Anger is different from the other disorders we’ve discussed. When
people are depressed or anxious, we want to help them and make them
feel better. Our feelings toward angry people are considerably less chari-
table. Their anger evokes our anger, which brings out more anger in them.
Our concern with them has far more to do with what they make us feel
than what they’re feeling, as I alluded to above. This lack of empathy is
reflected at almost every level. It confounds our attempts to diagnose and
treat angry people, and often leads us to choose strategies for dealing with
them that just make them angrier.
However, it is far more difficult to empathize with anger than with
other sorts of emotional explosions, especially if that anger is directed at you.
Empathy is critical in keeping all kinds of emotional outbursts from escalat-
ing. To deal effectively with explosive people, you have to approach them
based on whattheyare feeling, rather than what you’re feeling about
them. This is far easier to do when people are anxious or depressed than
when they’re angry.
Empathy for the irritable is possible only if you clearly separate it
from sympathy. Empathy requires only understanding; sympathy requires
understanding andagreement. At its heart, dealing effectively with anger
is a matter of semantics. Even if you strongly disagree with an angry per-
son’s perception of a situation, you must still be sensitive enough to rec-
ognize the danger of sharing that opinion. Now that you’ve been warned
of the dangers, we may safely step over to the other side of the looking
glass.
Disorders Associated with Anger
Personality disorders are the mental illnesses most often diagnosed in peo-
ple who explode into anger. Since such diagnoses relegate a person to a place
slightly beyond the pale, they are most often awarded to people of whom
therapists disapprove. Personality disorders are fascinating enough to warrant
their own book. For those who wish to delve more deeply, I have expressed
my views in a previous work, Emotional Vampires(New York: McGraw-Hill,
2002). For the present discussion, I’ll attempt a brief summary.
210 ❧Explosions into Anger