“Duh.”
“How do people usually react to being flipped off ?”
“Uh, let me see. Do they get pissed?”
“Right. Now let’s talk about all the thousands of different
ways to flip people off.” I demonstrate a number of them, verbally
and with body language, that I’ve learned from my teenage children.
Brittany laughs, despite herself, then returns to her mien
of casual insouciance. “And your point is?”
Then it’s my turn to laugh.By the end of the session we were both laughing at the dumb things
the authority figures in her life did, and the even dumber ways she reacted
to them. I told her the saying about the truck too. If you have good material,
you might as well use it.
Some of you may be wondering about my lapses into profanity and
rude gestures, when it’s fairly clear that I can express myself without them.
I think it’s important that a therapist speak his clients’ language, rather
than requiring them to learn psychobabble to talk to him. Profanity is the
language of anger, so I use it. Please pardon my French.
“David,” I say, “you want people to listen to you and pay atten-
tion to your needs. Have you ever noticed that the louder and
longer you talk, the less people listen?”Angry people often feel isolated. This is because they’re so obnox-
ious that people avoid them. To be allowed to talk about the obnoxiousness,
I must first show them that I understand the loneliness.
Once people realize that anger is aproblem, the next step is convinc-
ing them that it’s theirproblem, rather than something created for them
by the insensitivity of loved ones and the unkindness of strangers. There
are fairly standard tricks for this purpose.
“David, suppose you were meeting your wife for dinner at seven.
It gets to be 10 after, and she still isn’t there. How would you feel?”
“I’d think she was being inconsiderate.”
“Okay, what if it got to be 20 after, and she still hadn’t
shown up?”248 ❧Explosions into Anger