pleasant. Nobody intends to lose all their money in a slot machine, or drink
enough to throw up; it just happens. Likewise, nobody intends to get angry
enough to bring on negative consequences. They just want to recreate the
feeling of sweet relief on those few occasions that anger has cleared the
air or gotten them what they wanted.
AVOIDING PAIN. The only motivational force strong enough to beat the
excitement of random rewards is avoidance of pain, which is as real in the
imagination as the sound of quarters rattling into a metal bin. No form of
anger control treatment will ever work until angry people see their anger
as dangerous to them.The essence of therapy is turning the sometimes
pleasant arousal of the fight part of the fight or flight response into a cue
for fear, so that angry people will be tempted to run away by calming
down, rather than working themselves up to a cathartic fight.
Most angry people are not aware of the addictive potential of anger, or
even that they do anything to bring it on. Once they consider anger danger-
ous enough to avoid, they must begin to realize that it isn’t something that
just falls on them from out of the blue. Like most other human maladies,
anger starts small and grows, and is easier to control if you catch it early.
In the next chapter we’ll look more closely at how people use their
thoughts to fan the flames of anger, but for now lets concentrate on the
signs and symptoms that indicate that anger is beginning to smolder.
Noticing the Signs
The physical sensations that accompany sympathetic activity differ
widely across individuals, but usually there are some common elements
in a given person’s experience of arousal from one instance to the next.
The trick is getting them to notice the signs, and to use them as cues to
do something to avert an explosion—like relaxation, physical exercise,
or simply getting out of the situation. As a review, some of the signs of
sympathetic activity are:
INCREASED HEART RATE AND BREATHING. Blood and oxygen have to get
to the muscles in order to make them ready to fight back or run away, so the
heart and lungs have to speed up. Everyone becomes aware of these changes
Explosions into Anger ❧ 219