Steps to Handling Our Anger

The First and Second Steps

The first step in handling our anger using NVC is to be conscious that the stimulus, or trigger, of our anger is not the cause of our anger. That is to say that it isn't simply what people do that makes us angry, but it's something within us that responds to what they do that is really the cause of the anger. This requires us to be able to separate the trigger from the cause.

In the situation with the prisoner in Sweden, the very day that we were focusing on anger, it turned out that he had a lot of anger in relationship to the prison authorities. So he was very glad to have us there to help him deal with anger on that day.

I asked him what it was that the prison authorities had done that was the stimulus of his anger. He answered, "I made a request of them three weeks ago, and they still haven't responded." Well, he had answered the question in the way that I wanted him to. He had simply told me what they had done. He hadn't mixed in any evaluation, and that is the first step in managing anger in a nonviolent way: simply to be clear what the stimulus is, but not to mix that up with judgments or evaluation. This alone is an important accomplishment. Frequently when I ask such a question, I get a response such as, "they were inconsiderate," which is a moral judgment of what they "are" but doesn't say what they actually did.

The second step involves our being conscious that the stimulus is never the cause of our anger. That is, it isn't simply what people do that makes us angry. It is our evaluation of what has been done that is the cause of our anger. And it's a particular kind of evaluation.

NVC is built on the premise that anger is the result of life-alienated ways of evaluating what is happening to us, in the sense that it isn't directly connected to what we need or what the people around us need. Instead, it is based on ways of thinking that imply wrongness or badness on the part of others for what they have done.

Evaluating Triggers That Lead to Anger

There are four ways that we can evaluate any anger triggers that occur in our lives. In the case of the prison officials not responding for three weeks to his request, he could have looked at the situation and taken it personally, as a rejection. Had he done that, he would not have been angry. He might have felt hurt, he might have felt discouraged, but he wouldn't have felt angry.

As a second possibility, he could have looked within himself and seen what his needs were. Focusing directly on our needs is a way of thinking that is most likely to get them met, when we are on them. Had he been focused directly on his needs, as we will see later, he would not have been angry. He might have felt scared, which it turned out he was when he got in touch with his needs.

Or another possibility: We could look at things in terms of what needs the other party was experiencing that led them to behave as they did. This kind of understanding of the needs of others does not leave us feeling angry. In fact, when we are really directly connected with the needs of others — at the point at which we understand their needs — we are not really in touch with any feelings within ourselves, because our full attention is on the other person.

The fourth way that we can look at things, which we will find always at the base of anger, is to think in terms of the wrongness of other people for behaving as they did. In NVC, whenever we feel angry, we recommend saying to ourselves, "I'm feeling angry because I am telling myself__________," and then to look for the kind of life-alienated thinking going on inside our head that is the cause of our anger.

In the case of the prisoner, when he told me that he was angry and that the trigger for his anger was that the prison officials hadn't responded for three weeks to his request, I asked him to look inside and tell me what the cause of his anger was. He seemed confused, and he said to me: "I just told you the cause of my anger. I made a request three weeks ago and the prison officials still haven't responded to it."

I told him: "Now, what you told me was the trigger for your anger. In our previous sessions I've tried to clarify for you that it's never simply the trigger that creates our anger. The cause is what we're looking for. So I'd like you to tell me how you are interpreting their behavior, how you are looking at it, that is causing you to be angry."

He was very confused at this point. He was like many of us: He had not been trained to be conscious of what was going on within himself when he was angry. So I had to give him a little help to get an idea of what I meant by how to just stop and listen to the kind of thoughts that might be going on inside of us that are always at the core of anger.

After a few moments he said to me: "OK, I see what you mean. I'm angry because I'm telling myself it isn't fair, that isn't a decent way to treat human beings. They are acting as though they are important, and I'm nothing." And he had several other such judgments that were floating rapidly through his head. Notice he initially said it was simply their behavior that was making him angry. But it was really all of these thoughts that he had within himself that were making him angry, any one of which could have created his anger. But he was ready with a whole series of such judgments, "They're not fair; they're not treating me right." All such judgments are the cause of anger.

Once we had identified this, he said to me, "Well, what's wrong with thinking that way?" And I said: "I'm not saying there's anything wrong with thinking that way. I'd just like you to be conscious that it's thinking that way which is the cause of your anger. And we don't want to mix up what people do — the trigger — with the cause of anger."

Trigger Versus Cause

Now, this is very hard for many of us to keep straight: to not mix up the trigger, or stimulus, of our anger with the cause of our anger. The reason that that's not easy for us is that we may have been educated by people who use guilt as a primary form of trying to motivate us. When you want to use guilt as a way of manipulating people, you need to confuse them into thinking that the trigger is the cause of the feeling. In other words, if you want to use guilt with somebody, you need to communicate in a way that indicates that your pain is being caused simply by what they do. In other words, their behavior is not simply the stimulus of your feelings; it's the cause of your feelings.

If you are a guilt-inducing parent, you might say to a child, "It really hurts me when you don't clean up you room." Or if you are a guilt-inducing...