A Mad, Mad World - Anger Management

One man's stress is another man's living. It has become a mad world with nationwide anger-management workshops, angry people checking into places such as the Violence Institute of Chicago and bookstores stacked with self-help guides like Mary LoVerde's Stop Screaming at the Microwave and Richard Carlson's best-selling Don't Sweat the Small Stuff. Amusing reads, but not many seem to be incorporating that "Don't worry, be happy" philosophy into their daily lives. The WTO demonstrators certainly weren't.

"Those people in Seattle, they're just saying, `I don't want to be a little cog in the machine, I don't want all these world leaders controlling my economic fate,'" says "Stress Doc" Mark Gorkin, a psychotherapist and motivational humorist on America Online, formerly a stress and violence-prevention consultant to the U.S. Postal Service.

It's no longer just outrage in America, Gorkin says, it's rage of all kinds. Who but horror writer Stephen King Could have imagined a suburban Alabama mother fatally shooting another mom in a road-rage incident or presidential contenders facing questions about airline rage? Even the office isn't a safe haven. In a span of four months, July to November, shooting sprees broke out at Seattle's Northlake Shipyard (two dead); Xerox Corp. in Honolulu (seven dead); an Atlanta office complex (nine dead); and in Pelham, Ala. (three dead).

"Civility is on the decline," euphemizes James V. O'Conner, founder of the Cuss Control Academy in Northbrook, Ill., which works to teach people -- from children to senior citizens -- not to use the seven dirty words. "What we have become," he says "is a nation of whiners and complainers. We have to accept facts: Accidents happen and things go wrong," and none of it is improved one bit by repeating the swearing cliches.

Trouble is that this lack of civility, supported by vulgarity, has spilled from the streets and offices to the rest of our culture. In September, hip-hop artist and producer Puffy Combs was ordered to participate in an anger-management class after he beat a fellow record producer. Anger even received a major pop-culture nod in February when an episode of Fox's The Simpsons focused on Marge Simpson's experiences with road rage and its aftermath.

Marge, the matriarch of the dysfunctional cartoon clan, found herself stuck behind a funeral procession while driving the family's new sport-utility vehicle. Though usually levelheaded, she cut around the procession, screaming, "Get that corpse off the road! The streets are for the living!" She was apprehended and sent to traffic school to learn to deal with her road rage. "So when you go out for a drive," Sgt. Crew, the course instructor, told students, "remember to leave your murderous anger where it belongs -- at home."

And anger even has reached U.S. sporting events, as fans have sunk almost to the level of Europe's soccer fanatics. In Milwaukee a disgruntled Brewers fan jumped from the stands to take a swing at the Philadelphia Phillies' right fielder. In Philadelphia, fans showed their contempt by tossing radio batteries at players, prompting authorities to install a municipal judge at Veteran's Stadium to provide timely justice. In Washington, a soccer fan stabbed another during a close D.C. United match. In Denver, fans rocked Oakland Raiders football players with snowballs and a player charged the stands to confront the attackers during a Monday Night Football game. Even golf's Ryder Cup has seen its share of rowdy fans, and at the Preakness in Baltimore a disturbed man ran onto the track to attack a jockey.

The Washington Post recently editorialized that it is the desire to win at all costs that leads to this fan pandemonium. Perhaps the same can be said of the sport of politics. GOP presidential hopeful John McCain's anger has been the subject of repeated attacks, although presidents Lyndon Johnson, Dwight Eisenhower, Richard Nixon and even Harry Truman also were known to throw tantrums. And don't forget Bill Clinton. As McCain explained to CNBC's Hardball in September, "I used to lose [my temper] ... all the time. Every time I lost it, either in captivity or out, I said something I regretted, usually harming someone?' Now, he added, "I not only count to 10, every day I get up and pray, `I don't want to lose my temper today.'"

This may not be a very comforting explanation for a potential president with the authority to kill 100 million people with a touch of a button. McCain tried to defuse this political bomb by making fun of himself at a recent debate, responding to the loss of military readiness under Clinton/Gore by cracking: "It makes me a little angry"

While McCain plays down his anger, America itself seems to be getting more cranky by the hour. And this despite low unemployment, increasing longevity, unprecedented affluence and technology that increasingly seems capable of almost anything. Why?

People are out of control because they have low self-esteem, suggests Marilyn J. Sorensen, a psychologist in Portland, Ore., who wrote Breaking the Chain of Low Self-Esteem. High taxes, lying politicians, traffic jams and exhausting schedules all are culprits, she says. "The demands are endless and people have no time to themselves or quality time with their families." Some people feel powerless, she continues. "Many work all their lives and have little to show for it." Those with no money to invest don't benefit from the booming stock market; indeed, they "feel even more like they have missed out; they feel further behind and know they can never catch up."

Prosperity also has its disadvantages, says the Stress Doc. "People wind up staying in positions longer than they should and they become burnt up or burnt out," he says. "They put in a lot of overtime and we live in this new 24/7, 365-day global and computer economy where people have lost how to communicate with each other."

Gorkin has quite a list of culprits. "E-mail has stopped people from talking to each other," he adds. "E-mail is really Escape-mail. People can avoid each other by sending out a blistering note that they wouldn't dare say face to face. We have created a division of the Roman Empire -- the world of haves and have-nots--of those who are computer-savvy and those intimidated by the new revolution. Salesmen resent the e-commerce. It is bringing a new death of the salesman."

When the computer crashes, all hell breaks loose because then people have to confront each other, says Gorkin. But the serious study of growing popular anger predates the computer revolution. Charles Speilberger of the University of South Florida tells Insight that modern research of the problem began 20 years ago when cardiologists developed the concept of "type A" personalities. "It turns out type A behavior was linked to heart disease, but the lethal component of type A personality was anger," says Speilberger.

The Florida academic distinguishes between feeling anger and expressing anger. As bad as expressing anger is proving to be for the society at large, Speilberger's studies show anger turned inward, which leads to depression, has deeply destructive physical consequences leading to elevated blood pressure and hypertension, heart attack and stroke.

If keeping your cool is so good for you, why do people lose it? Because, for one thing, "the promise of service never equals reality," notes C. Leslie Charles, who recently wrote, Why Is Everyone so Cranky? and has made it a mission to stamp out anger with her "cranky buster" buttons and T-shirts. "We are overwhelmed, overworked, overscheduled and overspent," she declares. "We are a nation living on the edge."

Or, as she puts it in her book, "giving has become secondary to getting." The got-to-have-it mentality, she says, has soured the nation's collective mood. "On our streets and highways, in our workplaces and even in our homes, we've abandoned common courtesy," she writes. People are "impatient, rude and demanding." And it's not one thing that got us there, either, she insists. "It isn't the big things that push us over the edge. It's the succession of little things that keep building."

Sound familiar? In the 1980s the late actor Peter Finch made famous the line, "I'm as mad as hell and I'm not going to take it anymore," in his Oscar-winning movie Network. The Finch character had the entire city of New York screaming the same line.

Do you want to know if you are on the road to that kind of madness? Charles says you might be if you tend to insist that you are entitled to what you want when you want it, are determined to be impatient or rude when other people are behaving stupidly or tend to insist furiously that since your time is important you should not have to be inconvenienced by others. If you recognize yourself, she says, it might be a good time to seek professional help or read her book.

"It's what we do with our anger or how we express it that matters" Charles says. "There is a healthy way to express anger, such as Candy Lightner did when her daughter was killed by a drunk driver. She started Mothers Against Drunk Driving. We should have a road-rage advocate group." Instead, people dwell on what they don't have, Charles says. Our "expectation machine" with its impossible-to-deliver promises insists that life is like sports: "There are winners and losers, and if you are not a winner guess what you are?"

Our crankiness, she writes, is the "natural by-product of our social compulsion to drive the right car, live in the right home in the right area with all the right furnishings, have the right job, send our kids to the right day care or school, wear the right clothes and accessories, belong to the right clubs and go to the right vacation spots." Believing that having the best means we are the best leads to the anxiety that results from financial instability. "Many of us are so busy trying to create the right life that we've turned our existence into a nightmare of debt"

While Charles blames our culture of greed, pop psychologist David Weiner says the culprit is biochemical. In other words, our brains are out of whack, he tells Insight. It's all about battling our "inner dummy" he says. Of course, he would say that. He wrote a book called Battling the Inner Dummy, referring to what he claims is a malfunctioning component in the modern brain. According to Weiner, the physical brain hasn't changed in 300,000 years, but our demands on it have. "If we could get in there with a screwdriver like we do with defective software, we would be ahead of the game."

If you want to see if you are winning the battle against anger, take Weiner's power-drive test. "Very few people have an organ in their brains that may be out of balance, and most people are in the middle on the test. The problem is not in the middle, but if you have a kid with a genetic predisposition and with a nine power-program score and a kid who shows little guilt and fear, and even though his parents may be Quakers, you got a kid who might go to the school and shoot someone."

Others say that while an angry disposition tends to be inherited, it can be overcome. "Our experience is that when people can identify their anger from the past as causing problems in the present, and we get rid of it in the right way, other problems of everyday life then can be solved" says Mitchell Messer of the Violence Institute of Chicago. "And they can even be solved if our brains are on fire."

The Violence Institute uses Adlerian psychology, which presumes that people "overcompensate" for feelings of inferiority and inadequacy in childhood. "Not only do we feel inferior and inadequate to cope in childhood, but it turns out we blame ourselves. That will tie you up in knots," says Messer, "and it will give us preexisting anger in our bloodstream so that all it will take is 2 ounces to spill us over." The only people to escape this, he notes, "are American citizens with perfect parents."

The young shooters, like everyone else, have been suppressing anger for years, says Messer. "When they cannot take the pressure any more, all of a sudden, 19 and behold, they turn it outward. What did you think they would do?"

Recent studies show it may not only be the angry child we need to be concerned about, but also coworkers. Take a look at the people in nearby cubicles and remember that while homicides committed during robberies declined during the nineties, killings by coworkers rose dramatically.

Donald Gibson, a professor at the Yale University School of Management, says the recent spate of workplace violence is not surprising. Coauthor of The Experience of Anger at Work: Lessons From the Chronically Angry, Gibson notes that nearly 25 percent of respondents to a 1996 Gallup telephone survey of 1,000 adults indicated that they were "generally at least somewhat angry at work." Much of that discontent is coming from the East Coast, where 12 percent of the respondents called themselves quite angry, compared with 6 percent in the Midwest, 4 percent in the South and 3 percent in the West.

As for what makes them mad, 11 percent of those questioned claimed the actions of supervisors or managers as the No. 1 reason they get upset. Nine percent of respondents cited others not being productive and tight deadlines or a heavy workload, while still others pointed to a public that treats them badly as the root of their stress.

"Supervisors need to think about how they are communicating with employees" Gibson says, because the effect of workplace anger can be quite costly for corporations. Employees who are angry create a hostile work environment and tend to do only just enough work to get by, he says.

New Jersey psychologists Steven Dranoff and Wanda Dobrich blame the rise of anger in America on "displacement" aggression: A father comes home from work and yells at his wife, who snaps at her son, who then kicks the dog. And there are other causes. The popular wisdom appears to be that 1970s deinstitutionalization of mental patients, combined with a managed-care health system in crisis, has produced too little help for those who need it the most. Talk about mad as hell -- Newsweek magazine described the health-care system as HMO Hell. A Newsweek/Discovery survey revealed that 61 percent of Americans polled were frustrated and angry -- about their health insurance. "Managed care is eroding care and ... you are left with how to deal with the situation with no counselors or shrinks," Dranoff says. On top of that, Dobrich adds, more women are entering the workforce and men and women are having to learn how to relate to each other in a new workforce culture. It's not going too well, according to the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, which reported a 300 percent rise in coworker sexual-harassment complaints this year.

Interestingly, there is not much difference between the sexes in feelings of anger, says Speilberger, but major differences in the way anger is expressed. "Most women rarely feel like expressing anger physically ... they express it verbally" he says. "Men don't discriminate so much between screaming at someone and hitting them. For women, there's a big difference."

While Dranoff and Dobrich see a solution in anger workshops, others have sought alternative sublimation. For example, Candace Talmadge, a Texas woman who says she used to suffer from an anger problem, turned to "Sunan Therapy," which emphasizes using meditation to find a "happy place." Perhaps reflecting a self-esteem issue, a relieved Talmadge says, "I always thought people were saying I was the worst slime that ever existed, but not anymore." Therapist Jana Simons sees this new-age fix between therapist and client as "two explorers using love energy" to get in touch with the "mental, physical, emotional and spiritual belief systems." And all on a massage table at $100 a session.

If you're not quite ready for the massage table, counseling or brain surgery, Cranky author Charles offers advice: "Take a bite of reality. Flights will be delayed, even canceled -- endure it. You will be inconvenienced -- count on it. People are going to do things that irritate you -- expect it. Uncontrollables are part of life -- accept it. These hassles won't change, but you can."

Timothy W. Maier