Anger Management--Keeping Emotions in Line

Hands clenching the steering wheel, you are in an anxious hurry to get somewhere. Stuck in traffic, you stab at the accelerator and brake in rapid succession, looking for openings in other lanes. A sedan suddenly hurtles past. Instantly, your seething blood comes to a boil. You stomp on the gas. The engine whines. Your forehead throbs. Fury spews forth from your narrowed eyes. You cut in front of the offending vehicle and screech to a halt. You unconsciously grab the long metal steering wheel lock as you exit the car. You bring the "club" crashing down on the oblivious driver....

Today's bumper-to-bumper traffic and hectic lifestyles transform many otherwise normal people into angry maniacs the minute they get behind the wheel.

Road rage

This is not a scene from a crime novel or movie about young thugs. Late last year, a golf course general manager was bludgeoned and stabbed to death on the Second Northern Freeway. After his arrest, the 21-year old male admitted killing the other driver following a tiff on the road. Even more disturbing: the "perp," who had a history of drug abuse, was not even sure that his victim was the person who offended him. He just pulled him over and took his life.

Eight years ago, the John Tung Foundation performed an anger survey to gauge the public's mental health. It found that 60% of the 2,300 people surveyed became angry at least once a week and one in seven admitted to blowing their tops on a daily basis.

In its Mental Health Index Survey, completed late last year, the Mental Health Foundation discovered that approximately one half of the 1,000 individuals surveyed admitted that a slight increase in stress causes them to blow up. Even more shocking is the fact that 19 participants gave themselves "zero" when asked to quantify their mental health. Clear warning signals are flashing for the mental health of Taiwanese.

A vital aid to survival in the primitive world, anger has no use in civilized society. Controlling rather than being controlled by anger is an important lesson people today must learn.

Caution: Angry green man ahead

Classified as an irrational, negative emotion, anger gives rise to rage, violence, and loss of self-control, and sends others ducking for cover. Experts point out that anger packs more wallop than any other emotion.

In the movie The Hulk, power floods into every muscle and blood vessel of the angry Bruce Banner. His expanding body shreds his clothes and he becomes a powerful green superhero capable of leaping hundreds of meters into the air. That is anger.

Anger pumps adrenaline into the system, accelerates the heartbeat, and causes blood to accumulate in the hands in preparation to delivering a crushing blow. Assistant professor Lu Hsu-ya of Tamkang University's psychology department explains, "Our ancestors ate raw flesh and battled with wild beasts every day. The instinct of anger helped them survive." Strong emotions are part of life, right from infancy, when hunger or a wet diaper will drive a child to scream with rage.

"Mankind is prone to a veritable cornucopia of emotions. Be it joy, sorrow, or anger, highs and lows are just a natural part of the process, just like with blood pressure. And as with blood pressure, when things get too far beyond the normal, you should take things easy for a few weeks and just look at things a bit more calmly," says Tang Hua-sheng, director of the psychiatric department of Taipei City Psychiatric Center.

Anger is not without merit, but in this day and age, we need to find and resolve the problems that produce anger. We cannot allow anger to lead us around by the nose.

Chang Ching-wen, author of Taming Your Emotions, maintains, "Emotions, such as fear, grief, frustration, and helplessness, transform anger into action. Oftentimes, it is an external expression of shattered hopes."

Like a fever, anger signals an internal condition. It is a distress signal, if you will. Unfortunately, when most people lose their tempers, not only do they not know why, they allow their emotions to condense into a turbulent, black thundercloud and reflexively hunt out a scapegoat. According to the John Tung Foundation anger survey, people most often lose their tempers with family members, especially those weaker than themselves.

Under the guidance of the school storytelling team, students at Peishin Elementary School in Taipei County learn about themselves and to respect others. Emotion education is being implemented from an early age.

Angry people need love, too

Another example of an unheeded distress call that also occurred in May of this year: A chronically unemployed victim of society, injured in a thrashing imparted by a creditor, beats his wife until she flees and his child until it dies.

Society sighs and shakes it collective head at this subgroup, which consists of disadvantaged individuals, often unemployed and/or single parents, stuck on the lower rungs both socially and economically. When faced with injustice or adversity, they often do not know how to express their emotions or where to seek help. These lonely, helpless, marginalized individuals are most vulnerable to anger-whether as its wielders or its victims.

National Chengchi University associate professor of sociology Kuan Ping-yin dissects the problem: "The middle classes enjoy a relatively high social standing. To them, anger management is an intrinsic part of their work. The ability to control your temper is a prerequisite to working environments that require frequent interaction with others, such as the service industry and public relations."

In addition to emotion management skills, people with higher educations have access to more resources effective in venting anger. If, for example, they inadvertently purchase counterfeit products, they can lodge complaints with the Consumer Foundation. If maliciously fired from a job, they know to appeal to the law. If they trip and fall in the street, they know they can sue the government and demand compensation for poor sidewalk maintenance.

Kuan Ping-yin explains, "They also experience frustrations, but they know better how to use the law and channels of appeal to convey their discontent and fight for their rights."

Faced with authoritarian schools, teachers, and parents, kids grumble and feel they have no other way to vent their anger. They are unaware that better means to express themselves exist.

Seething pots

Violent crimes committed by out-of-control individuals abound, but Lu confides that another personality type is also cause for concern: those that do not show their anger. In last year's box office comedy hit Anger Management, a psychologist (played by Jack Nicholson) describes a situation: A guy in a store blows his top. He screams and harasses a convenience store clerk. The first guy is an example of the first personality type. He needs emotion management training. The store clerk, however, is an example of another personality type that also requires training in emotion management.

As the survey on anger undertaken by the John Tung Foundation also illustrates, when faced with something that annoys them, the majority of people would prefer to try and escape from it rather than confront it. But these people, suppressing their anger and avoiding conflict, can end up having the pressure of this bottled-up rage build up to a dangerous level, at which point it can explode with astonishing and potentially extremely harmful power, basically turning them into a ticking time bomb.

Emily Liu, a mental health counselor with the Shiuh-Li Liuh Memorial Foundation who has a great deal of experience counseling abused women, has found that despite their anger, many patients cannot bring themselves to punch pillows when encouraged to do so to vent their anger. Unable to communicate their resentment, some women turn around and harm themselves or commit suicide (sometimes taking their children with them) to "get back" at their attackers.

Kuan believes that to prevent anger-related tragedies-whether instigated by individuals who hurt others or those who hurt themselves-basic emotional education needs to be improved. The social welfare system also needs to be more far-reaching, providing better unemployment relief, skills training, and assistance for dysfunctional families.

Early warning is important for averting disaster. In Taiwan, the Domestic Violence Prevention Act is the only law to include a provision for treatment of offenders. When domestic violence occurs, it sets into motion an integrated early warning system composed of the police, domestic violence centers, the courts, and hospitals. Judges can compel offenders to undergo psychological counseling for between one and two years, depending on the seriousness of the violence.

Kuan also hopes that society will work to promote community activities and strengthen the role of the community to reduce the feeling in people that they are alone in their struggles with anger. He believes that this mechanism can help prevent tragedies.

The hormones made me do it

A crime of passion early this year in Taichung City shocked the nation. 23-year old Hung Kuo-yang attacked his live-in girlfriend and their flatmates (his girlfriend's sister, another flatmate, and her boyfriend) with a knife, killing three and seriously injuring a fourth. Hung then jumped to his death from a ninth-floor balcony.

In his family's eyes, Hung was independent and headstrong. As a student, he rented a room outside and worked his way through school. He was a good kid, not some fiend. What drove him over the edge? Many questions have been left unanswered. What type of person is particularly apt to fly into a rage and commit murder? What can drive them to it?

Statistics show that in the United States, ten times as many males are arrested for violence as females. Among young Taiwanese, 11 times more males are apprehended for violent crimes as females and most murders are committed by males between the ages of 15 and 25. Males are responsible for 99% of domestic violence. Research shows that violent behavior in males increases in direct proportion to the concentration of the male hormone testosterone in their systems, revealing a link between anger, violence, physiological type, and gender. Biology, however, is not the sole determinant. External conditions, such as social practices and home environment, play key roles.

A shocked society

Last year's unprecedented SARS outbreak produced tremendous anxiety in Taiwan. Government officials, hospitals, patients, and the public flung curses as they stood in opposition to each other. A woman on a subway train slapped her child for tugging at the surgical mask he was wearing. She snapped, "Go ahead. Take your mask off and see if I don't smack you again!" Tensions ran high and tempers were touch-and-go. Society had become a seething pressure cooker.

The more society progresses, the more unpredictable factors pop up.

Psychological experiments show that the behavior of laboratory mice undergoes drastic changes when administered electric shocks at random. They become irritable, they sleep less and even bite each other. Over the past few years, the roller-coaster ride of Taiwan's economy has made it difficult for individuals to make ends meet, producing similar feelings of frustration and panic.

Moreover, under past society's strict standards of behavior and order, people were trained from an early age to be submissive and patient. Professor Kuan elucidates, "The venting of anger among people today is not only more accepted than it was in the past, it is increasingly tolerated as a 'right' in all social classes. But the rules for expressing anger and just how far one can go in conveying anger before it is considered 'going too far' have yet to be established. Society is still incapable of mature self-control."

Today, children can express anger at parents and employees can blow their tops at bosses. Fewer people are keeping their feelings in check. We have not learned, however, how to express anger without being insulting or provocative. You can use sharp words without getting personal. Kuan explains, "The Legislative Yuan and political talk shows, with which we have been inundated, are pathetic role models."

Public figures with their violent language and behavior are not only bad examples, they serve to indirectly stoke the resentment and anguish the public feels.

In its 2003 Young People's Misery Index, the ToSun Foundation found three major reasons for despair among the young. They are the inability of the law to truly protect citizens, the dismal behavior of politicians and the resultant decline in credibility, and individuals with power ignoring the rights and interests of the people.

Have weapon, will travel

Professor Kuan points out that in addition to a general sense of anxiety in society, the fact that "individuals today are faced with more stress and more kinds of stress than their counterparts of yesteryear is another major reason for the soaring anger today." Sources of stress include office time clocks, lines, traffic jams, applying for jobs, single parenting... sources rarely, if ever, heard of in agricultural society.

In light of the unraveling of the traditional family and increasing alienation in interpersonal relationships in modern-day society, Kuan explains, "People today frequently have to face these complex pressures alone." Supportive friends would serve to mitigate anger in many situations.

To make matters worse in this age of estrangement, we have another sometimes-fatal problem with which to deal. Frank Fu-yuan Huang, professor of crime prevention at Police University, explains, "Criminal psychology describes a phenomenon common today as the 'weapon effect.' Weapons make people feel powerful which causes them to become more aggressive." Behind the wheel of a car, for example, people are more apt to go berserk. Knowing that they can radio others for assistance makes taxi drivers more likely to provoke others. Their vehicles and radios make them feel invincible.

To put it more succinctly: pressure from society is building, and individual levels of tolerance and self-control are dropping. Combine this with ever-easier access to things such as sedatives, which just put off the inevitable explosive release of anger rather than help cure it, and the number of aggression-related fatalities and injuries increases at a phenomenal rate.

Anger management

According to statistics, 70% of homicides in the United States are sparked by trivial matters and most victims knew their killers. The situation in Taiwan is similar. Huang outlines six common stages that lead up to anger-induced killings: The perpetrator feels threatened. He interprets the threat as provocation or an insult. Both parties push and shove as temperatures escalate. Once onlookers start egging them on, any possible retreat is cut off. The individuals become increasingly violent. In the end, if one of them does not admit defeat and flee, another tragedy occurs.

"When all's said and done," Huang continues, "preventing murders of passion requires situation coping skills. Most importantly, we must change how we think, enhance our EQs, and always try to look for the bright side."

In recent years, anger management courses have become ubiquitous in the United States. US courts commonly require offenders, like boxing champion Mike Tyson, to participate in anger management classes.

A group of individuals with histories of domestic violence are sitting in a circle under the direction of Kuo Fu-jung, a psychiatrist at the Taipei City Psychiatry Center. New members are slow to open up, preferring to gripe about their judges and the unfairness of society. They even talk about getting revenge. They need time and to hear others share their stories before they will start facing their own problems.

To teach them to be more self-aware, they are asked to retrace the steps that led to their violence. One of them realizes that in the early stages of each fight with his wife, he is still capable of communicating rationally. Gradually, however, he loses patience, becomes restless, starts pacing. He eventually becomes so angry that he "sees red" and starts hurling anything and everything at her.

Through repeated examination, he discovers the critical moment-the point where he starts to lose control. He realizes that when he begins to feel restless, he needs to leave or he might once again lose control. Kuo, who has treated some 50 patients, confides, "Anger management is first aid for domestic violence."

Emotional education

Sociologists, psychologists, and crime specialists agree on the importance of emotional education. A study by Yeh Kuang-hui, assistant researcher with the Academia Sinica's Institute of Ethnology, indicates that parents typically respond to their children's negative emotions in one of four ways: 1) by educating them, 2) by not getting involved, 3) by pushing them away, and 4) by losing control. Most Chinese parents tend to push their children away. Parents are very sensitive to the negative emotions of their offspring, but they refuse to deal with them head on. Faced with an angry, ranting, or crying child, parents respond by demanding that they immediately shake off the negative emotions, saying such things as "What's your problem?" "Shut up!" or "Keep it up and I'll spank you!"

As a study into teen aggression discovered, parent-child communication and in-class rules dictating how one should deal with others aren't enough. Many teenagers have no real way to express their emotions, to tell people when they are feeling hurt or sad, and basically lash out aggressively as a reaction to those feelings.

Sung Wen-ling of the storytelling team at Taipei County's Peishin Elementary School teaches emotional education through stories. She explains, "A child might get straight 'A's, but if he has an EQ of zero, then everything else is meaningless." Parents today are keenly aware of the importance of emotional education. They search within themselves to find the cause of their children's negative attitudes, but having never truly understood or faced their own emotions, the parents cannot really make sense of their children's feelings. "We are learning along with our children. We are relearning," explains Tsai Yi-ping, head of Peishin's storytelling team.

As the cicadas commence their summer cacophony and the heat index soars, we need to keep a watchful eye on our tempers, so as not to be at their mercy. Only then can we lead truly happy, beautiful lives.