All the Rage

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One option, of course, is to seek out some help with anger management. The very phrase has become such a familiar part of our lives—how often does a day pass without hearing of some offender being sentenced to attend anger management sessions?—that it’s easy to forget that it is a relatively recent coinage. Raymond W. Novaco may have been the first to use the term, in his seminal 1975 work Anger Control (Lexington), but the term didn’t begin appearing in the popular media until well into the 1980s.

One of the first and most influential popular books on anger was Carol Tavris’ 1982 Anger: The Misunderstood Emotion (Simon & Schuster). Her book was a response to the then-popular “ventilationist” strategies that suggested that loudly articulating our anger would free us emotionally. Tavris insisted on a more subtle and complex approach to anger, one that even acknowledged its constructive aspects.

“I have watched people use anger, in the name of emotional liberation, to erode affection and trust, whittle away their spirits in bitterness and revenge, diminish their dignity in years of spiteful hatred,” she wrote. “And I watch with admiration those who use anger to probe for truth, who challenge and change the complacent injustices of life.”

Two decades later, researchers were still probing for the constructive aspects of anger. A January 2000 article in the journal Health Psychology suggested that calmly discussing angry feelings and working toward solutions with others can have health benefits. But the emphasis, the researchers pointed out, must be on solving problems, not merely venting feelings.

Anger management specialists usually work from a menu of strategies that include everything from deep-breathing exercises to muscle relaxation techniques to visualization exercises that help people regain their calm. Other interventions stress cognitive approaches that aim to change unhelpful patterns of thinking. And there are, as always, pharmaceutical options. Emil Coccaro, chair of psychiatry at the University of Chicago, has explored using Prozac to treat explosively angry people.

Psychologist Deffenbacher urges, among other things, using humor to defuse anger. The idea is that the next time you find yourself tempted to call someone a dumbass, you can merely picture that person as, say, a burro wearing a dunce cap. The image might be amusing enough to get you through your angry moment.

Whatever successes anger management professionals can claim, they are clearly dealing with new realities that make it all too easy to vent rage. John Duffy, a Chicago-area psychologist and life coach, says many of the teenagers he works with use text messaging and social networking sites such as MySpace to lash out at classmates or authority figures who have crossed them. This spring the New York Times reported on the popularity among high school students of “hit lists”—sometimes posted online, sometimes scrawled on a school wall—of people an angry student would like to harm. Part of the appeal is being able to spew bitter thoughts at targets without having to confront them and deal with them as human presences. Just as road ragers may find it easier to flip someone off when the gesture is mediated by a windshield, information technologies allow us to vent at a digital remove.

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