Smart Parenting During and After Divorce: How to Keep Your Cool - Anger Management (page 4)

There is a difference between someone who says, "Sometimes I get so mad I could spit" and someone who gets so mad he does spit. The first person can be helped by some sympathy and some good strategies for managing anger when being provoked. If this sounds like you, then the advice in this section will give you additional strategies to keep your cool so you don't lose control. The second person usually winds up with a restraining order, a few nights in jail, or, worse yet, killing someone—she has chronic anger or rage and needs help beyond what I can provide here. That is the difference between managing occasional anger and managing chronic anger or rage. Chronic anger is very difficult to change in a person, and most people who have chronic problems sincerely believe that it is the world at large who has the problem—not them.

Anger is a very contagious emotion. When you come into contact with an angry person, it's often the case that you will become angry, or at the very least uncomfortable and uneasy. If you are in a high-conflict relationship with a co-parent, the anger generated by one person feeds the anger of the other person in a self-perpetuating cycle.

Understanding How Anger Is Destructive

It is always better to disengage or de-escalate hostile situations when you can. Anger and hostility generated by divorce and custody problems are destructive in many ways. The two most destructive ways are to shut down reason and to make you sick.

Anger Leads to Loss of Reason

Anger can lead to the point of complete loss of reason. That is a nice way of saying it can make you insane. Literally. The type of instability this sort of anger creates can lead to assault, even homicide. I have seen it more than a few times in my career—"normal" everyday people driven to extremes by anger at the ex-spouse or partner.

Intense anger like this breeds motivation for revenge. Revenge brings retaliation, and so it goes until one person raises the stakes high enough to either harm someone else or get caught and put in jail for trying to harm someone else. This is all separate from what it does to your children and your relationship with your children; it can and does ruin lives.

Anger Makes You Sick

Anger can make you sick, as well as ugly. Anger is a very corrosive emotion. It can erode your physical health. It certainly makes you age prematurely. It causes a type of ongoing agitation that advances your biological clock faster than the passage of time alone. No one really knows why, but there are theories stating that the type of agitation that anger and hatred causes places you in a state of frustration that builds and builds until it either bursts the vessel that holds it or gets released in the form of acting-out behavior.

This process causes the release of hormones that are associated with anger. Since the biological systems that control the release of these hormones were not designed to be "on" all of the time, if we tape those switches in the "on" position, we remain in a state ready to fight all the time at the expense of other biological processes that keep us healthy.

Strategies for Coping with Anger

Here are a few strategies that you can employ to help you cope with the kinds of anger that people struggle with in high-conflict divorce cases.

Handling Communication

If communicating face-to-face leads to an argument and to escalation of conflict, communicate in writing, by e-mail or voice mail, or with the help of an attorney. Sometimes face-to-face communication is unavoidable. If you must communicate face-to-face, bring along a friend—not the type of friend who is going to pump you up and encourage or even assist you in doing something stupid, but the real kind of friend who is going to stay in the background, reason with both of you and stop you from doing something stupid, or advise you to leave a rapidly escalating situation.

Use Your Support Network to Help You Focus on the Positives

When you build a network of supportive people around you and you are going through a rough time, all of your friends want to hear the latest "story" about your last fight or argument with your ex or soon-to-be ex.

Retelling stories of how you argued, were mistreated, of how you told someone what was good for them does not reduce anger—it increases it. That is because your friends tend to reinforce your side of the story and the things you did within that story. Encourage your friends to talk to you about the parts of life that you would like to get back to, presumably those parts that are enjoyable and do not involve daily battles. Friends should distract you from your angry conflicts, not assist you in investing in them.