How to Live a Life Free of Anger

If you picked up this book because you want to know how to get rid of anger, you picked up the wrong book. This book is about anger management — recognizing the source of your anger and then evaluating your responses to it. But as a side note to the main thrust of this book, I can tell you how to be anger-free. You only need to read these few short pages.

There are three ways to live a life free from anger. The first is to be in a coma. The second is to stop caring about anything.

Seriously! If you stop caring, you will not get angry. Haven't you ever met two people who've experienced the same situation, but one is upset and angry and the other is not? When you ask the second person why, he will tell you that he doesn't care. It doesn't bother him. No skin off his back. He is not emotionally invested in the situation; therefore he is not mad. The angry person cares, while the non-angry person does not.

You may know someone who has experienced this, or you may have experienced it yourself — not caring about something. It is called apathy (or as some people would say, "Whatever!"). Apathy is not caring. Que sera, sera. Whatever will be, will be. Apathy is absence of emotion. Stop caring, and you'll stop being angry. But the fact that we are westerners — driven to achieve, to consume, and to gain status — sets the stage for countless unmet expectations. When we care about stuff, we have the potential for being disappointed and feeling angry.

We don't always start out being apathetic, with the intention of not caring. Instead we can move in that direction over time. After many disappointments, we develop an unintentional self-defense mechanism that saves our soul, our emotional reservoir. We can make the decision to stop caring because it hurts too much. Sometimes it is a gradual slide into apathy, and other times it is a spontaneous decision not to care.

For example, have you ever been so mad at someone (or someone has been so mad at you) that you arrive at the place where you make the decision to stop caring? You may even have told that person, "I don't care what you do or where you go. Stay out of my life." Or perhaps you stopped getting involved in or you cut off relationships because you don't care anymore. This could be a former boyfriend/girlfriend or husband/wife, or any other person who was involved in your life. It could even be a job, hobby, or organization that you walked away from. You became so angry that you had to quit being emotionally invested. You stopped caring.

If you have an emotional investment in someone, than there is a risk that he or she can hurt you and make you angry. We end up being angry because things didn't work out. Life is all about having expectations and trying to fulfill them.

Often we'll reflect back on our lives and whether or not they have met our expectations. If they have, then we are generally happy; if they haven't, then we might be bitter and angry. What kind of person do you want to be — a bitter person or a better person? A better person is one who has gone through life understanding and accepting that it will not meet all their expectations. A bitter person is one who decides that life isn't fair and has cheated him out of opportunities. A bitter person believes that life is hard and has robbed him of some or most of his expectations. A better person believes that life is hard but good, and things turned out all right. Life met most of his expectations.

You can feel anger about society in general, an organization, or your workplace, or any activity in which you participate. Then you can get tired of being angry, make a conscious decision to stop caring about the world around you, and drop out emotionally and/or physically. That is apathy in its full glory. Moving to a log cabin in the woods and living off the land doesn't sound so bad sometimes, because it removes the many expectations you have regarding others in your life. Living in a log cabin would mean that you would only have to deal with yourself and Mother Nature.

A funny story that happened to me a few years ago, when I took my family to Disney World in Florida, illustrates what apathy is all about. I was waiting in line with my granddaughter, Gabrielle (who, by the way, gave me permission to tell this story). Since the lines were consistently long, I would pass the time by making small talk with people in line around me.

Finally Gabrielle asked me, "How come you are always talking to people?"

I responded, "To pass the time. I find it interesting to learn where people come from and what they do."

She gave me that look — you know, the look teenagers give when they feel their parents are embarrassing them.

Since I was embarrassing her, I said, "Okay, then, let's you and I talk." I asked her the following questions (keeping in mind that she was very young, and slightly embarrassed that her grandpa was disturbing the peace):

"Do you want to talk about politics?"

"No" was her response.

"Do you want to talk about religion?"

"No" was her response.

"Do you want to talk about current events?"

"No" was her response.

I followed with a couple more questions, and she gave the same response. I then asked her why she didn't want to talk. She said that she didn't care. I then proceeded to ask her if she knew what apathy meant. She said no, and that she didn't care.

Many people around us in line started to giggle, as they couldn't help listening in on our conversation. She actually knew the meaning of the word apathy, but she didn't know that she knew. Thank you, Gabrielle, for letting me share that.

This apathy (not caring) is a basic human defensive response. When we stop caring for someone or when we withdraw from society, we may be helping preserve ourselves and our sanity. We can make a conscious decision to stop caring, and the end result or side effect is the elimination of our anger. This apathy helps us retain our sense of self-worth and our emotional energy, which is being depleted by the person or situation that is the focus of our anger.

Now if you want to be anger-free, take this apathy and apply it to every area of your life. If you do not care about anything, you will never be angry. If you don't care about the people around you, about where you live or society or politics or religion and so forth — the list can go on and on — then you will not have to deal with anger. It is when you care that you place yourself in a position to feel the emotion of anger. Caring carries with it expectations that may not be met. If you care, then you will have expectations.

The third way of living a life without anger is to modify or change your expectations so that in every aspect of your life, life meets your expectations.

Any time we get angry, it is because we have an unmet expectation.

The bottom line is that you would be perfectly happy if everything happened just the way you want it. Living life your way, as well as everyone else in the world living life your way, would remove any reasons for being angry.

Instead of trying to have every aspect of your life live up to your standards and expectations, which is nearly impossible, you can modify your expectations.

You must acknowledge that in life, not all your expectations will be met — and decide that you are okay with that.

This way, although you might have expectations, you will not expect them all to be met. Then the anger in your life will be very manageable; you will be able to live with anger and know and accept that it is okay to be angry. Or perhaps your anger will be eliminated altogether.

Although I have told you how to live anger-free, you might suspect from the tone of my writing that I do not think it is healthy to live life without the emotion of anger. Who really wants to live anger-free? To do so, you would have to live a life that is basically flat-lined: no pulse, no ups or downs. You really wouldn't be living life to the fullest in any sense of the word. Not caring about anything would make life boring. How can you experience deep and lasting peace and joy if you do not have something to compare them to?

Now for the reality check: we know that it is basically impossible for all of life to live up to our expectations. So the rest of this book explores what we can learn about our expectations and how to manage them. The practical result can lead us to embrace anger as simply one of the emotions that humans are capable of, and to live life more fully. Anger is an emotion that we need to understand and embrace. It is neither right nor wrong; it is something we experience. The "right or wrong" part of anger has to do with how we deal with it. How we respond to the emotion of anger is what we, and those around us, judge as good or bad.

So if this strategy sounds good to you, the rest of this book is for you. Anger management is all about managing your expectations.

The Law of Anger

Unmet Expectations = Anger

"Every time we get angry — without exception — it's when we have an unmet expectation. And twenty bucks goes to anyone who can prove me wrong." This is my opening statement in my anger management workshops. I place a twenty-dollar bill on the board behind me or flash a picture of one on a screen, and then I challenge anyone in the room to give me a personal example of a time they felt angry and did not have some unmet expectation. Over decades and hundreds of classes and seminars, I have never lost my money (although I have given away money for some creative and funny answers). Truth be told, no one ever wins the twenty bucks — no one! And the amazing thing is that no one has ever gotten angry about not winning the money. Why? Maybe because they knew it was a trick question and so they really did not expect to win it.

What makes us angry? There are only two reasons, apart from a chemical imbalance or similar clinical diagnosis, or immaturity (not having reached the age of reason). First, we have an expectation of how something should happen. Second, we have an expectation of how something should not happen. So any time we use the words should or should not, we have an expectation. Within that expectation lies the potential to feel anger when the expectation is not met.

Anger management is all about managing our expectations, knowing our options, and choosing the right response for every situation. The lessons in this book are simple and not my own, and the truth is that while everything I've shared within these pages deals directly with anger, it also can be applied to any other emotion. Anger management is all about emotion management. Joy, happiness, depression, grief, and so forth are emotions that can lead to poor judgment and bad behavior. Really, we should call this subject "emotion management," but "anger management" is the more popular and politically correct term, so we'll stick with that.

Most people who attend anger management classes are there because they've been forced to come by the court system, their parole officers, or their employers. Very few of them choose to attend on their own. Most people will admit that they get angry but do not feel that they have a problem. I hear this all the time. People will say, "I don't have a problem," but then they will add something like, "My brother-in-law (husband, wife, brother) really needs your class. That's who should be here. Not me." It is always somebody else who has the problem. I find it funny that I rarely meet people who are honest with themselves and will admit that they have a problem dealing with anger.

My desire with this book, which is a product of my anger management classes and seminars, is to share with you ways to manage anger and expectations. The theory is simple, but the practical application takes energy and commitment to change.

When we feel angry, we usually feel justified in our emotion; otherwise we wouldn't be angry. Those around us, therefore, are just reaping the consequences of our righteous anger. But the truth is that all of us, or at least 99 percent of us, experience anger. The 1 percent who never get angry are the people I described in the introduction — people who are in an emotional coma, who don't care and don't have any expectations. But the rest of us experience situations in everyday life where our expectations are not met, and that makes us feel angry and upset. This is our reality.

Anger has many names or synonyms in our culture. We might say we're upset, irritated, mad, or enraged. We might stew, go postal, blow up, or have a catfight — there are a few dozen other names too. In our culture, these names represent an attempt to quantify and qualify the intensity of a person's anger. But that level is extremely personal and subjective; it cannot be measured concretely. Maybe someday scientists will be able to measure people's brain waves and assign a number to their anger according to its level of intensity. But as of now, the intensity of someone's anger is extremely personal and hard to measure.

Your level of anger may or may not be the same as mine, but we might use the same words to describe it. There is no way of measuring the level of intensity accurately. We can assess that a person is angry, but can we really know what goes on inside a person's head?

Learning to deal with and accept anger, as important as this skill is, is not something children are taught in school or at home. The curriculum when I was growing up was based on moral guidelines. It taught kids that they shouldn't be angry, instead of teaching them how to accept their anger and then manage their expectations and responses. Didn't we hear over and over as children that we shouldn't be angry?

But it is okay to be angry, and we need to learn to manage that emotion.

There is nothing moral or immoral about the emotion of anger, nothing good or bad. How we respond to anger is where the question of morality comes in, and where we're judged by those around us and society as a whole.

We learn our anger management response by seeing how others display their anger in person or in the media, such as on TV Generally, the entertainment media teach us that when we get angry, we should get even — that is, get revenge or payback. This seems to be the basic plot of most movies that center around anger: the good guy gets angry and then gets even.

Yet we tell children that they shouldn't be angry, or that they simply have to "deal with it." What an injustice to our children! What a mistake! We should teach our children that it is okay to be angry and then teach them that life doesn't always live up to our expectations. Then we should teach them appropriate options for dealing with and expressing their anger.

If my younger sister takes my toy without my permission and breaks it, I should be allowed to feel angry. But then I should be instructed how to appropriately display that anger toward my sister. I should be taught to consider my expectations in that situation and to modify them to reflect reality — in this case, the fact that my sister is too young and immature to understand what she did wrong. Maybe at this point in time, I have unrealistic expectations considering her level of development.

I shouldn't be told to suck it up, because eventually there will come a time when I can't suck it up anymore, and then my behavior may be disproportionate to the offense committed, or even way over the top. We need to teach children and adults to manage their expectations.

Wouldn't it be great to teach children at an early age that it is okay to feel the emotion of anger, or emotions in general, and then teach them productive ways to manage those feelings? Maybe we can start today, with you. Since I am the anger management expert, I give you permission to be angry, starting today. There — I said it! You can be angry. Now, don't go out and do something stupid because I gave you permission to be angry; read the rest of the book. Being angry is not the problem, but how you deal with anger is the problem.

I have had numerous discussions with judges, lawyers, and police officers, and not one of them thinks we should try to eliminate the emotion of anger. We just need to learn when to express it and when to hold it back — sort of like Kenny Rogers sings in "The Gambler." We need to know when to hold 'em and when to fold 'em.