Anger is healthy. The healthy functions of anger are to protect the physical or emotional self and create energy to make constructive changes. Healthy anger is clear, focused and of an intensity that is appropriate for the situation. It is directly related to mature power, while rage and passive-aggressive anger are related to either a perpetrator or victim approach to solving life's problems. Learning to convert either passive or overt rage into mature power is a complex developmental task that is teachable, requiring that clients first become competent at labeling and expressing feelings.

In our practice, clients learn very early on to arrive for their sessions prepared to do what we call a "feelings check" at the beginning of each session. After awhile, most of them walk in, sit down, and after we say, "Okay, let's do a 'feelings check," they reply, "I knew you were going to ask that. I've been paying attention to my feelings all the way here, even through all the traffic." We are diligent about doing this with our clients because far more than 50 percent of the people whom we see begin therapy with "feelings checks" like, "I don't know." "Numb." "Nothing." "Fine, I guess." And, far more than 50 percent of our clients are well-educated professionals — business executives, psychologists, teachers, attorneys, physicians and university professors.

Making conscious the unconscious rules of living

As we grow up, we are supposed to learn in our families the complex abilities to identify, express and contain our emotions. As we go about our daily lives we simply absorb all of the unconscious rules of living that are around us. But some people actually believe that the experience of their feelings "has always been that way," and so they also believe that it is not possible to re-educate themselves about the way they experience their feelings. Our job as therapists is to help our clients replace this mistaken belief with a more useful one. Telling brief stories and/or visualizations like the following can help clients grasp how family rules are acquired:

Let's look at how the rules are learned. If you're watching television or reading a book, you might notice out of the corner of your eye that Mom can't find her car keys. She walks into the kitchen where your dad is fixing himself a sandwich and says, "I meant to thank you for taking my car this afternoon and filling my gas tank. I really appreciate it when you do that. By the way, do you remember where you put my keys? I need to run a quick errand." See? You were just exposed to some very powerful unconscious rules about how to relate to another person, especially a loved one. You would learn very different rules if Mom walked into the kitchen and said, "Where the hell are my car keys? I am so sick and tired of having to look for my keys every time you take my car. You think you're doing me a favor, but...get a grip! You're not! I can fill my own gas tank, for crying out loud!"

Feelings ‘just happen’

As Daniel Goleman described so elegantly in Emotional Intelligence, feelings are neurochemical reactions that occur in the limbic system of the brain. This is sometimes called the "reptilian brain" because feelings "just happen" — we don't have a lot of control over whether they occur or not. A reptile simply reacts without thinking of the consequences. A rattlesnake doesn't think to himself, "This man who almost stepped on me is Abraham Lincoln. If I bite him, he may die, changing the whole course of human history. I'd better not bite him!" The snake just reacts. He is the consummate reactor.

In human beings, feelings "just happen" also. Suppose a very competent surgeon comes to us because she is about to lose her job. The hospital where she practices has sent along a personnel file indicating that she has been blowing up at everyone at work and regularly causing mayhem. When we ask her what she feels as she is describing these embarrassing and painful circumstances to us, she might say, "I don't feel anything right now. They have their point of view and I have mine. I haven't done anything wrong. I'm thinking of suing them." We know that it is physiologically impossible for her to not feel anything right now because the reptilian brain in each of us just reacts. What we suspect is that she is feeling a lot of shame (embarrassment), perhaps some fear (of what will happen to her), maybe some loneliness (because she has been cut off from her colleagues). In addition, to cover it all up and protect herself (which is a perfectly sensible thing to do), we suspect she's feeling angry. Are we mind readers? No. It's just a simple fact of humanity that under these circumstances, we'll feel those feelings.

When a client is having a hard time grasping the subtleties of the above emotions, we might jump in with the following:

Pay close attention to your own reactions when something happens to you abruptly and without warning. For example, you're driving down the freeway at 60 mph and out of nowhere a car cuts in front of you aggressively and wildly. You're startled. What does "startled" mean? It means anxious, nervous, scared, afraid, frightened — you pick the word, they're all the same feeling. What do many people say they feel in this situation? They say "mad, angry, pissed, annoyed, ticked off" — they all mean the same. Who's right? Here's what's true. If you pay attention to what's going on inside your body, you'll notice that when someone cuts you off on the freeway like that, your heart rate increases, your blood pressure goes up, and your breathing gets rapid and shallow for a second. Those are startle reactions. Startle reactions are just another way of saying "fear."

When we try to explain this to people who need to deny that they feel fear, they get angry with us for suggesting that they might feel fear. They might have been so hurt when they were children that the only way they could make it through childhood was to ignore the fear. Or they might have been belittled and criticized after telling adults when they felt scared, which would make them feel very frightened and embarrassed to say that they ever feel fear. But just because I believe that I'm not afraid doesn't mean that I don't feel afraid. Remember, feelings happen in the reptilian brain, in the limbic system. Feelings just happen.

More advanced creatures think about feelings — except when acting like snakes.

Connecting with softer feelings

What follows is an explanation, combined with story-telling to help people with anger problems connect with their softer feelings:

You get startled on the freeway, feel the fright, then quickly burn inside. You're suddenly enraged. Now what? As an advanced creature that has both a reptilian brain as well as a mammalian brain with a very well-developed cerebral cortex, you get more options. If you're emotionally intelligent you'll notice that you were startled, anxious, scared. Then you'll notice that as a protective reaction you begin to get really mad. Then you think: "I'd like to run that SOB off the road. Who the hell does he think he is?" Then you think ahead: "But if I overreact here, I might really try to run him off the road, and that would have disastrous consequences for him, me and God knows who else. Then you decide: "Take a deep breath. Relax. Shake off the anxiety. Good. Now get out of the fast lane. Move over into the middle lane. Let the fool go and hope he doesn't kill himself or somebody else."

Having a cerebral cortex changes many of the rules of living and gives each of us the joint burdens of empathy and social responsibility. The snake gets scared and simply goes ahead and bites, out of self-defense. We get scared, and then we have a whole range of consequences and decisions to sift through, if we so choose. If we choose not to use our cerebral cortex, then all we have to do is "bite" and ask questions later. This works in a few limited emergency situations. In all others, it typically leads to tragedy, as in the way-too-common domestic homicide case, below.

"You had an affair with whom?" Having little emotional intelligence, husband is unaware of the fear and shame and hurt that he feels upon hearing of his wife's infidelity, and instead escalates right into rage. Husband reaches for gun and shoots wife. Bullet severs aorta. Wife dies instantly. Subject bursts into tears after realizing what a terrible, irreversible act he has committed. Seven-year-old daughter, now suffering from shock, watched entire scene from corner of kitchen after being awakened by parents' loud fighting. Thinking it was just another marital fight, neighbors had waited to call police. Police arrive on scene two minutes too late to stop the shooting. It would certainly be scientifically correct if the headlines read: Man Ignored Cerebral Cortex, Used Puny Brain of Snake to Kill Wife While Seven-Year-Old Daughter Watched. What a sad, preventable tragedy.

Feelings happen in our bodies

Feelings are registered in the brain, but they are felt in the body. We tell clients, "If you are having trouble identifying what you're feeling, don't try to figure it out. Simply let your eyes glance downward, take a deep breath, even close your eyes if possible and notice what your body is doing. Are your hands cold and clammy? Is your heart racing, your breathing shallow and your stomach doing butterflies? That's usually fear. Are your muscles tense and ready to fight? Are you grinding your teeth? Is there 'fire in your belly?' That's probably anger. Do you feel dirty, broken, disgusted deep down in the pit of your stomach? That's often shame."

Expressing feelings is 80 percent nonverbal

The words we say are almost irrelevant when we try to connect emotionally with another person. Notice what message is conveyed to me if you stare at me blankly and with a monotone voice and no facial expressions or changes in body posture, you say, "I am so excited that you stopped by to visit. You are my best friend ever." Your words will say one thing and your nonverbals another. This is called "crazy-making" for obvious reasons. The message is extremely confusing. In families where expressing emotions is not done well, or much at all, everything else can be going very smoothly, but children growing up in such families will have a fair bit of damage to repair as adults, if they ever want a good intimate relationship with another.

Feelings are going on all the time

Feelings "just happen," and, they're going on all the time. At some point in the therapy process, we'll mention that feelings are happening all the time, and then we'll suggest that our client has probably felt most of the primary feelings already that day, if only for an instant. We then ask if the client can recall feeling some of those feelings since getting up in the morning. Anger? "Somebody was driving so slow in front of me." Sad and scared? "I spoke with my wife and she said that a friend of ours was just diagnosed with cancer." Happy? “I was really glad to get here this morning and talk with you about what happened at work yesterday.” Ashamed? “When you mentioned the craziness of saying one thing but not having the nonverbals to match it. I do that sometimes.”

It makes this whole business of mastering one's emotions much easier. You don't have to wonder if they're there, you just have to find them. But if you believe that you are feeling nothing sometimes (as in, “I’m dead or in a coma”), it would be pretty hard to master your emotions. If we are dissociated, i.e., disconnected, from our feelings a lot, then we'll be feeling things but not be aware of it we’ll become slaves to our emotions. When we dissociate from our feelings, we do a lot of reptilian things.

St. Paul psychologists James Maddock and Noel Larson, two of the nation's top experts on treating victim and perpetrator dynamics, speak of perpetrators as those who as children learned to protect themselves by dissociating from their feelings, especially their "softer" feelings. When someone is disconnected from his emotions, dangerous things often happen. When we accept that feelings are always there, all we have to do is take a moment to look for them. If a client is disconnected from his feelings a lot already, this will take some effort. In fact, it can take a highly educated and intellectualized person well over a year of regular practice to be able to readily identify what he's feeling. We tell our clients that "Once this skill is acquired, your feelings will become incredible allies instead of tyrants that prompt you to do terrible things."

John C. Friel, PhD, and Linda Friel, MA, are full-time practicing psychologists in the Minneapolis/St. Paul area. They also conduct the Clearlife/Lifeworks Clinic. This article is adapted from their latest book, The 7 Best Things Smart Teenagers Do, Health Communications, Inc.
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