As I mentioned in my last blog, psychologists are now doing major research in determining what makes people happy. These researchers are called Positive Psychologists and some of what they are discovering is fascinating. Take Sonja Lyubomirsky at The University of California at Riverside who wrote a book based on her research called “The How of Happiness.” She addresses the question of what determines happiness? and finds the following:

(1) about 50% is due to genetics; that is, we all have a biological “set point” that probably cannot be modified. Some of us are just naturally more dour than others. On the other hand, are the disgusting people who wake up chirping like a bird every morning.

(2) About 10% - yes, only 10% - of happiness is due to life circumstances. This includes circumstances such material wealth and beauty.

(3) About 40% of happiness is due to intentional activity. Wow! What a finding. This means that at least 40% of your happiness is under your control and includes specific behaviors and ways of thinking that will increase or decrease your happiness.

So, what are these activities and which ones will work for you? Lyubomirsky discusses and describes 12 happiness activities that seem to have a positive effect on people’s happiness.
Which ones will work for you depends on your personality, needs and circumstances. Many seem to be commons sense, yet unhappy people have not yet learned these basic life skills.

In future blogs, we will be discussing some of them, especially the ones we regualrly teach in our live anger classes and in our online anger class. Stay tuned………

This months episode handles the topic of how to deal with a passive aggressive person. To help us understand this behavior, we interview Dr. Roselyn Laudati who helps us recognize passive aggression in ourselves and others as well as provides excellent tips on how to handle this behavior.

I just returned from a 3-day conference in Philadelphia sponsored by the International Positive Psychology Association. The positive psychology movement is about ten years old but has really “taken off” in the last year or so. It is about scientific research related to concepts like optimism, happiness, resilience, courage, love, achievement, and goodness. The emphasis is on helping people develop positive traits or enhancing what is right and good rather than focusing on fixing what is wrong with a person. The movement believes that we are not so much victims of our past as we are motivated by being pulled into what we want in the future.

Being an anger management expert, my listening at the conference was mostly how all this fits into anger management. Would developing “happiness” or “well-being” skills decrease anger? Can a positive emotion like happiness offset a negative emotion like anger? Rather than trying NOT to be angry, should we instead focus on skills to be happy?

As is the case with most things in psychology, the answers to these questions is probably “it depends.” For some people, practicing and mastering happiness skills probably WILL make them less angry. For others, anger might be very situation specific so that they could be happy in most areas of life, but still have anger in a specific area of life (like in their marriage).

To see which category you fall in, I would recommend starting with a happiness skill that almost all happiness experts recommend- expressing gratitude. This is defined as “a felt sense of wonder, thankfulness, and appreciation of life.” Research clearly shows that those who count their blessings on a regular basis become happier as a result. It is simple to do; once a week, simply write down in a journal or log what you are grateful for that week. Seems to work better if you only do it once a week, rather than every day.
If you have an Iphone or Itouch, you can even download a free app that allows you to keep a gratitude journal.

Sounds simple-minded, but sometimes simpler things are amazingly effective. Try it, keep track of both your happiness and your levels of anger, and see if this works for you!

Persons often get into angry outbursts and escalations with each other because they don’t know how to resolve conflicts. Often, one person sees himself/herself as the victim which justifies retribution, retaliation, or “getting even” with the other, who also sees himself/herself as the victim.

No where was this more clearly demonstrated than on a recent episode of NBC”s dateline which chronicled a retired, affluent, church-going, community leader engineer who utimately shot and killed a neighbor and his wife, and then felt quite justified in doing so.

The conflict started several years  earlier over needing to repair a common very small bridge access to both their properties.  

They had a disagreement over payment of the work which gradually escalated over several years ending in the tragic double murder. It was a classic “Hatfield and McCoy” conflict which has been going on for generations in, I believe, West Virginia.

Why couldn’t two, educated, mature men work out their differences without violence?Part of the reason is that they both lacked skills to do so and both saw the other guy as the problem from which they needed to defend themselves. Netiher man had anything close to a criminal or violent history, yet both became violent and aggressive.

There are many ways to resolve conflicts. In our local anger management classes as well as our online anger classes, we teach the anger tool of “empathy” as a starting point for conflict resolution. As we define it, empathy is not only the ability to feel what others must be feeling, but also being able to see things from their point of view. Sounds simple, but it is far from easy, because we tend to think that others see things as we do, or if they don’t, they should!

We teach that our behavior is much more determined by how we individually see things, than how they “are.” Having the ability to transpose ourselves into the eyes, ears and hearts of the other guy takes a lot of practice and patience. Yet, it is crucial to conflict resolution to first able to see where the other guy is coming from, even if you don’t agree with it.

In later blogs we will discuss other conflict resolution tools. For now, practice empathy and see if it makes a difference in your life. But, if you don’t have time to do it right now, I understand!

Last night I was with my poker group, a small of men of varied professional backgrounds. The subject came up of anger management and what it is all about. I explained my 8-tools model of anger management which is oriented toward helping angry people control their anger. Suddenly, one of the group, a retired mathematics professor of Italian descent, stated ” I think anger management should be about teaching others to cope with my anger,because I am entitled to have it.” He was being a provocateur, of course, but it got me to thinking.

Is our society too sensitive about anger? Should we just “toughen up” and learn to to cope with angry people better?

The answer, of course, is that……it depends.

While coping with anger in others is often times an important part of anger management (because people tend to escalate each other in anger dances), the fact is, for most people it simply doesn’t work to try and convince them the problem is theirs and they should learn to cope with it. That is because many people “opt out” and simply don’t want to be with angry people.

Moreover, having to live in an angry environment often kills or at least severely injures all kinds of relationships. People in your life may learn to cope with you, as you would like, but they may stop loving you or they may stop trusting you in the process. In the workplace, they may stop giving their full efforts.

So, on a practical level, the philosophy that “it is their problem not mine,” does not work to solve the issues at hand. At the end of the day, it is you - the angry person - that has to do most of the changing if you want better or closer relationships with those people in your life who are upset with your anger.

In our model of anger management, we teach skill-building, new ways to think, and new ways to respond when confronted with anger triggers. This is distinct from a “therapy” approach to anger management which may involve exploring understanding the deeper root causes of a person’ s anger. In some cases, therapy may also involve medications with anti-depressive agents or other drugs.

We recently had a young woman in our anger management classes who was discouraged because she had had a “slip” since completing our classes and had gotten angry at an obnoxious co-worker.  We re-assured her that this happens sometimes and that learning new skills like anger management should be seen as a process, not an absolute. With all processes, there will be ups and downs, forward progress and sometimes back steps.

That said, she happens to be a person who  also needed therapy to deal with her anger because of underlying issues in her life which she has not yet dealt with and which contribute to her angry outbursts. Understanding  where anger comes from doesn’t necessarily change it, but in this case it would probably help, if used in conjunction with the specific anger management  skills she learned in class.

As this case illustrates, as a psychologist, my answer to the question: “Will anger management work for me or do I need therapy?” is usually, “start with anger management (it is much cheaper and much faster), and then add therapy if needed.”  If you are already in therapy, but you still have anger problems, then I would recommend going to anger management to supplement what you are learning in therapy.

We’re back! After a long hiatus, we’ve finally revisited the AngerCoach show and promise to be better than ever! In this episode, we look at the high cost of anger as well as answer the question: “Is anger ever a good thing?” Keep listening - you might be surprised at the answer. Be sure to email us if you have any suggestions, or would like to have us read your story on our next episode.

Have you ever had the experience of not seeing something that was right in front of you because you didn’t expect that it would be there? I recently had that experience with trees that the city was supposed to plant in front of my house. For months there were no trees where they should have been planted. One day I saw some city trucks outside my house and went to the supervisor asking him when they were going to plant the promised trees. Imagine my surprise and embarrassment when he told me. “sir, we planted them this morning.”  Indeed they had been. Why didn’t I see them? Because expectations determine perception. I didn’t expect to see them there..so I didn’t.

This got me to thinking of the many individuals and couples I work with in anger management who have told me similar stories of how expectations determine what they see or don’t see in other people or situations. Sometimes we get angry when something isn’t the way we think it should be. Adjusting those expectations is an important tool of anger management. Not only do expectations influence our emotions, they also partly determine how we see things in the first place. For instance, if we expect our teenage son to be lazy, we might well miss or mis-perceive some of his behavior that is not lazy at all.

Expectations are subtle and we often we don’t even realize they are influencing us, but they are. Research shows that happy people seem to be happier because they know how to manage their expectations so they don’t experience a great  deal of disappointment or anger when there is a gap between what they expect and what they get. Try it and see if your anger doesn’t decrease! Some tips to help you do this include the following:

• Mentally prepare yourself ahead of time for what happens
• Stop “shoulding’ in your self-talk. This is being judgmental. Ask yourself why “should” things be as you think they should?
• Practice seeing disappointing things from a different perspective
• Believe that limitations are “built-in” most relationships. Learn to accept them.

Click here for more in-depth article on expectations by Dr Fiore

I have to admit that I thought twittering was some kind of perversion and pretty much a waste of time- until I actually checked it out. Now as see it as a marvelous communication and teaching tool for anger management. How can this technology help people their anger, you may ask? Not sure of all the answers to that question yet, but we can start by announcing that if you start following me on twitter several things happen. The first thing is that you become one of my tweeple . As an anger coach tweeple person  you can just read what I write or you can start tweeting yourself.

(The next time you get angry, just read this blog about the tweeple people; that ought to take away 80% or so  of your anger right there)

To join my group and start following me,  go to http://www.twitter.com/drtony

and clcik on the “follow” icon. (You may have to join Twitter first, if you are not already a member, but it is free).

By following me on twitter, you will get many short but extremely useful anger control tips plus instant updates on new programs, products an classes.
See you there

Dr Tony Fiore