Anger: The Anger Response Model

To help understand anger and our responses to it, I have developed what I call the Anger Response Model.

The model demonstrates anger as a two-stage response. The first stage is a physiological response as the human body prepares to take some form of emergency action. The second stage is the action that is taken and depends upon whether you decide to express anger or repress it. In this and succeeding chapters, we will come back to the Anger Response Model to explain the origins and effects of anger.

ANGER:  A Primitive Response

Can you imagine a time when the survival of an individual or a family depended upon their ability to react swiftly to danger? In some long-ago era, the ancestors of our species were faced with many dangers in the wild. Predators threatened the weak and the young. Other tribes competed for food, fresh water, and safe shelter. Those individuals who were able to recognize danger first and react the fastest were the ones who survived. This response to external threats seems to be closely linked to our modern-day anger response.

Perhaps anger is a relic of this earlier time, when quick reactions were necessary for survival. The anger response may be a descendant of the males’ territoriality instinct and of the females’ urge to protect their young. 

Certainly these responses are important to the survival of people in a primitive society, but how do they fit into the complexities of our modern, civilized society? Whether they fit or not, they (or the very-similar anger responses) are still with us. 

Consider the various situations in which people get angry. Can you see any common threads running through them? Try making a list of things that make you feel angry.

Here are some things people have told me make them angry:

• When people don't listen to me
• People who interrupt
• Inconsiderate people
• Child abuse
• My boss acts like he owns me
• Bigots
• People who don't use their turn signals
• Bigshots who think they can boss you around
• Lateness - being kept waiting
• When my mother tries to tell me how to live
• Men who cheat on their wives
• When I get blamed for someone else's mistake
• Hypocrisy
• People who think they're holier-than-thou
• Indecisiveness
• Sarcastic people
• Unfair criticism
• Litterbugs
• People who don't keep promises
• Bullying………………….

.... and the list could go on and on.

How does your list compare with this one? Perhaps you have discovered, as I did, that different things make different people angry. One example of this is the way people feel about hunting. Many Americans have grown up in a culture in which hunting is a natural, accepted part of life, as much a sport as a way of bringing food home to the family and controlling the size of the deer herds. For another segment of society, hunting is viewed as a barbaric anachronism which is unnecessary and which appeals only to the uncultured rustic who has some need to prove his manhood by killing. For yet another group, hunting is of no interest and raises no passions, either for or against. Obviously, the same subject may outrage some people while having a very different effect on others. What may anger and upset you may mean nothing to me.1

YOU THINK YOU'RE BEING ATTACKED

In any anger-provoking situation, there is the perception that, somehow, you are being attacked. The attack may not be a real one—the mere threat of an attack may be enough. The attack may not be direct—an attack on what you believe in can also make you angry. And the threat or attack may be communicated to you by many different means:

• Words - written or spoken
• Tone of Voice
• Gestures
• Facial Expression
• Body Language
• Symbolically
• Via Print, TV, Radio, Film, in Person, or by word of mouth
• or by a combination of these.

Whatever the means of communication, your anger is triggered when you perceive yourself under attack. Needless to say, you don't always perceive the threat or attack, so you don't always get angry when you “should” and sometimes you feel angry for no obvious reason. There are times when an imagined slight will set off an anger response and times when a situation one might expect to provoke anger, or which is intended to hurt, doesn’t arouse feelings of anger.2 What matters is NOT the nature of the attack, but how it is perceived by the “attackee.”

Therefore, we can define anger as a natural response to situations in which we perceive an attack (or the threat of an attack) on our value system or on a source of our self-esteem.

There are two categories of situations which are consistently anger provoking for most people (when they perceive them). These are attacks on your value system and attacks on your sources of self-esteem. 

The Anger Response Model shows how a perceived attack on one’s sources of self-esteem or one’s value system can trigger anger. ©1985, Steven B. Zwickel

Attacks on your value system

When someone does something you think they should not do, you may construe their behavior as an attack on your value system and you will feel angry.

A value system consists of a set of rules which you believe in—what is "right" and “wrong” behavior, what you “should” and “should not” do, and what makes a person “good" or “bad." These rules are give to each of us by the adults in our lives while we are growing up. They represent the values that our parents, relatives, teachers, community and religious leaders wanted to pass on to future generations because they believed that these values were important. These messages are internalized, so that, long after these adults are gone from our lives, we still retain a critical sense of good and bad.

Within your value system are rules telling you what behavior is considered acceptable and a conscience which alerts you to any violation of these rules. The image of a man striking a rock will not set off this “alarm” of conscience, but an image of a man striking a baby seal may do so. Your internal alarm goes off whenever you believe that someone is doing something that he or she should NOT do. (You may even get angry at yourself for feeling angry if you believe that that is something you should NOT do!)

All of the statements about anger in the Introduction describing anger as childish or crazy are examples of the judgments made by a person's value system. These judgments are supposed to help you know how you should feel about anger. What most of them do, however, is to make you feel badly about feeling angry. They do not take into account the fact that, for most people, anger is an uninvited feeling rather than a conscious choice. Anger is a NORMAL response to some threat (or what you believe to be a threat) to your sense of right and wrong, and the first part of that response is PHYSIOLOGICAL; that is, your body responds automatically, without thinking, to this threat. [We will talk more about this part of the anger response in the next chapter].

The second part of the anger response is your choice of behaviors for dealing with the apparent threat. You DO make choices, 'even when you may not be aware of doing so. These behaviors are what most people think of (and condemn) when they think of anger. They include behaviors that may frighten and confuse people about anger for all the reasons given in the Introduction. And they are responsible for the way our value systems respond to the whole concept of anger.

One important facet of our individual and collective value systems is the notion of FAIRNESS. One of the things almost all of us are taught while growing up is that might does not necessarily make for right. Civility demands that we forego the idea that winner-takes-all so that we can each contribute to, and participate in, society. Thus, we are taught to share, to take turns, to flip a coin, and to play according to Hoyle. We are taught to believe that, somehow, the righteous will be rewarded and the wicked will be punished. We believe, and we WANT to believe, that there is JUSTICE in the world.

Theological considerations aside, this belief is illogical—there is no evidence whatsoever that life is at all fair. Still, people really expect both fairness and logical explanations in life. When you believe that something is UNFAIR, you perceive it as a violation of your value system and it triggers an anger response. When faced with unfairness, this anger may be directed at anything you believe may have un-balanced the scales of justice—God, fate, whoever you think may be loading the dice of life.

Many people also seek logical explanations where there are none—they rationalize the irrational to help explain random events. Have you ever heard (or thought), "I'm not surprised that so-and-so got sick—the way he lives …." While it has been shown that people do things that increase the risk of getting sick, who actually gets sick from any given disease is a completely random event, ruled strictly by the laws of probability.

Similarly, people will decide that the randomly-selected victim of a crime had it coming. When a judge in Wisconsin took this position regarding the victim of a sexual assault, he was ousted in a recall election; but, several hundred people AGREED with him. They wanted so badly to believe in a just world that they were probably angry that the judge was being challenged for stating something which appeared so obvious to them.

The need to believe in FAIRNESS runs deeply through our whole society. Its honorable origins go back to the religious persecution suffered by the earliest immigrants and are reflected in the sense of injustice which led up to the American Revolution. Our complex legal system was created to ensure “liberty and justice for all” and we continue to hope that the ideal will become the real and that the I.R.S. will audit somebody else (a REAL tax cheater) instead of us.

Attacks on Your Self-Esteem

The second category of anger-provoking situations are those in which you perceive your sources of self-esteem to be under attack. 

Just as people differ in the composition of their value systems, they also differ in their sources of self-esteem. In other words, people feel good about themselves for different reasons. For example, I take pride in my accomplishments as a social worker and, for me, that role is a source of my self-esteem. Other social workers may feel differently and get their self-esteem from being associated with a prestigious hospital or university. Comment disparagingly on my performance as a social worker and I will very likely perceive you to be attacking a source of my self-esteem—I will probably get angry.

Think for a moment about your sources of self-esteem. Do you feel good about the work you do? If you. are a parent, does parenting make you feel good about yourself? What other sources of self-esteem do you have?

Here are some of the traditional sources of self-esteem for WOMEN:

• Physical Beauty ( = ability to attract a man)
• Successful Parenting
• Home-making Skills (cleaning, cooking, etc.)

Traditional sources of self-esteem for MEN include:

• Power ( = being successful)
• Financial Status ( = a “good” provider)
• Potency (able to satisfy women and sire children)

These traditional views of where we get our self-esteem from are changing after having been challenged by a more liberal and egalitarian perspective in recent years. Even so, many modern-thinking men and women still have to struggle to shake off the old stereotypes. As a liberated Child-of-the-60’s/Man-of-the-80’s/Senior-of—the 2010s, I may scoff at these old-fashioned ideas about what is supposed to make me feel good, but advertisers are betting billions of dollars every year that I'm wrong and that Ms. America can still be shamed into buying a product that promises to end the humiliation of smelly laundry.

Watch and listen and read you'll discover how carefully advertisements are pitched directly at one of the traditional sources of self-esteem.

Just as Madison Avenue knows where the “Strike zone” is if they want to sell you something, they also know that some pitchers are more effective than others. In a similar way, the source of an attack on your self-esteem can affect the amount of anger that attack will generate. Generally speaking, an attack coming from someone you feel inferior to will hurt you more, cause you to feel more anger (and require more energy to repress that anger), than an attack from an equal or someone you feel superior to. If one of the neighborhood kids notices a stain on your carpeting, it is of little importance. 

But if your mother-in-law notices the same stain (and lets you know that she sees it), you may feel a much greater sense of anger, especially if you pride yourself in being a good housekeeper. [If your value system has been nagging you, telling you "You should clean the carpets every week,” you’re really getting a double whammy]. Your mother-in-law’s regard for you may be more important to you than the opinion of a child, not only if you want her to like you, but if her “expertise” in caring for a home makes you feel that your skills are somehow inferior. Criticism from ordinary people may be dismissed in your mind as uneducated and uninformed; the displeasure of someone who is “in the know” can really hurt a lot.

Dealing With Anger By Discounting The Source

This suggests one method for dealing with anger from the outset. If you can convince yourself that the source of you anger is somehow inferior to you (not as well informed, ignorant of certain things of which you are aware, or unable to make a competent evaluation for whatever reason), you may be able to discount:the source of your anger and block the anger response very early on.

There is reason to believe that people who are exceptionally good at dealing with anger use a combination of discounting the source and feeling sorry for the source to diffuse their responses to threats and attacks. This technique certainly warrants consideration. I suggest that any reader who can, try this method of diffusing anger.

QUESTIONS TO THINK ABOUT

1. What makes you angry? How do your "buttons" get pushed?

2. In what situations do you feel attacked or threatened? Is there a particular person or group of people who put you on the defensive?

3. What does your value system say about feeling angry? Is it always "bad" or is it sometime OK to get angry?

4. Is there one part of your self-esteem that seems to be more vulnerable to an attack than others?

5. Do you ever put yourself into situations where you will almost certainly be attacked? Do you sometimes contribute to your feelings of anger?

6. How could you respond to someone you perceive to be attacking you if you feel that he or she is not really aware of all the factors involved?

↪ From All the Rage: dealing with the anger in your life ©1985, Steven B. Zwickel

1 The hunting example also illustrates another important point: people don't get angry about a thing unless they care about it. Show people a picture of a man hitting a rock and most people won't react. Show the same man hitting baby seals (or, worse, a child) and the response will increase enormously.

2 Carol Tavris points out, in ANGER: The Misunderstood Emotion, that “there is a word for people who are not persecuted but believe they are ‘paranoid', whereas there Is NO word for people who are being persecuted but believe they are not.”