Explosions into Anger

How to Deal with Emotionally Explosive People

By Albert J. Bernstein, Ph.D.

What Are Anger Control Problems?

Anger control problems are like this : Nobody can define them, but everybody knows them when they see them. In public, everyone is against excessive anger, but a surprising number of people indulge in it in the privacy of their own minds.

To understand what anger control problems are and how to deal with them, more instructive than a list of symptoms is a discussion of why there is no official list of symptoms to discuss.

In many ways, anger control problems are the mirror image of other psychiatric disorders. Those afflicted usually don't think there's anything wrong with them. This is quite different from fear and depression. Unlike other disorders, anger control problems are defined less bu what the people who have them are experiencing, and more by the effect their experience has on us.

The words and action may be disparate, the one thing all these people have in common is the negative emotional response their behaviors elicit. Angry people make us angry at them. Anger, unlike other mental disorders, is highly contagious, and one of its most salient symptoms is not realizing that you have it.

If you think the people in the examples make you afraid rather than angry, you know what I mean about not realizing, or are about to find out. The differences between anger and fear are more semantic than psychological. Choosing one state over the other means that to you, the distinction between anger and fear is clearer than it actually is in reality. This is a polite way of saying you're in denial.

You are not alone. The words we use to describe our own experience are different, more varied, and often more positive than those we use to describe that of other people. They may be angry, but we are afraid. Or hurt, upset, irritated, out of sorts, or perhaps premenstrual. We can almost fool ourselves into believing that we're talking about different emotional states entirely. But why do we need to do this?

We need to do it because anger is inseparable from morality. People get angry because other people are not doing what they're supposed to do.

Many people who suffer from mental illnesses use different substances. Photograph by Elena.

Brandon, who you probably guessed was driving the pickup truck, believes that you insulted him by making a big stink over his perfectly reasonable request to be allowed into the line of traffic.

David believes that punctuality is one of the many ultimate measures of love. If you're late, he feels abandoned.

Jenna is adamant that anything short of a perfect product – meaning that something is done exactly the way she would – constitutes lack of proper respect to the firm and to her. She takes every deviation personally.

Zack would say that toasters should work correctly or suffer the consequences. Brittany would say that nobody has the right to tell her what to do.

Of course they're wrong. But before you try and convince them, wait. You're about to step into their world, where everything is clearer and in sharper contrast than in ours. Over there, it's so much easier to tell the difference between right and wrong.

Anger involves an almost hopeless intertwining of morality and psychology, yet our only hope for communicating effectively with angry people lies in being able to separate the two. The reason there is no diagnostic category for anger control problems is that mental health people can't decide whether angry people are sick of just bad. Sick people are entitled to sympathy and treatment. Bad people deserve punishment. Grudgingly, we insert not guilty by reason of insanity between the two, but that's for people who are really crazy. Where do we put people who are convinced they're fine but whose actions drive everybody else crazy?

Enter the personality disorder, which today is diagnosed along a separate axis from more genteel problems like anxiety and depression. According to the DSM-IV, a personality disorder is “an enduring pattern of inner experience and behavior that deviates markedly from the expectations of the individual's culture.” The pattern is manifested in two (or more) of the following areas:

1. Ways of perceiving and interpreting self, other people, and events.
2. Range, intensity, lability, and appropriateness of emotional response
3. Interpersonal functioning
4. Impulse control

We can't be sure about what happens in our brains when we suffer from anger. Illustration by Elena.

Isn't this a remarkably civilized way of saying “bad”? The trait that supposedly distinguishes people with personality disorders from those who are normal is disturbed object relations, which means treating people not as people, but as objects to supply one's own needs. I've never met anyone who doesn't do this to some degree, but most of us are not exploitative enough to meet the criteria for full-fledged personality disorder.

A good way to think about these disorders is as the unbridled pursuit of a single psychological goal- excitement, attention, affection, adulation, and control are the usual suspects – that feels as necessary as air and water. Personality disorders are like addiction, another mental disorder with moral overtones. Actually, they may be variations on a single theme. People with personality disorders are often addicted to various substances, and treatment for addiction usually involves the structured force-feeding of morality, which is similar to current treatments for personality disorders.

Personality disorders wound up in their own separate category because many psychiatrists believed that they weren't really medical disorders, meaning they couldn't be treated with drugs, and wouldn't improve much, even with years of expensive psychotherapy. Such attitudes are changing, but slowly. To this day, your medical insurance will not cover the treatment of personality disorders.

You may be wondering why we bother with these morally and chemically impaired people at all. There are, however, two problems with ridding ourselves of those exhibiting personality disorders. First, the symptoms of these disorders are pervasive if not universal. Every has them to a certain extent. Second, and more fiendishly ironic, is the fact that much of what makes people attractive and interesting bubbles up from the same dark source as personality disorders. People who don't want anything are dull. But our desires distort our perceptions, make us do things that aren't good for us, and mess up our relationships with other people. The question is: Does this make us mentally ill or human?

All of the above.

The elements of personality disorders – yours, mine, and theirs = keep life interesting, sometimes to o interesting. They also keep me employed. If personality disorders didn't get in the way, anybody could have mental illness. Everybody would get along, and you could just tell people what to do to get better, and they would do it gratefully. A computer program could then handle the psychiatrist's job.

You can fight explosions into anger by different means. Photo by Elena.