DISSOLVE THE PAIN OF ANIMOSITY
A 5 minute exercise to end lingering anger after an argument
When you remember an argument, do you ever find yourself rehearsing the brilliant one-liners you wish you had said? And then feel pangs or regret that you didn’t think of them in time? Do you sometimes suffer from the discomfort of hot antagonism when you think of someone you’ve had a disagreement with recently - or long ago? The problem for us when we hold hostility is that it hypes our fight-and-flight emergency response. There is overwhelming evidence that when this goes on for a long time, it makes our minds less effective and our bodies more prone to illness and earlier death. In addition, it doesn’t feel great. This post provides a technique for transcending lingering anger after an altercation or disagreement with someone. It takes five minutes.
SETTLING THE SCORE?
When we’re angry with someone, we often want to get back at them, win, or take revenge in some way or other. We want to settle the score. Thinking about it, it’s a strange phrase, this settling the score, since getting back at someone hardly ever settles anything. If we don’t succeed in our quest for retaliation, our vengeful fantasies tend to multiply and that’s not very conducive to our own peace of mind. It’s a bit like drinking poison and hoping the other person will die.
If, on the other hand, we do retaliate in some way, things may get even worse: our enemy will likely seek further reprisal, to which we’ll probably respond in kind, and so on, in a cycle of escalating animosity that can go on for months, years, decades, or — in family or national vendettas — centuries. There is no settling at all.
There is a simple way out of this, a real way to settle the score: it is to reach the conclusion in your own heart that you do not need to score at all! Now, I know this might sound a bit far-fetched if you are in the middle of a fantasy battle plan, but it really is possible to let go of your own aggrieved stance. When we succeed in doing so, we feel peaceful, more content and, yes, settled. What follows is a five-minute exercise for letting go of such an aggrieved stance - and it works!
WHEN this exercise is USEFUL/ CONDITIONS HEALED
Here are some examples of typical situations:
You’ve just had an argument with someone and you’re still angry.
You keep thinking of those brilliant winning points you could have made but didn’t because you didn’t think of them till three seconds after you slammed the door.
You are still angry with someone over an argument you had months or years ago.
You find yourself thinking about this annoying person over and over again. You find yourself asking: “How could they have done that? How could they have said that?” These are not questions; they’re marginally disguised barbs of judgment against this enemy person who is jumping around in your own mind.
You find yourself calling them names: “bastard,” “idiot”, and so on.
You find yourself smiling malignantly with cutting humor, like: “A sheep with his brains would still be a sheep,” or (if you are in Australia) “She’s got kangaroos loose in the top paddock.”
When you see the person you are angry with, you feel discomfort, or heat, or tension.
You can’t get rid of this sense of hostility — and it doesn’t feel great.
This exercise does not work for battles in which you were victimized by the unprovoked and/or insurmountable aggression of another. Nor does it work for childhood trauma.
PRE-EXERCISE SET-UP
Make sure you have alone time in a space you feel comfortable in.
If not required for emergency response, turn off all phones and other possible sources of interruption. The exercise takes less than 5 minutes.
Sit in a comfortable chair.
Have a pen and journal, notebook, or paper to write on.
If you are using the recording, set it up in advance and be clear how to pause the recording to give yourself the time you need. Do not drive while listening to the recording, as you will need to close your eyes. After listening to the recording, skip the written exercise section below and jump to “EXPERIENCE.” If you do not use the recording, you will need to remember steps 1-3 of the exercise, since your eyes will be closed and it will be difficult to read.
THE EXERCISE
Close your eyes. Imagine you are with the person you had the disagreement with. Picture the scene from your point of view, looking at this aggravating person in front of you. For about 20 seconds, imagine yourself arguing your point of view.
Imagine now that you leave your body, so to speak. You move out of your body. Your body remains where it was, arguing away, while your mind’s eye begins to shift to a new point of view. This new point of view is located just behind and above the shoulder of the person you are angry with. Take this position right now. Your mind’s eye is behind and above the other person’s shoulder and you can see your body arguing away. Look over his or her shoulder and observe yourself arguing. You are actually seeing yourself from their point of view. What do you look like? What’s it like to see yourself from the other’s point of view? Be aware of how you look and what it feels like to listen to you.
After you have seen and felt the other’s point of view, take the other person’s point of view with you as you allow yourself to return, gently, to your own body within the scene.
Now, gently open your eyes. Write down what came up for you. How did you look from the other’s point of view? What happened for you? How do you feel?
EXPERIENCE
When you experience what it is like to see yourself from the other’s point of view, there may come a moment when you sense a shift, perhaps an inkling of softening, or perhaps surprise at what you look like and what you project when you are angry or tense.
A man who did this exercise shared with me: "When I was in my own body, I thought I was absolutely right. I didn't just think it, I knew it! I could not understand how it was even possible that she did not agree with me. When I jumped out of my body and looked over her shoulder, I saw myself standing there being pretty aggressive and, from her perspective, I didn't want to listen to what this person — I mean myself — was saying. No one would have wanted to listen to a person talking like I was! I was critical, disdainful, kind of arrogant. Now my judgments about her seem to have sort of melted away. I feel quite tender towards her."
WHY IT WORKS
In this exercise you manipulate yourself, literally, into a 180 degree different point of view. Thousands of grandmothers and parents have said to their kids and grandkids over the millennia: “Put yourself in their shoes!” Not always so easy to do. This exercise provides a readily doable method for making this shift of stance.
When we are caught in our own point of view, we tend to be blind to the other person’s wants and needs. As soon as we dissociate from our own point of view, we become more open to others.
When we deliberately position ourselves to see what we look like from the other’s point of view, we are almost instantly aligning with the other. Alignment with the other is an aspect of empathy. This exercise is a practical means of finding empathy. Empathy mends discord.
Seeing yourself from the other’s point of view also gives an answer to an important question that is really hard to ask when we are trapped in our own aggrieved story: what part did I play in creating/maintaining this battle? Even if I were only a little bit responsible, what did I do/say/convey that contributed to the hostile feeling? Many people who do this exercise, write that they are surprised to see how much aggression, control, arrogance or unfriendliness emanates from them when they see themselves from the other’s point of view. They often realize that their contribution was actually more than a little bit. Recognizing our own responsibility in the creation of what happened — even if we only claim a small portion — helps us drop our case against the other: forgiveness is a natural result.
The reason for writing down what happened for you, is that it helps ingrain your shift of perspective. It helps you remember. When we are angry, it is not easy to remember that any other point of view other than our own is possible. So we need any help we can get to remember there is another way. By writing down the shift and the positive effect this had on you, you are helping to ingrain and ease the pathway to putting yourself in someone else’s shoes in the future.
WHERE IT COMES FROM/ HISTORY OF THE TECHNIQUE
This exercise, as I mentioned, is based on the ancient sage advice of putting yourself in someone else’s shoes. This particular iteration of the technique comes from Neuro-Linguistic Programming (NLP), a therapeutic methodology developed by Bandler and Grinder in the 1970s. Bandler and Grinder’s methods were, in turn, derived from their careful study of three exceptional therapists: Milton Erickson, Virginia Satir, and Fritz Perls.
The technique also has deeper roots in philosophical and religious texts which extol the value of detachment and compassion:
The techniques of disassociation recommended in some NLP exercises (of which the second part of this exercise is one example) are simple steps toward the quality of detachment. Through attaining some detachment from your own point of view, you are more able to discern another’s point of view. If you actually take the other person’s point of view, as you do in this exercise, then you are seeing with this person, rather than at or against this person. Seeing with someone else, sharing their point of view, as an important aspect of empathy. And empathy is deeply healing.
Empathy is also the precursor of compassion. The word compassion comes from the Latin roots com (with) and passion (feeling).When you see with another, you are better able to experience feeling with another and this may inspire compassionate acts of kindness. All religions, and humanism too, teach (and practice with varying degrees of success) the value of compassion. This exercise provides a simple shift of focus from judgmentalism (you are bad/wrong and I’m right/better than you) to a more compassionate recognition (we both created what happened and, in seeing from your point of view, I feel something of what you feel and recognize our equality of heart).
FURTHER ACTIONS
In some personal situations, it may be helpful to speak to the person you had the argument with. If you want, you can tell them about the exercise you did and the realization that you had from it. In other situations, particularly more professional ones, it may not be prudent to do this. But even so, you may find that your energy is now different when you are with your erstwhile enemy and that your more mellow countenance may positively uplift him/her without an explicatory word being spoken.
Practice seeing through others’ eyes by doing this exercise in other situations, whether you are angry or not. It is good practice for cultivating empathy, and fun to do.