Navigating Anger: Why Perception Matters More Than Reality in Your Emotional Life.
Anger poorly expressed kills careers and relationships alike. Learning how to express well is one critical aspect of cultivated emotional intelligence.
Sandy Farac and I teach a few fundamental principles when teaching groups and couples to connect more powerfully. One of the most important is that anger, disagreement, and disconnection are not the same, even though you may often experience them simultaneously. Learning to tease them apart is critical to building a healthy and life-affirming life.
Disagreement arises when two or more people differ in their perspective on an issue or happening. Alternatively, you could disagree over who is responsible for a particular happening. Or perhaps they assess an appropriate future action yet to be taken differently from one another. Behind this sort of thinking often sits the binary paradigm of "right and wrong".
Disconnection: Like other warm-blooded animals, human beings possess a Social Engagement System (SES). Its purpose is to support you in forming connected relationships. Connected relationships allow you to live and work in groups, raise a family and function effectively as part of our species in what can be a dangerous and challenging world. The necessary condition for activation of your SES is perceived safety. Your integral domains of security include emotional, intellectual, property, sexuality, time, touch and relationships. Any perception of being violated in any of these domains will trigger a protective response at a physiological level. The critical point here is that the perception of violation does not refer to you thinking you have experienced such a violation; it is the response of your physiology. In other words, your body has its own intelligence that runs in parallel to your brain-based thinking self.
Your amygdala constantly scans your memories for potential threats as part of your physiological threat detection system. This system works fast but is imprecise. Your threat detection system gets triggered when you see a piece of lint that resembles a spider. After your initial startle response, your nervous system is downregulated a few seconds later (i.e. after the engagement of your higher-level thinking, you see it to be lint.) The relevance here is that when you perceive a threat, your SES will shut down and you will become disconnected from the people around you. It does not matter whether there is an actual threat or not. Disagreements with crucial people in your life or when contemplating particular issues will trigger your threat detection system and cause you to disconnect from those around you, including your loved ones and co-workers.
Anger is a primal emotion. The late evolutionary neurobiologist Jaak Panksepp identified all mammals as possessing seven primary emotional structures in their brains and nervous systems. Anger is one (although he called it your RAGE circuit). Your anger circuitry evolved for a reason: to keep you safe in times of danger. It then follows that when a disagreement triggers your threat detection system in response to a perceived threat, then anger will soon follow to protect you. When experienced in this way, anger's primal roots in your physiology may have you act in ways that cause you and others pain.
Learning to separate anger, disagreement and disconnection can transform your relationships in the best possible ways. We discovered two paths forward to shift this dynamic in our anger course. The first path involves you learning how to embody your anger in the present in a way that re-establishes and maintains the connection between yourself and others. The second path is to review and, where necessary, reprogram your threat detection system so you don't continue to get triggered in the same way in the future. Both these steps are required.
Anger can be one of the most powerful emotions you experience; learning how to embody it well can be one of the most life (and relationship) transforming choices that you make.
