I recently returned from Phoenix, Arizona for a visit with a high school buddy that, save for a brief visit two years ago, I had not seen for fifty years.
What an experience that was – catching up with each other’ s lives covering a half of a century!
He had heard that I had become a psychologist, but he had a little trouble wrapping his mind around how he thought I would be versus how he remembered me as a 17 year old adolescent. As old friends often do, we kidded around a lot as we reminisced, after which he asked, “‘How can you be a successful psychologist seeing people with serious problems when you kid around so much?”
The answer to that question is that appropriate humor is a valid therapeutic technique that can have much therapeutic value, even with people who have quite serious problems.
As Bill Cosby said: “You can turn painful situations around through laughter. If you can find humor in anything – even poverty – you can survive it. “
Comic Bob Newhart (who played a television psychologist) said: “Laughter gives us distance. It allows us to step back from an event, deal with it and then move on.”
Actually, considerable research shows that humor is a powerful strategy to lower your stress level, dissolve anger and instantly give you new ways to view situations and thus new ways to respond. Often, mood is elevated just in the process of striving to find humor in difficult and frustrating situations. Laughing at ourselves and the situation helps reveal that small things are not the earth-shaking events they sometimes seem to be. Looking at a problem from a different perspective can make it seem less formidable and thus more solvable.
As we teach in our local anger management classes, as well as our online program, humor shifts the ways in which we can think and thus opens opportunities to be more “response-able” in dealing with whatever is triggering our anger – without being overwhelmed by it. As Henry Ward Beecher (clergyman and activist) observed: “A person without a sense of humor is like a wagon without springs. It’s jolted by every pebble on the road.”
Laughter can also help us release pent-up feelings of anger and frustration in socially acceptable ways; it also reduces tension because it is often followed by a state of relaxation.
So, give it a try. If you are truly humor-challenged, here are some suggestions to improve:
Start collecting amusing (but tasteful) jokes that you can use to brighten the moment.
Take anger situations and flip them to see the funny side.
Learn to laugh at yourself; it shows you are secure about who you are and what you want.
Try seeing the situation from a different perspective
Century Anger Management (The Training and Education Site for The Anger Coach and AJ Novick Group) are re-approved for the 6th year in a row by the California State Board of Corrections (a.k.a. Corrections Standard Authority) for the training of probation, parole and correctional officers. Their contact information can be found on the Board of Corrections provider list.
They were approved again due to their involvement with the Standard Corrections Authority and their model of intervention being evaluated by corrections staff and personnel. There are very few models of anger management intervention chosen by the state of California for employee training, and we are honored to be part of this important provider list.
We are very excited to announce the release of the AngerCoach Mobile iPhone/iPod Touch app available in the iTunes app store!
With the pace of technology catching up to our busy schedules we feel this new platform is the ideal way to deliver the timely and practical content the AngerCoach provides. People of all ages and backgrounds can access these useful anger management tools in the palm of their hand. Not only does the app provide skill building tools for the 8 tools of anger control, but it provides an easy way to monitor your progress and access constantly updating tools for 6 unique anger zones.
Click here to download the app via the App Store, and remember to tell us what you think!
Thirty-eight year old Lisa (a stay at home mom) was absolutely convinced that Jose, her husband of five years, was cheating on her. She secretly checked his cell phone messages daily, timed how long it took him to return her numerous calls during the day when he was out of town on business, and constantly monitored his facebook and myspace entries. If he left the house to shop, she yelled at him on his return that “that was just an excuse to meet a girl in the park.” If he even glanced in the direction of a female when they were out together she accused him of “wanting” her. When they made love, and it ended too quickly for her, she yelled at Jose for “wanting to get it over with so you can be with your girlfriend.”
In therapy, Jose pleaded innocence and stated with absolute conviction that had never been unfaithful to Lisa. When pressed for concrete evidence, even Lisa had to admit that she had none, despite her obsession with finding such evidence.
Jose was tortured
Jose was a tortured man. He felt he could no longer put up with the daily unfounded accusations of his wife, yet he loved his three children and did not want to cause them to grew up in a broken home, as he had as a boy. So, he tried to cope as best he could, but everything he tried seemed to make the situation worse.
What can both Jose and Lisa do to help the situation? While there are no easy answers to complex problems like this, the following guidelines may be helpful, which we teach both in individual and marriage therapy, as well as in our anger management classes.
Guidlines for Jose:
Assuming his innocence, it is not up to Jose to “fix” Lisa. Most of the time, this is not even possible. Lisa has to fix Lisa, probably with outside professional help.
Jose may have to decide if he feels he can cope with his wife, or if she is too “toxic” for him to continue the relationship. Sometimes “anger management” requires protecting ourselves from toxic people in our lives before common arguments turn into domestic violence.
Jose should focus not so much on defending himself from his wife’s verbal assaults, as on re-assuring her that he loves her.
Jose should find ways to make her feel more secure in the relationship.
Joe should find ways to increase trust with Lisa by being open constantly about his whereabouts, his activities, and his associations.
Guidelines for Lisa:
Lisa has deep feelings of insecurity and low self-esteem. She probably will need therapy to overcome these issues. She should not be defensive or feel shameful about needing therapy. Her problem stems from childhood experiences which will require a competent professional to help her sort out.
Lisa should increase self-confidence by finding things in life to help her feel better about herself such as getting more education, acquiring job skills, and developing healthy friendships with other women and couples to serve as positive role-models in her life.
Question: How many psychologists does it take to change a light-bulb?
Answer:Only one – but the light-bulb has to really want to change.
In my experience as a psychologist and marriage therapist, I have often see people struggle with the question of how much they are capable of actually changing. At social events, when people discover my profession, they will sometimes ask, Can people really change, even if they want to?
Can it change its spots?
Some folks believe in the philosophy that “A leopard cannot change its spots” while others believe “anything is possible” in terms of ability to change. As is often the case in psychology, the truth is somewhere in the middle. Obviously, certain habits and some personality traits are changeable, many psychiatric conditions (such as phobias, depression, sexual dysfunction and anxiety) are now very treatable, but certain core character traits, attitudes toward life, core personality traits, and personal beliefs are not.
A question that often comes up in therapy (or socially) is: “Can an unfaithful partner change or is cheater always a cheater? Too bad questions about human behavior are not more easily answered with a simple “yes” or “no.”‘ Truth is, some unfaithful partners can and do change and others don’t. Depends on the circumstances (the type of affair) and the character structure of the offender.
The reason the “change” issue is an important question is that it lies at the core of setting expectations about people. It is our expectations that determine to a large extent what we will feel toward others or certain situations. If we have in our minds that someone could change if they really wanted to, but, in fact, they cannot, we may unjustifiably get upset with them. We may also get unduly upset with ourselves for not changing something about ourselves when, in fact, we need to accept limitations in that particular area of our lives. People often have unrealistic expectations about themselves and then either unduly berate themselves (expectations too high) if life turns out differently than they anticipated or, give up too easily(expectations too low) when they could have done more!
What does change require?
Can You Change? It Requires Ability To Do So
The philosophy that “anything is possible” does not square with life experience, although this notion is popular in our society. For example, for ten years my first wife was convinced she could teach me how to sing. Being a music teacher, she saw me as a real professional challenge the first time she heard me, even though I told her that I couldn’t even carry a tune in a box. Poor woman really tried..and tried. We both eventually gave up, bowing to the harsh reality that one has to have the proper brain structures to be able to sing, no matter how hard one tries, desires it, or commits to it.
Is It Worth It? Change Requires Motivation
On the other hand, we can we learn to change how we communicate, how we handle anger, how we function or show love as a wife, husband, partner, or parent! Many times it is not innate limitations holding us back, but simple lack of skills. If you didn’t get the skills earlier in your life, you can still acquire them, but this will involve motivation to do so, assuming the thing is changeable in the first place. Take the young women who comes to our anger management classes because she has just lost her third boyfriend in a row because they could not deal with her anger. Is she motivated to change? You bet! Was she motivated during her first conflictual relationship? No, because at that point she did not see herself as the problem. But, now she does!
Should You Change? It Requires Trait of Flexibility in Your Personality
Some people do not believe in change. My late mother was one of those people. She did not believe in personal change and could not successfully deal with change in others or change in circumstances. At age 63 she was proud of the fact that “I am the same person today as I was at age 19.”
When I went away to college and then returned home with fresh ideas and life views, she was very upset because she did not see me as the same boy that had left home (”College has changed you” ). Change requires the flexibility to accept it rather than being scared of it or threatened by it. It requires the ability to be adaptable (instead of rigid) in a changing world and to see the necessity of changing in order to be a more effective person. It is the attitude: “Well, if that doesn’t work for me, I better try something else.” Unfortunately, many people are the opposite: they hold onto what obviously doesn’t work any longer in the hopes that somehow it will work again for them.
Are You Ready To Change?
When Should You Change? Often it is required to Deal with Life Stages. Most people realize that children go through developmental stages, but fail to recognize that adults do too. What you need and how you see the world is often quit different at age 60 than at age 20. People sometimes naturally change at different life stages. The man who was a terrible father because he was always gone to support the family when younger, may be an excellent grandfather at age 60. The 19 year old girl who was attracted to the “hot” young men , at age 40 may value stability more than muscles in a man now. To some extent, nature forces us to change as we age, but some people fight it more than others or become frightened because different survival skills are now needed.
Some people mellow as they get older while others sour. Perhaps one reason for the difference is that of adaptability – or change. It seems to me that happier people are better at accepting change as natural and as part of the universe while sour people are often bitter, disillusioned, disenchanted or unfulfilled with their life or life situation.
Believe it or not, old dogs CAN learn new tricks. Life is change and the wise person asks themselves what they need in THIS life stage to be happier, to be more effective, and to deal with the current as well as future personal challenges.
A famous psychologist, Dr. Albert Ellis changed the face of psychology on the 60’s and 70’s by arguing that it is our self-talk or thinking patterns that determine how will respond to events in our world and what we will feel about them. He went on to explain that this also explains why person “A” responds differently to an outside event than does person “B” even though they both experience the same thing.
Sounds rather obvious to us in 2010, but it was a major mind-blower back then, especially for those who believed the extensive writings of the psychoanalyst Sigmund Freud, or the school of thought that said we are like knee-jerk animals and all our behavior is determined by simply stimulus-response connections.
Dr Ellis wrote a signature book called “Reason and Emotion in Psychotherapy” in which he argued that it is as simple as “ABC.”
A is an outside event like a marital conflict.
C is an emotion connected to that conflict such as anger.
But, Dr. Ellis explained, Anger is NOT caused directly by the marital conflict.
(Stay with me and I’ll explain….)
Rather, something comes between “A” and “C” that causes “C.”
That something (”B”) is our beliefs about “A”. It is our thinking (or self-talk) ABOUT the Conflict (or the original issue that you are fighting about) that causes anger or other negative emotions. Because of this unique human ability, we can modify and control how we feel and what mood we are in.
So, here is how it works:
A - An event that happens (the marital fight or conflict)
B- Our beliefs and self-talk about marriage (or our partner) or the beliefs (and self-talk) around the issue that causes the fight.
C- All our negative emotions such as anger, frustration, fear, etc.
Psychologists/therapists who teach clients how to think differently about events in their lives in order to change how they feel and behave are called “cognitive” therapists and their practice is called CBT or Cognitive Behavioral Therapy.
I am this type of psychologist and try to teach my local therapy clients that we as human beings should take responsibility for how we interpret and deal with the world because the only alternative is to try and change the world. Sometimes we can change parts of it, but most of the time a better strategy is to develop skills to deal with it more effectively.
Visit the Anger Coach Webisodes section of our website to see a video of this and other very practical and useful mental health tool videos. Thanks to Jason Badham of Population Four for his help in producing this ongoing video series.
When I was a boy growing up in Cleveland, Ohio, it was my Italian-American father who was the mood setter of the house. If he was happy, everybody was happy. If he was angry, the home atmosphere turned ugly with discontent spreading like an August fog in San Fransisco, from one family member to the next.
Like many psychologists, I was attracted to the field of psychology to find answers to the many strange and vexing questions about my dysfunctional family, including why one person’s mood in a family can so drastically affect everyone else in the family, and beyond.
I am happy to report that new research now provides some answers. This research shows that everything we do or say tends to ripple through our social networks, having an impact on our friends (one degree), our friends’ friends (two degrees), and our friends’ friends’ friends (three degrees). That means when you feel happy, your friend’s friend’s friend has a higher likelihood of feeling happy too.
The implications of this finding for family members is gigantic, especially if family members also happen to be your friends. As famed researcher Daniel Gilbert of Harvard University points out:
1.Happiness is not only an individual matter.
The research shows that taking control of our own happiness can positively affect others. Happiness is not one’s own business anymore.
2. One plus one does not necessarily equal two.
Happiness does not spread among people in a ‘1 to 1’ manner, but infuses up to three degrees of separation. Your happiness thus depends on the pleasure of individuals beyond your own social horizon. The power of this transference of happiness is no more 1+1=2.
When you stop and think about it, how many people “up-line” contribute to your happiness or unhappiness? When I grew older, I realized that my father’ s moods were being influenced by His mother, who maybe was being influenced by her relatives or social contacts.
Thinking about all this reminds me of how important it is to (1) be aware of whom you associate with (and who they associate with) as they may be influencing you more than you realize, and (2) You can greatly influence many people in the world with your own moods, including happiness.
So, set the tone positive for your social networks at home, at work, in peer-based activities and on your virtual social networks.
In our anger management classes in Southern California as well as in our online anger management programs, we try to teach people how to be happier as an antidote to anger. What we are discovering now is anger reduction replaced by happiness not only greatly affects the individual, but many people around him or her.
Now for the drum roll……
Remember, before you decide to laugh with someone, you are not only laughing with him or her, but with everyone they have laughed with before you!
Married for 10 years, Mary and Joe rarely argued, yet were slowly drifting apart from each other, each feeling emotionally distanced from the other. Underneath their emotional distance was anger, but it was “hidden” and lived as resentment, passive-aggression toward the other, and emotional detachment. In therapy, it was learned that a fairly common patterns of estrangement had developed between Mary and Joe who at one time were deeply in love with each other.
The pattern started with Mary not doing what Joe considered to be her share of the household chores. She worked only part-time while Joe rose at 4AM every day, worked until 2PM and then came home and did all the housework, the yardwork, and then often started dinner. She spent much of her time with her family of origin and her friends. Joe slowly developed resentment toward Mary for having to “do it all.” He complained to her, but she didn’t see what the problem was. Her attitude toward household chores and standards of cleanliness were much more relaxed than his:
“So will the world stop turning if we do the laundry this weekend instead of today?” was a common Mary retort while looking at mountains of dirty clothes. Joe, meanwhile, was smoldering inside because of what he saw as her “laziness” and irresponsibility.
After awhile, he stopped complaining and simply stuffed his negative feelings toward Mary, while continuing to do almost all of the household chores. But, he found himself losing sexual interest in her, which greatly wounded Mary who placed a high value on being sexually attractive to her husband. Of course, sexual deprivation led to further emotional distance and estrangement between them.
The Solution?
Agreement on Division of Labor
Often the problem is the other way around: many married woman justifiably complain that they too work yet are expected to do their “second job” once they get home at night.
Either way, a major breakthrough can be achieved by a couple sitting down with a pencil and paper, listing all the household chores, drawing a vertical line down the center of the paper, and deciding who is going to do what and when it will be done.And then doing it!!
Sound like a simple solution? As we teach in our local anger management classes, our online anger program, and our local clinical clients (in marriage therapy with us), many times simple practical changes in how a couple does things often snowballs into other, more substantial changes in the relationship. Of course, there were more problems than just division of labor between Mary and Joe, but once Mary started doing more of the home tasks, Joe’s resentment lessened and his sexual interest in Mary picked up. This, of course, motivated Mary to try even harder to do more of her share of household chores.
Do they now have a perfect marriage? Of course not, but they are happier, have less conflict, and are feeling closer to each other.
Having taught hundreds of anger management classes and seminars since 2004, I have been impressed with the high number of people who confess that much conflict and rage often follows discussing marital issues while one or both partners is drinking. Not that drinking in itself is necessarily bad. And trying to resolve conflicts is a good thing. It is the combination that often become explosive. Let’s see why that is.
To overly simplify, your brain has a protective mechanism called the “blood brain barrier” which selects which molecules can enter the brain from the bloodstream. Guess what? Alcohol molecules can easily get through this barrier. This means that the brain is the first organ to be affected by alcohol intake. As you probably have noticed, alcohol immediately changes your mood, your thought processes, your impulse control, and your judgment. That little voice in your head that normally says “don’t do it,” now says “Do it..it’s OK.”
Or, it says say something like: “I’m going to say it because he or she deserves it.” Or, ” I don’ t care how they feel, I’m going to get this off my chest.”
This attitude often leads to escalating arguing and anger which can quickly get out of hand, especially if one or both of you is particularly stressed that day. Perhaps you even feel justified in getting so angry at the “outrageous” behavior of your partner, feeling like a victim instead of the aggressor.
Alcohol-induced Righteous Indignation seems so right at the time. It often isn’t until the next day that you say to yourself: “self: what was I thinking?”
By then, the damage often is done and is difficult to undue. How do you “unring” a bell? Sometimes there are even legal consequences involving law enforcement. More often, the damage is emotional as the couple struggles to restore communication, heal hurt feelings, and re-build trust.
The advice I always give my local clients as well as my anger management students is to make a firm agreement not to drink while discussing serious or important marital issues, if this has been problematic in the past for you.
Often reducing marital conflict involves “doing something different” from what you normally do. So, for example, if you notice that you’ve gotten into a conflict the last 5 times you discussed parenting issues over Gin and Tonics, separate those two events and see if it helps!
But, what do you do if you see the sense of this, but your partner refuses to cooperate in such an agreement? Well, that depends on the circumstances, but you can still stick to your end of the bargain, avoid as much conflict as possible, and when he or she is sober and rational, firmly and assertively communicate how that made you feel, what you will expect in the future, and what the consequences may be if it continues to happen.
Dr Fiore/ The Anger Coach continues to produce educational materials to help individuals, couples, and families deal with anger, conflict, and stress. Just click on the resource listed below to access the material. Feel free to pass on the material to anyone who you think might benefit from it.
