself. Maybe the anger hurts you because anger can be very destructive and it can be hurtful, and sometimes anger is intended to hurt, and so that's what you experience. Sometimes you get counter-aggressive and you shout back, and typically that happens if you get angry yourself, if you get triggered, or you have a hair-trigger anger response. Of course, all that does is escalate the fight. So, but it's a common, it's a common response for people to become counter-aggressive and fight back. Maybe you've tried explaining or justifying or rationalizing or excusing yourself or excusing the situation against somebody who's super angry. And if you've been observant, you've noticed that that doesn't work. And in fact, you can never rationalize, justify, excuse, or explain and hope that somebody's anger is going to, going to go away. And the reason for that, as we'll go into more detail in a little while, is that when somebody is hyper-angry, their prefrontal cortex is shut down and they are not capable of any kind of rational thought. It's physiologically impossible for them to do any kind of critical thinking or analysis. They're simply in an emotional overload. So if you try to rationalize, explain, justify, or excuse, you're talking to a brain that can't even hear it, and it just makes the angry person even angrier. Maybe you've tried to apologize, and you've probably noticed, if you're careful, is that apology does not calm an angry person down. Apology at the right time will help, but apology is a form of problem solving. And you cannot problem solve until you de-escalate. De-escalate, then problem solve. And as I teach in all of my classes, never take responsibility. And I'll go through the do-nots here in a minute, but just to foreshadow that, never take responsibility for anything until you've got a person calmed down. And by the way, there's the link. Get your Superpower Owner's Manual here, Go to that link and you can download my new ebook that talks about the superpower of listening other people into existence. You'll find it very beneficial. All right, so earlier I said we would cover the perfect response to someone who takes their anger out on you. And so that's what I want to do. I want to show you what the perfect response is. So the first thing to recognize is that it's not your fault that you don't know how to respond when someone takes their anger out on you, because we are not taught what to do when someone takes their anger out on us. We're simply not taught the skills how to do this. We're certainly not taught the skills in school, and, and our society sort of expects us to gain emotional competency in our families But the truth of the matter is 96% of all families are emotionally dysfunctional. Families are incapable of teaching children how to be emotionally competent, how to respond to intense emotions, how to have constructive difficult conversations. Children are not taught that. Children are emotionally abused. Even in the most loving families, they're abused because they are emotionally invalidated. And so families are not the place where we would expect to learn how to deal with someone when they take their anger out on us. In fact, what we learn from our parents' behaviors is to run and get out of the way if somebody— if mom or dad are really angry with us. We learn that it's a very scary, difficult, challenging situation over which we have no power to control. And we take that programming with us into adulthood. So here are things that you absolutely do not want to do when someone is taking their anger out at you. Now, these are things you probably do do, but you don't want to do this. So you're going to have to use a lot of discipline and courage and refrain from doing any of these things. So for example, You don't want to rationalize. I've explained already that the rational part of the brain in the angry person is offline. They cannot think. Rationalization will only anger the person even more. You don't want to explain or try to justify. You don't want to go to that old active listening formula of using I statements. Gee, what I hear you saying is X. That's old psychology. It was invented by a guy by the name of Thomas Gordon in the 1960s. He was the one who created this concept of active listening that's been around for so long. There is no science to support it, and it does not work. We all know it doesn't work. If we've taken active listening classes, you don't use it because it doesn't work. I know for a fact that it doesn't work because as a professional peacemaker and mediator, I was trained to use I statements, and I learned very, very quickly that all I statements do is make angry people even angrier. There's a better way, which I'll be showing you in a few, in a little while. Do not take premature responsibility for somebody else's anger. You don't know what's causing that anger most of the time, and believe it or not, most of the time the anger is not about you. It's about something else. You just happen to be a convenient and maybe a safe target for the person to take their anger out on. So until you have calmed things down and can really understand what's going on, don't take premature responsibility. It's not going to calm an angry person down by you trying to do face-saving or take responsibility. Not yet. Wait. Don't apologize early. Now, if you are at fault and once you've got things calmed down, you can apologize, and that's appropriate. But in the heat of the moment when someone's taking their anger out at you, not appropriate. Don't apologize. Don't try to solve the problem. When people go to problem solving immediately when confronted with somebody who's taking their anger out on you, They are trying to soothe their own anxiety. So if you try to problem solve, what you're really trying to do is soothe your own anxiety. You're trying to get rid of the anger as quickly as possible so that your anxiety goes away. Problem solving is not appropriate right now. You have to de-escalate first, then you can go to problem solving. And what that means is that you have to learn how to manage your anxiety when someone is taking their anger out on you. You have to maintain a cool, collected, calm presence. And there's a way to do that that works really, really well. We'll get there in a moment. You don't want to become angry yourself because all that does is just escalate the situation. You don't want to try to justify yourself. You don't want to try to excuse yourself or the situation. You definitely do not want to appease. Now, I don't have time in this session to explain why appeasing makes things worse. I have— you can learn that in my online courses where we talk about the polyvagal theory and how the polyvagal system demonstrates to us why appeasing an angry person only makes an angry person more angry because of the biology, uh, of our— of who we are as human beings. Um, you don't want to become defensive You don't want to be offensive. You don't want to be defensive. You want to be completely neutral. And to get to the place where you can help calm down somebody who's taking their anger out on you, you first have to understand what does that angry person need. And I talk about the 5 needs of fury. And I'll just go through them very quickly with you. The first is the need for vengeance. Sometimes when people are very angry, they need to feel like they're punishing you or punishing somebody else because they want you to hurt more than they hurt. Vengeance is an anticipatory emotion. And what that means is that when we are in a vengeful state of mind, we are anticipating what it will feel like to punish another person, to inflict pain on them in exchange for the pain they inflicted on us. And when we do that, in a part of the brain called the striatum, dopamine is released and we feel pleasure. We get a little dopamine squirt and we feel good about ourselves. So the idea of vengeance and vengeful thinking and taking revenge, as we anticipate it and think about it and imagine it, makes us feel good and it spurs us to action. The problem is that if we are able to exact vengeance, if we really are able to exact some kind of punishment ourselves, there's no dopamine release, and so we feel let down. We feel like there hasn't been justice, we feel like the other person has not suffered enough, and so the vengeance cycle continues because now we need to punish even harder. Well, I must not have punished hard enough because I don't feel good about it. And at a social level, this is what caused the mass incarceration movement in the 1980s. When people feel like they've got to be tough on crime, it's because they don't feel the pleasure of punishment inflicted on somebody who's been convicted of a crime, and so they say, well, I don't feel good about this, so maybe we didn't punish enough, maybe we better punish more, and of course that led to three strikes and crazy laws that have cost us trillions of dollars without increasing our public safety one iota. The second need is the need for vindication. This is the need to feel that you're right and I'm wrong. So oftentimes an angry person has a really strong need to feel right. I'm righteously correct in, in my anger. And so you have to satisfy that need for vindication somehow in order for the anger to dissipate. The third need of fury is validation. People need to feel validated and in their— they need to experience validation in how they're feeling so that their emotion of anger and all the emotions that are underneath the anger are being validated as legitimate feelings. Now, that doesn't mean that the reason for the anger is legitimate, but it does mean that the experience, the emotional experience, is legitimate and they have a deep need to be validated. Every angry person has a need to be heard, to be listened into existence. And here's the secret: when you fulfill the need to be heard, when you listen an angry person into existence, the anger goes away. Within usually 45 to 90 seconds. It's quite magical, but it's how our brains are hardwired, and I'm going to show you how to do that in just a moment. The fifth need is the need to create meaning. Sometimes angry people have had their reality shattered. Maybe they've been traumatized, maybe they've been victimized, maybe something has happened to them and their understanding of their place in the universe has been completely shattered. And in order to reconstruct themselves, they have to create new meaning. And typically you'll hear people say, I just want to make sure that nobody else has to go through what I went through. And so people try to find meaning that's bigger and higher than themselves, than themselves, so they can construct a new reality and a new meaning out of whatever it is that has cause them to be so angry. And finally, angry people have a need to be safe—physically safe, emotionally safe, and spiritually safe. And as I said before, if you can meet that fourth need, the need to be heard, especially the need to be heard and validated, emotionally validated, all of these other needs are automatically satisfied, and you can calm an angry person down in literally seconds. It's amazing to watch. So meet these needs and the anger goes away. So here's how to do it. Step number 1: Ignore the words. You're not ignoring the person. You're just ignoring the angry words. Step number 2, guess at the emotions. You're really good at this, believe it or not. Again, if you take my online courses, I'll teach you how to do this. It's very efficient. Your brain's very efficient at this. You just need to learn a couple of tricks. But what you really want to do is learn how to read the emotional data fields. Emotions are data. It's information. It's fast and it's fleeting, but it's still information, and our brains can process that information far faster preconsciously than we can consciously be aware of. So we just need to let our brains do the work for us, and we can very accurately perceive the emotional experience that another person is having. Takes a little bit of training, a little bit of practice, but every human being can do this. And then finally, we're going to reflect back the emotions with the "you" statement. You are really angry. You're pissed off. You're enraged. You're frustrated. You feel completely disrespected. You feel like you've been treated unfairly. Nobody's listening to you. You're completely ignored. And you feel a little anxious and scared, and you're a little sad. Because the connection that you were hoping for did not materialize, and that's really, really pissing you off. Notice how what I just said was all about you statements, and all I did was reflect back a list of various emotions that angry people typically have. That's all you have to do. Reflect back the emotions with a simple you statement. Don't use I statements. Don't ask questions, don't interrogate, don't do all those other things I told you not to do a few slides ago. Simply reflect back the emotions with a simple "you" statement. So here is a slice of a pie. I've got, I've got a full circle. They call this a wheel of emotions, but I just picked out the slice, the anger slice. And to give you a sense of some of the words that you can use when you're reflecting back somebody's anchors. So in the first, in the middle layer there, you got frustrated, jealous, hate, and rage. So you could say, "You're really frustrated," or, "You're really jealous," or, "You really hate what's going on," or, "You feel like you're enraged." And then on the outer part there, You could say, "Man, you just are totally aggravated. You're so irritated. This is really annoying to you. Oh, you're so envious. You're really resentful. You feel cheated. You feel betrayed. You're indignant. Ah, you're just totally bitter about the whole thing. You are outraged. You are furious." So you can see right there we've got, you know, more than a dozen words that we can use for various intensities when someone is taking their anger out on you or they're directing their anger towards you. So again, in my courses, I have the full wheel and we go through all of the various emotions that people can experience and start building an emotional vocabulary that we can use when we are confronted by somebody who's taking their anger out on you. So the question is, why does this work, this idea of using you statements and labeling emotions? Well, the The technique is technically called affect labeling. And in 2007, Matthew Lieberman, who's a neuroscientist at UCLA, did a brain scanning study or published the results of a brain scanning study. And this is what he and his team found. And I just highlighted the most important part of this neuro geek, and I'll translate a little bit for you. So affect labeling, that's the you statements, you feel X. So you feel why. Diminish the response of the amygdala, and you've probably heard of the amygdala. We have two of them, almond-shaped processes deep within our brain. They're associated with strong emotion. They're our early warning system, strongly related to fear responses and anger. So affect labeling diminished the response of the amygdala, and additionally affect labeling increased activity in a single brain region, the right ventrolateral prefrontal cortex. That's the thinking part of our brain. So when we affect label, not only are we inhibiting the negative emotion of anger by inhibiting the amygdala, we're also activating the prefrontal cortex, which is the thinking part of our brain. And the results show that affect labeling may diminish emotional reactivity along a pathway from the right ventrolateral prefrontal cortex to the medial the prefrontal cortex and the amygdala. So affect labeling literally calms people down and allows people to start thinking again. And it literally takes 45 to 90 seconds for this to happen. It's a biological process over which we have no control, and it acts unconsciously on the angry person's brain, and they don't even know most of the time that you're even doing it. So for your neuro geek people, here's a little bit of the brain parts that are involved in this. So if we look here, let me pull up my pen. Where are we here? So we have the amygdala, which is right here, that right in there. And then we have the ventromedial prefrontal cortex, which is right here. And basically what happens is that when we affect label, this part of the brain over here is calmed down while this part of the brain is activated right here. And this allows us to control our emotions. This is where our impulse control comes from. This is where we have the ability to make choices about how we're going to behave. If this is offline or it's overwhelmed, by all of these emotional centers of the brain over here, there's no way we can think our way through an emotion. However, when we are affect labeled, and we can affect label ourselves too, it works just as well whether we label our own emotions or the emotions of somebody else, when affect labeling occurs, the ventromedial prefrontal cortex is activated, it comes back online, and the amygdala and associated structures are inhibited And so the emotional response decreases. It's as if we are literally lending our prefrontal cortex to this angry person for the time that it takes the angry person's brain to come back online and get calm again. And then after calm is restored, we can start to problem solve. That's when you can start to ask questions like, what's going on? And if apology is required, you can say, "I'm so sorry." But you can't do any of that work until you've got somebody calmed down first. So let me know whether these ideas work for you. You can either write comments or you can email me at Doug@dougnoll.com. I want to put up for a second here, let's put up this. So you can learn more about this at— on this slider that's going across the bottom of the screen. That's my— one of my courses that will teach you how and why to do this in more detail. So if you want to learn more about this, here is the same link. Https://dougnoll.com/LP, listen others into existence. That will take you to a page where you can buy both of my courses as a bundle and learn in depth everything that I've talked about in this Facebook Live presentation. So next week in my continuing series of Facebook Live YouTube live streams, I'm going to be covering how to have a relationship without fights. And I'm going to be talking about this same material but in the context of preventing relationship arguments and fights as opposed to trying to calm people down. And it's really the same idea, it's just applied slightly differently in relationships. So if you are in a relationship with either a partner or a spouse or even a business relationship or or maybe with your children, and you have constant fighting, bickering, and arguing, you want to come back next week because I'm going to show you how to use these skills to stop all of that stuff forever. And again, if you like this stuff, comment on it, like it, uh, email me and let me know that you found it useful, and we'll see you next week.