David sits up a bit straighter.
I catch his gaze with mine and hold on. “You need to promise
yourself and your family that from here on out, you will not raise
your voice for any reason. Imagine that you have duct tape over
your mouth and you have to rip it off before you say anything.”
“That would hurt,” David says, rubbing his mustache.
“That’s the idea,” I say. “If it hurts to open your mouth,
you’ll think carefully about what you say.”The essence of anger control for angry people, and for you, is think-
ing carefully about what you say. The duct tape solution helps by slowing
things down, but that isn’t the only reason I use it.
Most angry people have a good deal of pride. For most of their lives
they have believed that speaking their mind was a strong response, requiring
courage. The first step in treatment turns this perception inside out; they now
suspect that anger may be a weakness. The duct tape solution redefines
bravery as being strong and silent. Bold, competitive people need chal-
lenges in order to feel good about themselves.
I admit that just telling people to keep their mouths shut doesn’t
require much skill. To people who subscribe to Freud’s digestive gas theory
of anger, or the new age dictum of mental health as the ability to get feel-
ings out, blatantly suggesting suppression may seem foolish, an invitation
to bigger, more dangerous explosions in the future. It isn’t. The research
is clear on this point: The more people get angry, the more they get angry.
The task of therapy is to break the chain, not add links.
Suppression is a good beginning, whether it actually works or not. It’s
a win-win situation. If angry people yell through the duct tape, it demon-
strates the need for further external control, such as medication. When the
duct tape solution didn’t work for David, he agreed to try Zoloft. Medica-
tion can give an angry person enough control to move on to the next step.
Sometimes the duct tape solution is all that’s needed to get anger
under control. Zack never raised his voice at the office, which meant he
was using something like duct tape already, even if he didn’t realize it. At
first he said it was because he didn’t get angry at work. I asked him if this
was because the people at work were more considerate than his family.
He laughed, and talked about some of the difficult folks he managed and
the cajoling he used to get them to give their best. I asked him why he
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