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Dear Aspie: How to control anger
Posted on Sunday, June 18 @ 01:11:21 EDT by | 
Dear Aspie:
“Can you give some general advice on controlling anger?”
--rocklobster
Read on for GroovyDruid's response!
Dear Aspie:
“Can you give some general advice on controlling anger?”
--rocklobster
You’re going to laugh. It’s really, really too simple. I’m going to have to make it quite complicated here to make an article out of it.
What I mean is, anger resides in your universe. Notice I don’t say in your head—that would belittle it. No, it is in your universe, and your inner universe is a fantastic, exciting, powerful, and very real place. But it’s yours. And that gives you an advantage, trying to control something on your home turf.
How? Well, this is where it gets silly. As soon as you get angry, don’t fight it.
“WHAT?”
Yes. That’s right, don’t fight it. In fact, as soon as you start to feel the anger well up in you, make it your mission to become more angry. In fact, your first goal should be to become twice as angry as you currently are. That’s a pretty good goal for a beginner: “Thou shalt become twice as angry as thou currently art.” That’s the commandment, before you say or do anything.
So stop and become twice as angry. And do it right. Be very sure you have reached the twice-as-angry mark. Don’t stop becoming more angry until you have twice as much anger: no more, no less. Once you have this down, you can move on to making yourself three times as angry, or boiling mad, or irascible, or irate, or “really pissed,” or whatever comes next for you. But start with twice as angry.
And what will happen, you ask? What’s the point? Well, it’s kind of a secret, but figure along with me here:
You took the anger and told it what to do, right? Well, that makes all the difference. See, anger, fear, confusion, and other unwanted emotions are only powerful in your internal universe as long as you can’t control, manipulate, extend, contract, and generally run circles around them. But if you take your anger and order it to become twice as severe, you actually take responsibility for the emotion. You are saying, “I caused this emotion, and I can cause some more if it pleases me. I am a god in my inner universe. Heh heh…” When you acknowledge you are a cause, then you stop being an effect—in this case, of your anger.
And believe you me, it feels great. When some idiot does something to you, and you make yourself more angry, all the sudden, he isn’t making you angry anymore: you are. You grab all his power over you. If you’re like most people who do this drill, you’ll burst out laughing on the spot. You’ll just howl, because you get the big joke: it all belongs to you! And you can then throw the anger away if you want, or keep some of it and unleash it as needed, or label it in a little brown bottle and keep it for next time. Your choice.
Now, you may be wondering: “Okay, smarty pants. Instead of making myself more angry, why don’t I just zap all my anger on the spot and not go through all the other mumbo-jumbo?”
Well, here’s the finesse: if you are getting angry in the first place, you are fighting something in your head. Always. Doesn’t matter if fists are flying or words are being exchanged yet, you are in a fight with something in your mind already.
Now, if you try to count to ten, or suppress your temper, or zap your angry urges, or become philosophical, then all you really accomplish is to fight the anger, which is just more internal fighting. “Duhhhhh what?” Yeah, you’re fighting the fighting. Doesn’t make any sense. None. If you try to fight fighting, you get what’s called, in modern warfare terms, an “escalation,” not a disappearance. Pretty soon, you either pee your pants or kick someone else’s. Either way, you have flown out of control, and you are not going to get the result you want.
So make yourself more angry. Go with the flow you started and master it, rather than resisting it head on. It’s like in the Westerns: the hero jumps on the backs of the horses that are pulling the out-of-control stagecoach and steers them into a circle, rather than standing right in their path and shouting, “I order you to stop!” It just makes sense.
Happy trails.
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Re: Dear Aspie: How to control anger (Score: 1)
by matrix Thursday, November 22 @ 14:24:20 EST
(User Info | Send a Message | Journal) | | This does work! Someone at school pinched me in the arm and I slammed the door on him. My only concern is the need for Aspie property insurance for moments when the door can't take your honesty. |
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Re: Dear Aspie: How to control anger (Score: 1)
by Lucrosus Sunday, June 18 @ 10:20:58 EDT
(User Info | Send a Message) | | This does make sense. In some martial arts, the way to deal with an attacker's motions is to direct where they go rather than countering them, thus using their energies against them.
But my question is this...I am a 38-years-old Aspie and a father of 8. What do you do when the anger takes hold and the tactic of doubling it (caused more by frustration -- 3 of my children have PDD) is not a real option?
Thanks for any response. |
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Re: Dear Aspie: How to control anger (Score: 1)
by danlo Monday, June 19 @ 06:53:32 EDT
(User Info | Send a Message) | | Did you actually look up the advice of professionals before giving this advice? Most advice I found is nothing like what you've given. This may sound similar to some martial arts ie Judo, but it's not the same. Your second comment is a lot closer to the mark. It sounds like what you've done, is to take a few ideas from fighting, maxims and the like, and using them as ideas on controlling anger.
Take, for instance, your advice to get angrier. You suggest that it actually makes it easier to control your anger, when in fact, the angrier you get, the harder it is to get in control. This is because when you are angry, you think angry thoughts. Things that you see and hear, are parsed or interpreted through the haze of anger. You talk about an "escalation" of anger, as a bad thing and it is, yet this is exactly what you endorse.
Consider, exactly how someone taking your advice is going to go about making themselves twice as angry. Their thoughts are just going to skyrocket out of control. Since you seem so fond of comparisons, compare how people would try to control panic and control anger. Would you suggest they try to increase their state of panic? Why wouldn't you?
Your logic in many of your responses seems flawed, and contrary to the opinion of many professionals. I would advise you to consider a lot more carefully your responses, Groovy. |
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Re: Dear Aspie: How to control anger (Score: 1)
by TheGreyBadger Monday, June 19 @ 10:40:18 EDT
(User Info | Send a Message) | | Yes. Nathaniel Branden cured an actor of stage fright exactly that way. Told him to take five minutes out to get as frightened as possible, really sweating bullets,worst-case scenarios, and all that - and after five minutes of that the fear went away!
It's a trick I try to use myself with fear but never dared with anger. |
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Re: Dear Aspie: How to control anger (Score: 1)
by ElliottHird Tuesday, June 20 @ 13:33:21 EDT
(User Info | Send a Message) | | Doesn't work. It seemed like such a good idea at first, but when I actually tried it - nope. I'm writing this while I'm still close to exploding before I forget. |
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Re: Dear Aspie: How to control anger (Score: 1)
by cc Wednesday, June 21 @ 14:07:36 EDT
(User Info | Send a Message) | | May be very naive, but here goes anyway.... It seems to me that being angry with someone is allowing them to control a part of my brain. I'm unwilling to let an uninvited intruder trespass on my mental real estate.
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Re: Dear Aspie: How to control anger (Score: 1)
by Hellfire418 Tuesday, July 11 @ 09:16:10 EDT
(User Info | Send a Message) | | i can recommend a few things that worked for me
one of them being martial arts philosophy and meditation. i still get very angry at times but i dont lash out as much as i did as kid. my house and my hands have the evidence of my lash outs, once i started taking kung fu i was able to redirect the anger better and keep it from building to the point where i would put holes in the walls and destroy things out of anger.
another thing that helped even though i totally destroyed it was a heavy punching bag =) taking out the frustrations of the day on the heavy bag i was actually able to control it better and needed it less and less. i dont honestly remember how many times i broke the chains on the bag due to just abusing it instead of myself.
weightlifting helps too just grab your ipod and turn up the tunes and zone out.
thats what has worked for me in the past |
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Re: Dear Aspie: How to control anger (Score: 1)
by RachelLugiagirl Sunday, September 17 @ 09:57:14 EDT
(User Info | Send a Message) | | What if you already have done something or said something wrong by the time you realise you are angry? Its' too late then for making yourself twice as angry. That's what usually happens to me. And when you have got a two way thing going even every thing you can do to stop it makes it worse. By this time the "turning into the skid" is past an d both parties are " fighting the fighting" as you call it. It never stops until one or the othe of us has gotten hurt or run off. Its horrible. |
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Re: Dear Aspie: How to control anger (Score: 1)
by MSEMT Sunday, September 24 @ 07:42:47 EDT
(User Info | Send a Message) | | This article is ok. I am eleven years old, and still have a lot to learn. Sometimes, I let my anger out on other people that really care about me. Most of the time, I don't have time to think. My phychiatrist and the neurologist thinks I am epileptic. I just wanted to share my experiences and tell you my feedback. These are one of my favorite articles. |
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Re: Dear Aspie: How to control anger (Score: 1)
by rixter Wednesday, November 15 @ 18:55:19 EST
(User Info | Send a Message) http://www.geocities.com/fractal.worlds | | That advice is rather clever, and as a way of demonstrating to a person that they can control their emotions, I'm sure it would be effective enough. And it's true that problems are best confronted head-on. However. In the long run, I don't think this is a good solution.
The problem is that emotional responses are habit-forming (the whole "catharsis" theory about purging your emotions by indulging them is sheer baloney, by the way, and I do realize that's not exactly what you were talking about). If you do learn to control your emotions by pushing them, well & good, but in the meantime you may be forming a bad habit of letting your anger take over. Plus it's likely to be kind of hard on the whole glandular system & body, or so it seems to me.
My own advice, based on personal experience, is that Zen meditation is a highly effective way to learn to manage emotions, and also to manage the mind in general. You don't have to become a buddhist; the basic meditation technique is actually used in all sorts of christian & islamic traditions as well -- for instance it is highly similar to the Quaker meditation practice.
All you do is sit quietly and observe yourself. Don't try to supress your thoughts & emotions; just observe them without engaging them -- like watching a movie. If anger arises, you simply note that you're feeling anger, & you let it go. When a thought arises, you notice it & let it go. You don't follow up on it & get caught up in some long chain of thought -- you just watch.
This eventually has the effect of giving you some extra perspective on your own thoughts & emotions - you can step back at will, and it's suprising how well this can work to defuse a bad mood or obsessive thought. It teaches you to be calm & centered.
And I believe it also fine-tunes the nervous system. When you watch your thoughts long enough, they tend to calm down & stop. But you never can really stop thinking -- the verbal thoughts may stop, but then you notice that there's a deeper level of thought in pictures, or feelings, or some other mode. And eventually that calms down & stops, and then you find another layer below that. It's like peeling an onion; you progress to more & more subtle levels of perception & thought, and you really can learn an awful lot about yourself. I highly recommend it.
Anyway, that's my advice for what it's worth. |
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Re: Dear Aspie: How to control anger (Score: 1)
by Legalize_Freedom_Now Saturday, December 16 @ 17:41:32 EST
(User Info | Send a Message) | | "Become more angry", you say? I do that all the time, and it doesn't help much. When I'm angry, I think of how I cannot express my anger without hurting those around me, and that makes me even more angry. Not to mention that I'm a really big guy - 6'5", 300+ lbs - and people always try to stop me from being angry.
My parents do it, my teachers do it, almost everyone I know just can't handle it when I get angry, because they get.. I don't know. Are they scared of me? Do they think I'm going to polymorph into some barbaric demon and flip cars on their side? Do they think they're doing me a favor by taking advantage of me in my angered state?
I'd love to debate with people, but I get so frustrated and I can't express it intelligently, and I'm paranoid of people using the "he's big so he must be stupid" stereotype on me. I don't want people to think I'm stupid! Especially since I can think circles around almost everyone I've met. This is going to make me sound like an arrogant ass I'm sure, but I'm very certain that I have yet to meet anyone as smart as I am. Smart, as in intelligent, wise, sensible, etc. But I can't express it!! And that's the worst of it. When I speak to people, my brain shuts down, and I fumble and mess up, and people never get to see what goes on in my head, and it frustrates me to no end.
That turned into an off-topic rant, so I'll close. In short: it's very difficult to allow yourself to get more angry when even the slightest anger causes so many dire consequences. |
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Re: Dear Aspie: How to control anger (Score: 1)
by shyblue Sunday, April 27 @ 06:59:21 EDT
(User Info | Send a Message) | | I would like to add something to this excellent article.
It is my belief that aspies have great spiritual capacity, and can realise that they can deal with anger by doubling the pure emotion of it. The higher reality is that others are not the cause of anger, and either is an aspie, anger is a raw feeling that rides along like a wave on the ocean. When a person allows the anger to ride, then the ocean is found, which contains both others and the self.
Aspies simply need to recognise their spiritual nature, that they have a deep desire to be understood by others, yet it is often a long time before another person who can really meet us comes along.
My feeling is that in all this time being alone the aspie will develope strength of soul, thinking, and the capacity to empathize. My feeling is that around 40 life for the aspie gets a bonus dose of wisdom.
I would recommend reading Rudolf Steiner's Philosophy of Freedom, which is great for the intellectual aspie, because it is solid philosophy leading to enlightenment.
Well, as you can tell, I like to ramble.
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Re: Dear Aspie: How to control anger (Score: 1)
by auroch Thursday, February 07 @ 22:50:15 EST
(User Info | Send a Message | Journal) | | Whoops, please excuse my use of profane language in my previous post. Won't happen again. |
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Re: Dear Aspie: How to control anger (Score: 1)
by auroch Wednesday, February 06 @ 22:38:34 EST
(User Info | Send a Message | Journal) | | How about you just have a cup of concrete and harden the f@#$ up?
As difficult as it may seem at times to control your emotions the simple fact is that your emotions are just that, yours and yours alone. No one else can take responsibility for them but yourself. While this tactic of doubling your anger to control it may help you to realise that you are the master of your emotions and not the opposite it's still dangerous and potentially deadly. Anger is in no way helpful to anyone unless of course you want to temporarily bump up your adrenalin and strength at the cost of your IQ for whatever purpose.
While anger is psycological it's also, especially for "Aspies" (this is what we're calling ourselves now?), very biological. Rixter seems to be the only one in this discussion who has a good grasp on this. If you're becoming angry all the time you're training your body to become an anger machine. These days anger is a reflex action, one that is pretty much hard-coded into your DNA but by no means is it not re-writable.
Your anger is your tool for you to wield. I can't think off hand of any positive uses for it but in nature it's primarily a weapon with which to defend one's life. The sooner you understand and accept that your anger is your responsibility, just another chemical release in your brain, the sooner it will become less of a reflex. You control your psycology and your biology will follow your lead.
Next time you're angry, take a step back from yourself, as big a step as you can, and just let it go, just cease to care. Imagine that you're an emotionless robot if you have to! Whatever it was that pissed you off, don't hold onto it anymore. Just let it go, and then, as Rixter has pointed out, observe and wait. As you let go your adrenalin gland will subside. You may notice your body feeling depressed or sad, at some point you may even feel drained or spent like you want to lie down and go to sleep. But in a short time your biology will soon normalize itself as the effects of your anger run their course through your body. The anger will pass and you'll come back to yourself feeling settled, calm, and centered.
The most difficult part ofcourse is remembering this once you have started to become angry, but practice makes perfect and your will makes you whatever you want, so make it an iron will. |
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Re: Dear Aspie: How to control anger (Score: 1)
by Hekate Tuesday, January 29 @ 13:34:36 EST
(User Info | Send a Message) | | Why control it? Anger might be worth experiencing...it might be telling you someone has been crossing the line and taken advantage of you or you are not getting your needs met. Its very different to experience anger than to act on anger or violence. The first is a signal and does not kill either you or others. It can rather point you to get something you need. The second is control based and might give you some trouble despite the instant release of steam.
Listen to what the anger migh be indicating...ask questions like: what is it that i might need that i'm not getting? or is this situation/person breaking my integrity, disrespecting me? Then perhaps respond with a bit of self caring talk. I can hear myself nt having my needs met/ respected, i feel angry/ frustrated...what is the best way or an alternative way to meet these need?? With time you might learn also to ask from others to respect your boundaries/space/ things/opinions...etc...Explore Non Violent Communication?? I think it might as well work with aspies as it does with NTs |
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Re: Dear Aspie: How to control anger (Score: 1)
by vkfigaro Friday, January 25 @ 10:28:21 EST
(User Info | Send a Message) | | brilliant and out of the box thinking! all the respect; will be definetely using this method |
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