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Let’s Compare Marcus Aurelius to Modern Psychotherapy
3 Plays5 days ago
In this episode, I talk with Raymond DiGiuseppe, Professor of Psychology at St. John’s University and Director of Professional Education at the Albert Ellis Institute. Professor DiGiuseppe is a renowned figure in the field of cognitive-behavioral therapy, particularly Rational Emotive Behavior Therapy (REBT). He’s also done extensive work on anger. Today’s something of a special episode because we’ll be discussing the Stoic anger management strategies described in the Meditations of Marcus Aurelius. How valuable are these ancient strategies when viewed from the perspective of modern evidence-based psychotherapy.
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Transcript
Introduction to Raymond DiGiuseppe
00:00:02
Donald Robertson
Hello and welcome to Stoicism, Philosophy is a Way of Life. My name is Donald Robertson and today's guest is Raymond DiGiuseppe, Professor of Psychology at St. John's University and Director of Professional Education at the Albert Ellis Institute.
00:00:16
Donald Robertson
Professor DiGiuseppe is a renowned figure in the field of cognitive behavioral therapy, particularly Rational Emotive Behavior Therapy or REBT. He's also done extensive work on anger.
Anger Management: Marcus Aurelius vs Modern Psychotherapy
00:00:27
Donald Robertson
Today's something of a special episode because we'll be discussing the Stoic anger management strategies described in the meditations of Marcus Aurelius.
00:00:35
Donald Robertson
How valuable are those ancient strategies when viewed from the perspective of modern evidence-based psychotherapy? Hi, Ray, and welcome to the podcast.
00:00:44
Ray
really an honor to be here. I'm looking forward to it. I think we'll have a lot of fun.
00:00:49
Donald Robertson
going be great. I'm really looking forward to it. It's kind of a treat for me. you want to begin by saying a little bit about your background?
00:00:55
Ray
Well, you know, I was a graduate student at Hofstra University where I studied with a guy named Howie Kazanov and Howard had, um studied under Joe Wolpe and Albert Ellis and sort of taught us behavioral and cognitive behavior therapy and introduced me to REBT.
00:01:07
Donald Robertson
Uh-huh. Uh-huh. Uh-huh.
00:01:13
Ray
And, uh, I then spent a couple of years working with, uh, Al Ellis. I did a two year postdoc fellowship and I co-led a group with Al for two years.
00:01:24
Ray
And, um, Al was really big on Epictetus and the Stoics. ah Recently, I reread or read a book by one of your colleagues on this the stoic life that goes into um Epictetus.
00:01:40
Ray
And I'm reading this book and I said, yeah i remember Al saying that in in group.
00:01:40
Donald Robertson
Uh-huh. Mm-hmm.
00:01:45
Ray
al Al said that in supervision. So he was really, as a psychotherapist, more of a stoic. then than i think anybody of his generation.
00:01:52
Donald Robertson
ah
00:01:55
Ray
And I can re reread some of these stoic books and just remember the things that Al said in supervision. And I think that was really helpful to me. So I always worked, i've I've stayed at the Albert Ellis Institute.
00:02:09
Ray
I really kind of committed to REBT because I think I like the philosophy.
00:02:10
Donald Robertson
Mm-hmm.
00:02:14
Ray
I think it is a a philosophical approach. And I think that it has sent out text tentacles to that have been been absorbed by other forms of cognitive behavior therapy.
00:02:28
Ray
Anger has always been an issue that I've been ah studying and treating. you know When I was a new graduate, I wanted to start a private practice. And you know I'm in New York. I have lots of colleagues.
00:02:42
Ray
And I decided to try to treat people that nobody wanted to treat.
00:02:42
Donald Robertson
Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.
00:02:46
Ray
I figured that was the best way to make money, right? And I would always work with these delinquent adolescents and all these kids who were having temper tantrums.
00:02:58
Ray
So I sort of cut my teeth on young, angry people. And then later on, I started getting involved in people who were adults. And I really got involved in that because the Albert Ellis Institute used to take referrals from this agency that treat treated crime victims and domestic violence victims.
00:03:16
Ray
And I always thought that treating domestic violence victims was a good business model. There was always going to be plenty of them. The only way to really help reduce that population was to treat the offenders.
00:03:28
Ray
Those are the people we have to work with.
00:03:29
Donald Robertson
Right.
00:03:30
Ray
And so I've always wanted to take on those kinds of difficult cases. So that's how I got involved and in anger and probably have looked at anger as an emotion through most of my career.
Exploration of Anger in Ancient and Modern Contexts
00:03:42
Donald Robertson
i mean, in a sense, angles are relatively neglected. problem, although it's it's it's got a social impact that perhaps other problems don't have, or and not in the same way anyway.
00:03:50
Ray
Yes.
00:03:55
Ray
So right now I'm, uh, been working with anger for a while and I'm am doing a book for Springer nature with, uh, Sharon Panula, the editor over there. And I'm kind of trying to make that argument.
00:04:07
Ray
And, um, You know, if you look at the ancient Greeks, as we did through that philosophy and psychology of anger, you see all this interest in anger, anxiety, they don't talk about it at all.
00:04:16
Donald Robertson
Yeah. Right.
00:04:18
Ray
But I went through the psych info search engine and I put in the word anger in the title of an article for a year, anxiety for a year.
00:04:31
Ray
And for the last 15 years, for every article on anger, there were eight on anxiety and 11 for depression. So just putting the title of those three emotions in the, you know, look the just gives you such a big difference in the literature.
00:04:42
Donald Robertson
right
00:04:50
Ray
So whatever you and I may say about anger, may turn out to be wrong because someone may do some interesting research that just hasn't been done yet.
00:04:57
Donald Robertson
Yeah.
00:04:58
Ray
And the amount of research is really small.
00:05:01
Donald Robertson
And ironically, like you say, you know, in the ancient world, anger was a big deal. we have, I'll just, again, preface it, you talked a little bit about the beginnings of behavior therapy and cognitive therapy.
00:05:14
Donald Robertson
A lot of people think that psychotherapy was invented by Sigmund Freud, which is wrong on many levels. Like fine Freud trained in psychotherapy. Like he went to France to train and it'd been around for like decades, like about a half a century in the modern world before Freud came along.
00:05:30
Donald Robertson
But psychotherapy actually existed, you know, and they virtually call it psychotherapy. They call it the therapy of the psyche in the ancient world. There were entire books written on the subject.
00:05:41
Donald Robertson
We have a book by Galen called On the Diagnosis and Cure of the Soul's Passions.
00:05:43
Ray
hmm
00:05:48
Donald Robertson
which is clearly a book on psychopathology and psychotherapy. The Stoics wrote whole books on it. and Now, annoyingly, most of them are lost. But we do have an entire book by Seneca called On Anger, which is pretty much a book on Stoic psychotherapy for anger, basically.
00:06:04
Donald Robertson
you know They were definitely doing it. And then in Marcus Aurelius, as we'll see, we have this you know bullet point list, weirdly, of of strategies for dealing with anger.
00:06:13
Ray
Yeah.
00:06:16
Ray
I think the Seneca book sort of reviews everything that's still a scientific ah question in anger today.
00:06:19
Donald Robertson
Yeah.
00:06:25
Ray
It's not like sometimes if you're going through that Seneca book, I have a little red volume of it that I read a lot.
00:06:32
Donald Robertson
hu
00:06:32
Ray
And it's just so insightful that the things that the the early people did
00:06:36
Donald Robertson
yeah
00:06:39
Ray
And sometimes I think people dismiss classic philosophers because it was so long ago. What could they know compared to all our science today? I think they were really ahead of us. um As a matter of fact, when I teach a course in cognitive psycho behavior therapy here the university and when I lecture someplace else, I have a a picture of me in front of the Marcus Aurelius statue in Rome.
00:07:04
Donald Robertson
Awesome.
00:07:05
Ray
And I have and have an expression on it. i have a quote. It's my quote.
00:07:08
Donald Robertson
yeah huh
00:07:09
Ray
There's nothing new in CBT since Marcus Aurelius.
00:07:16
Donald Robertson
That's awesome. well we'll see Well, let's put that to the test. Let's see if that's true by looking at what they but he actually says. so We're going to focus mainly on the practical advice today that Marcus gives, but I'll preface that a little bit by briefly acknowledging, I said, Galen has this book on psychopathology and psychotherapy. The Stoics have ah not only techniques, but they had a theory of anger.
00:07:38
Donald Robertson
um They classified anger as a desire. Interestingly, they call it a desire for revenge. And that implies that it's a response to a preceding sense of hurt.
00:07:51
Donald Robertson
Like we want revenge for something. We were disrespected or insulted or something.
00:07:54
Ray
Yes.
00:07:55
Donald Robertson
that That got us in the feels. That hurt, you know, and we want payback for it. That was a common assumption, actually, among most ancient schools of philosophy.
00:08:05
Ray
yes
00:08:06
Donald Robertson
The Platonists and Aristotle all anger as a desire for payback or revenge. The Stoics also distinguished between voluntary and involuntary aspects of anger.
00:08:19
Donald Robertson
And crucially, I think, and particularly from our perspective, they emphasized the role of our underlying beliefs in shaping anger.
00:08:29
Donald Robertson
So they had a cognitive model of anger. So Ray, what want to ask you is from a psychological perspective, Could it be helpful to view anger as having to do with two things?
00:08:42
Donald Robertson
On the one hand, an initial appraisal of threat or injury, such as to your social status, like being disrespected, and that kind of hurts.
00:08:47
Ray
Right.
00:08:51
Donald Robertson
And on the other hand, with a desire to get back at the person that we blame for doing it.
00:08:55
Ray
Yes, I
Cognitive Theories and Models of Anger
00:08:57
Ray
think so. I think if you look at the basic science model that most of CBT rests on, it's the appraisal theory of Richard Lazarus, which, you know, has been around in Lazarus and a lot of college.
00:09:09
Donald Robertson
Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.
00:09:11
Ray
which is to differentiate him from Arnie Lazarus, who was another famous cognitive behavior therapist who worked with Joe Walby. But Richard Lazarus had this very scientific theory, and he argued that people would make an appraisal of a threat.
00:09:18
Donald Robertson
yeah
00:09:26
Ray
The threat could be to your resources. You know, you're going to steal my cheese or my apples, or you're going to steal my money, or you're going to steal my my reputation and hurt my reputation. And that was sort of a primary appraisal.
00:09:40
Ray
And in Richard Lazarus's model, people then made a secondary appraisal as to whether I am stronger than the threat or the threat is stronger than me, or if the threat is just, there's no escape from the threat.
00:09:40
Donald Robertson
Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.
00:09:56
Ray
If the threat is stronger than me, I'm anxious. If there's no escape from the threat, I'm depressed. If I am stronger than the threat, I'm angry.
00:10:11
Ray
And I think if you kind of look at that, you could see a lot of people with anger say, well, anger is a reaction to some other emotions. Well, but then so is anxiety. In other words, you they're both a reaction to threat.
00:10:26
Ray
It's the secondary appraisal about your own efficacy and strength that seems to put it in one direction or the other.
00:10:31
Donald Robertson
Right.
00:10:34
Ray
So I think that that stuff that you just said from the ancients was rediscovered by Richard Lazarus. He just did a lot of experiments to show that they were right.
00:10:43
Donald Robertson
the and the nineteen so but but Going back to now, is that right?
00:10:44
Ray
And I think that's really the case.
00:10:48
Ray
ah Maybe nineteen eighty s Yeah.
00:10:50
Donald Robertson
1980? Okay.
00:10:50
Ray
Yeah. In the 1960s, he's been around for, what was around for a long time.
00:10:51
Donald Robertson
Yeah.
00:10:53
Ray
So Richard Lazarus's research really confirmed this idea of appraisals. um There may have been some others as well.
00:10:59
Donald Robertson
yeah
00:11:01
Ray
I'm always like most familiar with, with Lazarus. So, um and,
00:11:05
Donald Robertson
And actually, now the other thing I'd say is, like just it maybe to put this in context a little bit, right? We're talking about theory of anger. We're talking about it this ah appraisal model, ah cognitive appraisal model ah of Lazarus, sometimes called the transactional model or the seesaw model. right um
00:11:24
Donald Robertson
Just as an aside, other but people, there's a folk psychology of anger, right? Most people's conceptualization of anger out there, by comparison, is not this nuanced, right?
00:11:39
Ray
correct, yeah.
00:11:40
Donald Robertson
Correct. right So most people probably think of anger ah more like what psychologists sometimes call the hydraulic model. Like it's just a sort of pressure that builds up into them and they can vent it maybe and get it out of their system or they can kind of push it down or they can sort of channel it, like channeling a river or something like that.
00:11:58
Ray
Yeah. But the hydraulic model really comes from Freud because Freud, you know, Freud studied medicine at the University of Vienna when physics was really the big science and the physicists were studying hydraulics and he borrowed the hydraulic model for emotions.
00:11:59
Donald Robertson
they
00:12:02
Donald Robertson
Yeah.
00:12:16
Donald Robertson
Yeah.
00:12:17
Ray
And that's why we have this idea that if you're angry, you go down to the basement and punch a punching bag and that's going to let out your, your um emotions.
00:12:25
Donald Robertson
Yeah.
00:12:27
Ray
and And that's sort of a very common thing in the culture. um I always look for that.
00:12:32
Donald Robertson
yeah
00:12:33
Ray
And I have to tell you, people come in and they say they want to do this.
00:12:37
Donald Robertson
Yeah.
00:12:37
Ray
And the interesting thing about that in terms of science is back in the nineteen fifty s a guy named Leonard Berkowitz tried to disconfirm that and did.
00:12:37
Donald Robertson
Right.
00:12:47
Ray
And about every 10 years, some new experimental psychologists would do some research to show that it's really not helpful at all to let your anger out.
00:12:49
Donald Robertson
yeah
00:12:56
Ray
And the guy who's done that again today is Brad Bushman, who shows that anything you do to cope with your anger that gets you more aroused is just going to increase your anger.
00:12:58
Donald Robertson
right
00:13:07
Donald Robertson
I mean, it's probably in a way the best example of what used to be an actual prescribed therapy strategy that's generally accepted to be counterproductive.
00:13:16
Ray
Yeah.
00:13:21
Donald Robertson
Now, like it's maybe the worst therapy, strategy worst strategy in field of therapy in that regard. Then what's called venting or catharsis?
Techniques for Managing Anger from Marcus Aurelius
00:13:29
Donald Robertson
Like now here's an observation for you. Right.
00:13:32
Donald Robertson
Again, just a quick note. Marcus lists all these 10 techniques, and there are actually other techniques even beyond the ones he mentions in the other Stoic literature. The Stoics never like prescribe venting as a way of dealing with anger.
00:13:45
Ray
Right. They never had Freud.
00:13:46
Donald Robertson
Nowhere. yeah
00:13:48
Ray
They didn't have Freud.
00:13:48
Donald Robertson
yeah maybe Maybe because of Freud, we are all duped into this really bad strategy that doesn't seem to work that well. Okay, let's look then at what Marcus actually says.
00:13:59
Ray
So could we, could we go back to the issue? You, you mentioned two things, the cognitive model and the revenge, because I think the revenge thing is really kind of important.
00:14:04
Donald Robertson
Yeah. Uh-huh. Uh-huh. Mm-hmm.
00:14:08
Ray
course, I think that the, Ancients really beat us at identifying revenge. So I've sort of collected a bunch of definitions of anger from various mental health experts starting, you know, in the 1800s, G. Stanley Hall, the first president of the American Psychological Association and others.
00:14:32
Ray
And almost none of them think about revenge. It's sort of a missing topic. And when Chip Tafrady and I created our anger disorder scale, we had the first anger measure that had like a revenge subscale.
00:14:52
Donald Robertson
Oh yeah.
00:14:52
Ray
So the question i always had is, how did we psychologists miss this? Modern philosophers didn't.
00:14:58
Donald Robertson
ah huh.
00:15:00
Ray
If you look at Martha Nussbaum's work, she's very clear about revenge being important.
00:15:02
Donald Robertson
Indeed. Yeah.
00:15:06
Ray
If you look at Myesha Cherry, who has written this interesting book called The Case for Rage, where she talks about how being angry at injustice is important. She says adaptive anger at injustice sort of doesn't want revenge.
00:15:15
Donald Robertson
Uh-huh. Uh-huh.
00:15:20
Ray
It wants justice. It wants change. And so these two philosophers of modern time really address the revenge where the psychologists just have not ah really talked about it. So it's sort like the ancient philosophers and the modern philosophers have focused on revenge.
00:15:41
Ray
Psychologists have missed the boat.
00:15:43
Donald Robertson
It's odd in a way because in in many regards, I mean, anger is a complex emotion in some regards and it's kind of nuanced. There's the scope for disagreement. But like everybody in the ancient world agreed, the desire for revenge is fundamental to it.
00:15:58
Donald Robertson
And actually, again, if you just rounded up a bunch of random people, And despite like the the crudeness of the prevailing folk psychology, and you said to them, do you know like there's this theory of anger that it's got to do with desire for revenge?
00:16:12
Donald Robertson
I think most people would find that fairly fairly intuitive. They'd be like, yeah, that kind of makes sense.
00:16:16
Ray
Yeah.
00:16:18
Donald Robertson
So how come no modern psychologists thought, yeah, that kind of makes sense and started doing research on it?
00:16:18
Ray
Yeah.
00:16:22
Ray
I have no idea. and And, you know, another thing that I always say in class is if you want to study revenge, go to the English and the classics department. The literature people have always studied revenge.
00:16:33
Donald Robertson
Oh, yeah. Yeah. Yeah.
00:16:34
Ray
You know, we could talk about the fact that the Iliad, the first letter, first word is about revenge. We can talk about the, you know, revenge tragedies that have occurred in the Middle Ages.
00:16:39
Donald Robertson
yeah
00:16:43
Ray
We can talk about Hamlet. You know, they're all there. but they were missing in psychology. So we're kind of behind the game there. And I don't think we have too many interventions that even address revenge. And very infrequently, the anger studies have a dependent measure, an outcome measure of revenge.
00:17:07
Ray
So we may we may have we may be successful, we may not. We're not really assessing this crucial component of anger.
00:17:17
Donald Robertson
Yeah. but So that's something maybe future, more research is required. like Let's see. Now, let's have a look at what Marcus Aurelius actually recommends then. So I've kind of group these in clusters. So they're out of order or compared to how they would appear in meditations.
00:17:35
Donald Robertson
But I think that makes it a little bit easier for us to look at them.
00:17:36
Ray
Right.
00:17:38
Donald Robertson
The first one, and I'm using, by the way, Robin Waterfield's translation, and I've tweaked it a little bit just to abbreviate and simplify it. But the first quote i want to look at is that Marcus says when you notice that you're beginning to get offended, remember that you can't be sure that the other person is doing wrong because many actions serve some unspoken purpose.
00:18:00
Donald Robertson
Generally speaking, a great deal of experience is needed before one can confidently express an opinion about what someone else is doing. So he seems to, but a side note to this, Marcus Aurelius had served as a magistrate and studied jurisprudence for about three decades before writing this. So he was like very experienced at trying to judge the character of people in legal trials.
00:18:24
Donald Robertson
And he says here it's very difficult to understand people's motives and judge their character. You shouldn't jump hastily to conclusions about that.
00:18:33
Ray
So that's kind of an interesting comment because it's present maybe in Tim Beck's work where he talks about the negative thought of jumping to conclusions and that people automatically assume that they know things.
00:18:50
Ray
They sort of make character judgments about the person.
00:18:50
Donald Robertson
Yes.
00:18:54
Ray
they But it's not really one of the strategies that's talked about very much in anger research or anger management interventions.
00:19:07
Ray
So um I wouldn't say that it's a belief that is explicitly mentioned. It may be implicitly mentioned and Beck would sort of implicitly mention it, like don't jump to conclusions.
00:19:18
Donald Robertson
yes
00:19:22
Ray
And that, yeah, it's like, you know, we don't really know.
00:19:22
Donald Robertson
It's main reading, right?
00:19:27
Ray
i think, you know, Marcus is right. We often know. Sometimes people do things to offend us and they really may be totally, you know, where un unwillingly or unfamiliar with what's going to offend us and they do it without our knowing it, without any purpose.
00:19:46
Ray
So I think that's a good position. i see how it's helpful, but I don't see it in the anger literature that we have today.
00:19:55
Donald Robertson
It might be more explicit in social anxiety disorder, where arguably mind reading is a kind of like central, more ah more more obvious component.
00:20:00
Ray
Yeah, that's true.
00:20:07
Donald Robertson
He follows that by saying, remember how they behave while eating, while reclining on their couches and so on. And most importantly, how their beliefs leave them no choice and how they pride themselves on what they do.
00:20:21
Donald Robertson
So I think here, And there's a bit of context. He refers to all these strategies many times in the meditations. So we could potentially draw on some of the other passages. So with that in mind, I think what he's talking about here actually is try to understand them in a more rounded way.
00:20:36
Donald Robertson
like When you're getting angry with somebody, like think of them as a more complete person. i Think of them as a rounded human being like with a whole life. And also think about the fact that the way they're behaving is shaped by their knowledge and their opinions.
00:20:51
Donald Robertson
um Maybe they hold different values, different beliefs from you. why and in a sense, he's encouraging us to engage in empathic understanding of the person that we're angry with, I think.
00:21:04
Ray
I think those thoughts are closest to the things that Albert Ellis would have taught that we want to be accepting of human beings.
00:21:17
Ray
You know, we want to accept ourselves. We want to accept others and we want to accept the world and the universe the way it is and that people are the way they are.
00:21:22
Donald Robertson
Right. Right.
00:21:27
Ray
They didn't necessarily do these things on design, make themselves out to be a person who's going to offend you. And that a lot of the people we're angry at, they think differently, they do different things, they have different values, and they may also be a little culturally different from us.
00:21:37
Donald Robertson
right
00:21:48
Ray
And that ah a a a strategy or a philosophy of tolerance is more likely to have you not be angry at them.
00:21:59
Ray
So someone who you know has a big party on your religious Sabbath isn't trying to be disrespectful to your God.
00:21:59
Donald Robertson
Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.
00:22:07
Ray
They just have a different belief about the world and about spirituality, and that's who they are. And tolerance of them would reduce our anger.
00:22:19
Ray
So I think that you know that might be a little bit of woke culture, I don't want to say, and it might be a little bit of... um Somebody's trying a little bit of of accepting others. That's really kind of the important issue. So I would say Ellis may be closest to that, but he was strongly influenced by the Stoics.
00:22:41
Donald Robertson
Yeah. that More so even than I think he kind of explicitly states. I think there are bits of Ellis that look really similar to Stoicism that he doesn't necessarily attribute to the Stoics.
00:22:50
Ray
Yeah.
00:22:52
Donald Robertson
There's a deeper influence there maybe. But also, I mean think it's worth saying, angry people in general are not known for being particularly empathic. like It may be that anger itself introduces certain cognitive biases,
00:23:04
Donald Robertson
that are detrimental to empathic understanding. So there's a bias in fear, this hostile attribution bias, like, you know, we're more likely to attribute people's actions to malice or hostility when we're angry, um rather than to attribute them to mistakes or ignorance or different perspectives.
00:23:12
Ray
right
00:23:22
Ray
Or just differences like they're just religiously and culturally different than me.
00:23:24
Donald Robertson
Yeah.
00:23:27
Ray
And we tend to, know, because anger really is a hostile emotion that sets up an adversary. You know, yeah when you're angry, you get into an adversarial relationship with people and that kind of,
00:23:36
Donald Robertson
Mm-hmm.
00:23:43
Ray
predicates an idea that there's something wrong with them, that they're the enemy somehow.
00:23:48
Donald Robertson
and Do you not think in a sense, like it's it's characteristic of of stress in general that we kind of regress to a more simplistic black and white way of understanding events in many regards.
00:24:01
Donald Robertson
Like it seems to me that when people are angry, they revert back to quite a primitive, simplistic understanding of other people's motives.
00:24:10
Ray
I think you're correct in that Stress always brings us back. A lot of psychologists have said that over the years. I remember Mike Mahoney, who was one of the founders of cognitive behavior therapy and the first editor of the journal, cognitive therapy and research made a very big deal about that. You know, that, that, that when you're under stress, you go back and you do things that you used to do and you thought you overcame.
00:24:34
Ray
And he made the point that we never really erase anything from our neurons.
00:24:38
Donald Robertson
Right.
00:24:39
Ray
they're kind of like in hibernation and they come back during stress.
00:24:41
Donald Robertson
Yeah.
00:24:43
Ray
So I think that, um and the fact that we may revert back to anger or sort of reminds me of something, you know, here at the St.
00:24:43
Donald Robertson
Yeah.
00:24:51
Ray
John's university, i had a colleague who was a psychology chair and then later on a Dean, and he was an infant researcher. And when i started to write about anger, he showed me this research that infant researchers have coding systems to identify emotions in infants because infants can't talk.
00:25:09
Donald Robertson
Right. Yep. Right.
00:25:11
Ray
They can't share with it. And the first negative emotion or the earliest negative emotion that they can reliably code was anger.
00:25:21
Donald Robertson
right
00:25:22
Ray
yeah So anger might be the primary first negative emotion that we have.
00:25:22
Donald Robertson
yeah
00:25:28
Donald Robertson
right
00:25:31
Donald Robertson
Yeah, that's interesting. So the other thing that Marcus says, think is related to the preceding two ones. He says, remember that there's no need to complain if what they do is right.
00:25:44
Donald Robertson
And that if it's not right, they're acting involuntarily and out of ignorance.
Understanding Motives and Empathy in Anger Management
00:25:49
Donald Robertson
Now, this is a famous Socratic paradox, right? For no soul is voluntarily deprived of the truth.
00:25:57
Donald Robertson
And by the same token, no soul is voluntarily deprived of the ability to judge the worth of things properly. And people indeed, people do not like to be called unjust, discourteous and avaricious, or in general, to be thought of as someone likely to wrong their neighbours.
00:26:16
Donald Robertson
So Marcus says these people don't believe in many cases that what they're doing is disrespectful or unjust or greedy. You know, so they're doing what seems right at some level.
00:26:30
Donald Robertson
They're doing what seems right to them.
00:26:33
Ray
I would agree as a clinician, but I don't see that written up much in the psychological literature, except every once in a while you'll find someone who will identify that all angry people seem to believe that they are the victim of some unfair transgression.
00:26:55
Donald Robertson
Yeah.
00:26:56
Ray
No one says, well, I'm just going to insult Don today. You know, they think that you've insulted them and they're reacting to it.
00:27:04
Donald Robertson
Yes.
00:27:05
Ray
Uh, every, every person tends to believe in their own goodness and never sees themselves as evil, bad. And it takes a lot for a human being to admit that they're wrong and that they misbehave.
00:27:21
Ray
So, um, I think this is kind of a really important issue because because anger is such a moral emotion that about justice.
00:27:30
Donald Robertson
yes
00:27:31
Ray
You know, if if I go to confession in the Catholic Church, if I go to court and to the judge and everybody wants me to admit that I've made mistakes. So if someone offends me and I'm angry at them, I'm looking for them to to to admit that they were wrong.
00:27:41
Donald Robertson
I think
00:27:46
Donald Robertson
you said,
00:27:49
Ray
And this may be a real difficulty. my My nemesis may never agree that he or she was wrong. And that's really maybe very common in the criminal justice system and the religious system.
00:28:03
Ray
But I don't think we talk about that much in the modern psychotherapy system. So I think it's a
00:28:09
Donald Robertson
anger as you said It's a peculiarly moral and social emotion. um It's got a lot to do with perceptions of injustice.
00:28:20
Donald Robertson
And angry people, as you say, tend to have a feeling, the angrier someone is the more righteous they often feel, the more justified.
00:28:27
Ray
Right.
00:28:28
Donald Robertson
They feel it's everyone else that's wrong. yeah um And that maybe that's connected also to the fact that angry people don't necessarily self-refer for therapy.
00:28:38
Ray
Yes.
00:28:38
Donald Robertson
as often as depressed or anxious people would arguably. you know They think everyone else needs therapy. why
00:28:45
Ray
I often say that angry people don't come for therapy. They come for supervision. They want you to change the people they're angry at.
00:28:50
Donald Robertson
Yeah.
00:28:52
Ray
You're going to give them advice on consultation on how to change those angry people.
00:28:53
Donald Robertson
Yeah.
00:28:57
Donald Robertson
So let's look at a different cluster of things that Marcus says. And the first one here is when you're too angry or impatient, remember that human life is fleeting and before long all of us will have been laid to rest. The Stoics love this idea about contemplating their own mortality, everyone else's mortality.
00:29:17
Donald Robertson
Also, more generally, the impermanence of all material things. They sound like Buddhists when they come out with this. And there's something kind of intuitive about this. When we're mad about things, if we were to view...
00:29:28
Donald Robertson
the disagreement itself as being transient in the grand scheme of things, you know, maybe that leads us to re-evaluate its significance and not take it quite as seriously. So maybe there's an element decatastrophizing.
00:29:44
Donald Robertson
And it's particularly, if you go back to the preceding emotion, you know, I'm pissed at you because I feel like you, you, Ray, you didn't send me a birthday card this year and that really hurt my feelings. And now I'm mad at you, you know,
00:29:57
Donald Robertson
But if I see that as a fleeting transient ah event in the grand scheme of things, maybe it helps me to take the edge off the initial offense that I experienced
00:30:08
Ray
I think this is the one area where cognitive behavior therapies really have identified something that Marcus Earley has talked about. I think both the work of Ellis and Beck and many others have focused on anti-catastrophizing and anti-awfulizing.
00:30:26
Ray
And one of the things that you can do is put these things in perspective. Sometimes I've pointed out to clients that they come in and they've been fighting with someone
00:30:31
Donald Robertson
Mm-hmm.
00:30:37
Ray
say, domestic partner, they can't even remember what started the fight. I'm having talked to him or her for two weeks, but I can't really remember what the fight was about. I'm more angry And I'm just supposed to be angry, but I can't remember. And sometimes when you get them to identify what it was that triggered the fight, it's something really small.
00:30:59
Ray
hot text dan I've noticed in my anger group and in couple sessions, loading the dishwasher tends to be a big trigger for anger episodes. You know, you didn't put the plate in the right that way and stuff like that.
00:31:08
Donald Robertson
Right.
00:31:11
Donald Robertson
Yeah.
00:31:11
Ray
and And some of the things that piss us off are pretty inconsequential.
00:31:16
Donald Robertson
Yeah.
00:31:16
Ray
And years from now, we're going to laugh about them. maybe even months from now.
00:31:19
Donald Robertson
so the I wonder if that might, I kind of feel that there might be some kind of but like experiment there. You know, when people keep a journal of the things they worry about, right?
00:31:28
Ray
Yeah.
00:31:29
Donald Robertson
And then they they review it and go how many of them actually happened or how many of them were actually as bad as they seemed when you were worrying about it. I feel like anger is a little bit like that. If you wrote a list of all of the things that you got angry about over the course of your life and then looked back on them in retrospect and kind of tallied up how many of them actually seem, you know, worth getting angry about in retrospect, now that you look back on them, you know, I kind of, there are many trivial things.
00:31:54
Ray
yeah
00:31:54
Donald Robertson
that yeah we regularly get angry or are at least irritated about trivial things. And in retrospect, 99% of them, or maybe 100% of them, probably weren't worth getting angry about at all.
00:32:05
Ray
I think what you just did is sort of identified the schema-focused cognitive therapy, you know, that Ellis talked about and Jeff Young and his group is, you know, you sort of collect what the things are that's triggering you and you look at it and you see, boy, these things really aren't so a big deal and not really worth getting upset about.
00:32:11
Donald Robertson
Mm-hmm.
00:32:24
Ray
What does it represent to me that my partner didn't load the dishwasher right?
00:32:27
Donald Robertson
Right. Yeah.
00:32:29
Ray
Or, you know, you didn't send me a birthday card. It's I need respect. I need control. I need, and you get to the more underlying schema that what those sort of superficial things represent.
00:32:41
Ray
So I don't know if Marcus Aurelius would like us to do that, but I think your homework assignment that you just came up with would be a good intro to the schema focused cognitive behavior therapies to find out What is it that these little minor things represent to us?
00:32:57
Donald Robertson
Right. Now, the next one, I think, might seem more familiar to you.
00:33:02
Ray
Hmm.
00:33:03
Donald Robertson
the Marcus, who had read Epictetus, I think, religiously, like Epictetus seems to be Marcus Aurelius' main inspiration. He's hero. narrow By the way, Marcus Aurelius, I feel like, must have been disappointed because we don't know exactly when Epictetus died, but I think he probably died when Marcus was round about 15.
00:33:21
Ray
Oh.
00:33:24
Donald Robertson
And he was in Greece. Marcus was in Rome. I think he narrowly missed the opportunity to go and sit at the feet of the guy that he considered the greatest philosopher of his lifetime. But he did have, and he makes a point of telling us, a copy of the discourses that someone gave to him.
00:33:40
Donald Robertson
And I think he read them line by line over and over again.
00:33:42
Ray
Oh.
00:33:44
Donald Robertson
So he says here, remember that it's not people's actions that disturb us because their actions are their own business, but our opinions about their actions.
00:33:56
Donald Robertson
Now, that's clearly a paraphrase from Epictetus. And in that he says, at any rate, eliminate the judgment that they're doing something hurtful and be willing to let go of it and anger will come to an end.
00:34:09
Donald Robertson
Now, again, interestingly, i get he he he seems to say there again that there's a preceding sense of hurt or injury or possibly anxiety. and And his therapy here is about not so much dressing, I guess, dressing their desire for revenge in this case, but going a step further back and dealing with the preceding sense of injustice or hurt by realizing that they haven't hurt us unless we believe that they have.
00:34:38
Donald Robertson
Someone insults me. my Doesn't do me any sticks and stones may break my bones, as the saying goes, you know, but words will never hurt me. Marcus is essentially saying here. um And then he adds, how does this take place?
00:34:52
Donald Robertson
By realizing that what seems to be hurting you, such as the disrespect, I i think, or the insults of other people, involves no shame for you. He says, so I think what he's saying is it doesn't realize that it doesn't really arm you if people appear to disrespect or insult you necessarily.
00:35:10
Donald Robertson
It's our judgment about it that causes us to feel offended and become angry.
00:35:15
Ray
this is the great stoic truth, um the great mountain principle that it's our thoughts. You know, it's Shakespeare. Things are neither good nor bad, but thinking makes it so.
00:35:27
Ray
This is the basis of cognitive behavior therapy, that way we look at thing. And i it really is the crucial variable. And sometimes when you work with angry people, they really just have such hard hard time to imagine that they could respond differently because their thoughts are so crucially ient rigidly fixed on the fact that the other person did this terrible thing that they should not have done and all this.
00:35:47
Donald Robertson
Okay.
00:35:57
Ray
So I think that this is the core of all anger treatments from a CBT perspective, that there is something that you have.
00:36:09
Ray
However, I'll just point out this. is that this is very difficult because the angry person is so convinced that the other person did bad that it may be
00:36:18
Donald Robertson
Yes.
00:36:24
Ray
may be difficult to convince them. So could you imagine somebody hearing and seeing what this other nemesis of yours did and reacting differently?
00:36:27
Donald Robertson
Well.
00:36:37
Ray
um i often like to have them think of
00:36:38
Donald Robertson
yes
00:36:41
Ray
a person who does react differently so they can see that someone can react differently than than they did.
00:36:41
Donald Robertson
well
00:36:48
Donald Robertson
Well, do you know who you sound like?
00:36:50
Ray
Who?
00:36:52
Donald Robertson
Socrates. Because he used to ask the same question.
00:36:53
Ray
Okay.
00:36:56
Donald Robertson
He would say to us, we have Socrates in the dialogue. There are some of the Socratic dialogue. So we have two sources of Socratic dialogues that survive today. There used to be loads. right But we have loads of dialogues from Plato. But we also have loads of dialogues from a guy called Xenophon.
00:37:11
Donald Robertson
And Xenophon's dialogues are kind of simpler, more down to earth. There's not as much metaphysics in them. And in some of them, Socrates looks way more like he's using the Socratic method to do something like therapy.
00:37:23
Donald Robertson
So specifically, in several of them, he's using the Socratic method to talk to people who are angry. And there's one where they he's talking to two brothers that are angry with each other over the way and and an inheritance has been divided.
00:37:37
Donald Robertson
And there's another one where he talks to his own teenage son who's angry with his mother. Right. And see, he's clearly doing some kind of relationships counseling or cognitive therapy by using a Socratic method. And one of the first questions he asks is whether other people.
00:37:52
Donald Robertson
would potentially be as irritated or annoyed with this person as you are, or might they see it differently. he's creating a cognitive distance or some cognitive flexibility so that he can then start to question ah the underlying reasons for the anger, I think.
00:38:11
Ray
See, that's the strategy that I learned from Albert Ellis is you want the person to see that different people can have a different reaction to the same activating event.
00:38:18
Donald Robertson
Yeah.
00:38:21
Ray
And if that's the case,
00:38:22
Donald Robertson
Yeah.
00:38:23
Ray
There's gotta be a different causative agent and that agent is between your ears.
00:38:28
Donald Robertson
Yeah, exactly.
00:38:29
Ray
And I, yeah, and I think that that is the core.
00:38:30
Donald Robertson
It's between your ears. Yeah.
00:38:34
Ray
And, um, I guess Marcus Aurelius got it from Socrates and Epictetus and it is the thing that we're the most consistent with Marcus Aurelius.
00:38:44
Donald Robertson
Now we're in another cluster and I think there's ah a couple of strategies here that work in a slightly different way, it seems to me. And the first one, I guess maybe overlaps a bit with the preceding one.
00:38:56
Donald Robertson
The Stoics, this is a Stoic. This one's a a Stoic cliche again. It's a ah recurring thing that they say about anxiety and anger and other emotions. So Marcus is taking a general principle here and just applying it to anger.
00:39:09
Donald Robertson
He says, remember that we suffer more from getting angry and upset about such things than we do from
Impact of Anger on Reasoning and Character
00:39:15
Donald Robertson
the things themselves. So anger does you more harm than the things that you're angry about.
00:39:20
Donald Robertson
Now, I think that's a very interesting question to pose the client.
00:39:22
Ray
Yeah.
00:39:24
Ray
I have a long reaction to that quote. First of all, I've created, ah collected anger quotes. You can probably get a similar quote from the Buddha and probably from around the world.
00:39:37
Ray
In other words, I think there's some representative of all cultures from around the world who said a similar thing to Marcus Aurelius. You know, ah Mark Twain has a similar quote. and Maybe they all learned it from him, but people seem to notice this.
00:39:52
Ray
And I think that this is another area where modern modern psychotherapy has failed. That there is and and the area of cognitive behavior therapy that will focus on this.
00:40:06
Ray
But it's not common and it tends to be people who work with children or adolescents rather than people who work with adults.
00:40:17
Ray
The model comes from what we call the social problem solving model of therapy, which was originally developed by Marv Goldfried and to Tom DiZarella from University of New York and Stony Brook.
00:40:17
Donald Robertson
right
00:40:22
Donald Robertson
hundred
00:40:31
Ray
And there was a team, Spivak and Shure in Philadelphia, which is now Drexel University. They had come up with this idea and they called this consequential thinking.
00:40:41
Donald Robertson
yes
00:40:41
Ray
Be aware of your thinking. And a guy named Alan Kasdan used to do this with delinquent kids who were aggressive. And he would have them sort of rehearse to their head. Whenever they had a tempting situation, he would say, stop, think, what's going to happen if I do this?
00:40:57
Ray
Stop, think, what's going to happen if I do this?
00:40:57
Donald Robertson
hello
00:40:59
Ray
And this was a very effective intervention for youth. um In the adult CBT world, it's not identified too often.
00:41:13
Ray
um And I think that it comes back to one of the things you said earlier, angry people often don't want therapy. And that the idea, i think, of consequential thinking helps motivate them to want to change because they're therere suffering twice.
00:41:21
Donald Robertson
And
00:41:29
Donald Robertson
and
00:41:32
Ray
Someone one insulted me and then I'm going to make myself miserable for the next two weeks. And helping them view this idea that the consequences of their reaction is worse than the thing that they're reacting to is really key.
00:41:49
Ray
So hats off to the cognitive the social problem solving people, but I think they haven't been picked up as much by psychotherapists who deal with adults.
00:41:58
Donald Robertson
yeah
00:42:02
Donald Robertson
Now, I think we can actually dive even deeper into this relatively short quote, because I think Marcus has two separate things in mind here from my wider reading of the the other Stoic texts.
00:42:10
Ray
Mm-hmm.
00:42:14
Donald Robertson
So anger does us more harm than the things that we're angry about. And in the first sense, the more obvious and more superficial sense, but still important. It's that getting angry often damages our interests in the world.
00:42:29
Donald Robertson
Like it damages our relationships, particularly over the long term.
00:42:31
Ray
Yeah.
00:42:34
Donald Robertson
So I get angry, you know, maybe I want people to respect me. Maybe in the long term, all it means is my wife is going to divorce me. Right. So potentially it really backfires and damages our practical interests, particularly in terms of our relationships.
00:42:49
Donald Robertson
um But there's another sense that this that's maybe particularly stoic and that Marcus thinks anger intrinsically harms us more than the things that we're angry about. Because if somebody insults me or disrespects me, the most they can do is harm my reputation or maybe damage my property um or punch me in the nose. And Marcus thinks these are all of secondary importance. They're relatively trivial compared to the harm that anger does to my character.
00:43:19
Donald Robertson
because it impairs my capacity to reason clearly. So anger, by its very nature, Marcus wants to say, damages the very core of our personality.
00:43:31
Donald Robertson
It makes us, the epictetus would go so far as to say that in some regards, anger makes us less human, like because it impairs our ability to reason clearly about life.
00:43:42
Ray
I think you're you're absolutely correct about that. And I think there's a couple places where we can see that. and And if we go to the Gottman research on couples, you know, they talk about the four horsemen of of the divorce, you know, the things that people do to separate.
00:43:58
Ray
And one of them is that there's always contempt. there's Contempt is kind of identified as a combination of anger and disgust towards your partner. And it really is very detrimental.
00:44:11
Ray
I am always amazed on that people who do marital therapy don't talk about anger the most or more.
00:44:14
Donald Robertson
Yeah.
00:44:19
Donald Robertson
and
00:44:20
Ray
Whenever I've done a workshop or a lecture on anger and I would say, what is the affective excess when you see a couple? You know, most people will identify anger, but if you look at the couples therapy books, anger may not be in the index.
00:44:39
Donald Robertson
yeah
00:44:39
Ray
And I think that there's a mechanism that we know the mechanism as to how anger becomes so destructive. So again, there's a little story in this.
00:44:46
Donald Robertson
Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.
00:44:48
Ray
When I was writing with Chip DeFrady, the book, ah Understanding Anger Disorders, I came across a lot of quotes that say people learn anger through operant and classical conditioning. So I knew the operant conditioning stuff and I went to psych info and searched for stuff on classical conditioning and anger.
00:45:06
Ray
who's classical conditioning, you know, that's that Pavlov guy. And I put in all the terms for classical conditioning, unconditional response condition. And I didn't find any evidence that people learn to be angry through classical conditioning, but you found overwhelming evidence that other people learn to fear you the person's anger.
00:45:26
Donald Robertson
right.
00:45:30
Ray
other words, we're almost like designed to become and learn to be fearful of someone's anger. right. And so that, that idea that you just expressed is so common in the classical conditioning literature.
00:45:49
Ray
We're just designed. We, we learned to be afraid of people's anger. And if I'm an angry person, I'm going to drive people away. And it's a very hard thing to teach angry clients.
00:45:59
Donald Robertson
Well, this is the risk of digressing. I just to make things a little bit more topical for a moment. We've been talking about, you know, 170 AD for a while.
00:46:10
Donald Robertson
Let's bring things right up to contemporary thing. So you you probably did you see that Netflix show adolescence about the manosphere and whatnot?
00:46:16
Ray
Yes, I did, yeah.
00:46:18
Donald Robertson
Pretty much every therapist has probably seen that now, right? They ah What was I going to say? These these angry young men, um there's a lot of them.
00:46:30
Donald Robertson
like Maybe there always have been, but there they form a kind of community now, which I guess didn't really happen in the same way before. for Angry young men around the world didn't all bond together and follow this.
00:46:38
Ray
Right. They didn't have the internet.
00:46:42
Donald Robertson
yeah They didn't have the internet to form communities and follow the same influencers and stuff like that. So have a community of angry young men now. And a lot of them are particularly obsessed with the fact or fixated in the difficulty that they have dating and how getting sex and having relationships.
00:47:02
Donald Robertson
But the anger that they have is probably not helping in terms of maintaining fulfilling relationships, you'd think.
00:47:10
Ray
Yes.
00:47:13
Donald Robertson
like would seem like a fairly obvious observation. And yet they are angry. The influencers that are preaching to them are often yelling down the camera and exhibiting quite a lot anger.
00:47:26
Donald Robertson
um And they often normalize anger. in their communities. they'll They'll say it's perfectly natural to be, ah you should be angry at feminists, at society, at people who reject you.
00:47:43
Donald Robertson
And yet their anger is driving people away and digging them into dprint deeper and deeper hole, it seems to me.
00:47:46
Ray
Yes.
00:47:49
Ray
Janet Wolfe, a big REBT psychologist, used to sum that up in one expression. Anger is not an aphrodisiac.
00:47:58
Donald Robertson
Right.
00:47:59
Ray
It doesn't ever have that function.
00:48:03
Donald Robertson
That's it in a nutshell. which She's right.
00:48:04
Ray
Yeah.
00:48:05
Donald Robertson
yeah Yeah. So let's look at the alternatives. So the next one that Marcus, and next thing that Marcus mentions gets interesting. he And you'll notice, by the way, these strategies or things he's mentioned, but they often really seem to be approaching anger from a number of different perspectives, different levels.
00:48:21
Ray
Yeah, different perspectives.
00:48:23
Donald Robertson
And i so now he says, remember that kindness is, and the word he uses here is a little bit tricky. He says, remember that kindness is unconquerable, I would say. If it's genuine, not phony or feigned, after all, what can even the most abusive person in the world do to you if you keep on being kind to him?
00:48:42
Donald Robertson
and then the ah And if the opportunity arises, gently offer him advice and take the time to show him the error of his ways right when he's trying to do you harm. Now, this is a challenging passage, and I'll preface it by saying,
00:48:56
Donald Robertson
A lot of people initially read that and think Marcus is crazy. He seems to be saying, and this is partly driven by some of the other translations, that kindness always succeeds in influencing other people. It's invincible or unstoppable.
00:49:12
Donald Robertson
So as long as you make an effort to be kind and compassionate, you're always going to get other people to do what you want. That cannot be what he means, though. like Apart from the fact it's kind of bonkers. It would be completely inconsistent with everything else that he says.
00:49:25
Donald Robertson
I think it's clear from his other remarks. so I'll help him out a bit. steal Man and Mir a little bit. I think what he means by saying that kindness is unconquerable is that nobody can stop you from choosing to exercise kindness, compassion and forgiveness. That's under your control.
00:49:45
Donald Robertson
You can always choose kindness as an alternative to cruelty or unkindness or anger to some extent. You can learn to communicate assertively.
00:49:56
Donald Robertson
Like that's your choice. like So he's I think he's presenting kindness for want of about a better word. We might say compassion or maybe you know even kind of constructive as assertiveness.
00:50:07
Donald Robertson
In some case, you can choose like to correct other people and to do it with compassion. And he adds to that. He gives an example conveniently.
00:50:19
Donald Robertson
And curiously, he says, know my child, which is a fairly common expression and Greek and Roman. But it's very tempting to imagine that he could be talking to Commodus here or imagining that he's who would have been 12, 13, 14 at the time he was writing this.
00:50:30
Ray
Hmm.
00:50:35
Donald Robertson
So he says anyway, he gives this example of saying, know my child. this is what he means by saying that you can always exercise kindness. Know my child. This is not what we were born for. It's not I who am being harmed, child.
00:50:49
Donald Robertson
but you. Now, the interesting thing is that he thinks the compassionate way to respond to someone who's getting angry with you would be to actually apply the anger management techniques that he's mentioned elsewhere.
00:51:04
Donald Robertson
One of them we've already talked about. It's not I that'm being harmed, but you. your Your anger's doing you more harm than the thing that you're angry about, he's basically saying. And he adds to this, but you must be sure to do this with affection.
00:51:19
Donald Robertson
and in a calm state of mind, not insincerely or in a reproachful tone of voice. So he's being very cautious here about saying, first of all, kindness is unstoppable because in the sense that it's always something that you can choose to do.
00:51:33
Donald Robertson
How the other person responds isn't under your control, but you can choose to show compassion. You can choose to behave, communicate as assertively as assertively or empathically with another person.
00:51:45
Donald Robertson
um But you have to be careful about the way that you do that, obviously. And I think really his point here isn't so much that you can always influence other people, but that it's always within your power to replace anger with an alternative and more pro-social way of responding.
00:52:05
Ray
I think in the modern cognitive behavior therapy or psychotherapy world, there's a couple of people who would pick up on that idea. The first are the people who promote compassion-focused CBT, that it's always better to have compassion for other people.
00:52:24
Ray
It's always better, and start with compassion for yourself, but if you have compassion for other people, you're just going to somewhat disarm them. So the compassion focused people would definitely go there.
00:52:35
Ray
There was a very popular book during the 1980s called The Dance of Anger. You know, and The Dance of Anger was, you know, the people get in the fight like you expect people to fight back, you know, and and you expect them, theyve you curse at them, they curse back at you.
00:52:48
Ray
And that when you stop the dance, you don't behave in the way you're supposed to. It sort of disrupts the patterns of behavior. i forget the author of this book, but it's always very influential on me. So the Dance of Anger book is like, you know,
00:53:06
Ray
You're going to do something different, and you're going to do something that's unexpected. And if I say, fuck you, Don, I don't expect to say, well, thanks, Ray. It was really nice talking to you today. I hope you feel better. yeah you just People don't know what to do They don't know what to do.
00:53:18
Ray
and And the third group is actually a group that uses a phrase that you use. It's called aggression replacement training. In other words, what can I do to behave in a non-aggressive way that resolves conflict?
00:53:26
Donald Robertson
OK. OK. OK.
00:53:34
Ray
Now, this may be – there's another – statement from Marcus Roldis about involving conflict. How do I assertively do things in a way that is going to be adaptive?
00:53:45
Ray
You know, angry people can often go tell you to drop dead, but can't say, gee, I really wish you wouldn't do that. Or I feel bad that I, they have such difficulty. And, and this is one of the problems I think we have is that it's not necessarily a change in cognition.
00:54:02
Ray
They just don't know how to do the behavior and you really need to role play the new behaviors with them.
00:54:05
Donald Robertson
Okay.
00:54:07
Donald Robertson
Right. Right.
00:54:08
Ray
like Now I do a similar thing. um there, there's a,
00:54:15
Ray
an idea. that if two people start to fight, you know, I say, fuck you, Don, and you say, double fuck you, Ray. And I got to say triple, you know, it goes around. And as it goes around, um we each got to outdo each other. Okay. And there's a guy, Roy Bellmeister, who's got an interesting book called evil, where he talks about this being an expanding, you know, of like tornado vectors of anger.
00:54:39
Ray
And, um, when when I, if I start a fight with you, i don't remember that I started the fight. I just remember the last negative thing you did that I have to respond negatively to, right?
00:54:52
Ray
And so, yeah, that's right.
00:54:54
Donald Robertson
revenge. That's revenge.
00:54:55
Ray
That's clear revenge. that right So if you stop and say something kind, it just disrupts the whole thing back to the dance of anger.
00:54:56
Donald Robertson
and
00:55:06
Ray
And I have found that if I teach clients to do that, In about a week or two, there their domestic partner will say, gee, I'm really sorry. Right away, it doesn't have an immediate effect.
00:55:17
Ray
And I think that's the interesting thing. So if you're going to true the compassion alternative to aggression, it takes a while for the person that you're fighting with to realize that you're not fighting back and for them to take a different attitude towards you.
00:55:28
Donald Robertson
Yeah. Yeah.
00:55:32
Ray
But I really think that works.
00:55:32
Donald Robertson
You have to break this.
00:55:33
Ray
So we have about four different ah areas of dealing with with anger that have used a similar concept from what Marcus Aurelius talked about.
00:55:43
Donald Robertson
It's more behavioral and it reminds me a little bit of kind of assertiveness training or communication skills training.
00:55:47
Ray
Yes.
00:55:50
Donald Robertson
um There's something else I'd mention about it that I think maybe we're coming around to this a little bit more is there's a number of regards in which the concepts of rigidity or flexibility are important to the field of psychotherapy, particularly in relation to it ah REBT, but also in relation to coping.
00:56:14
Donald Robertson
We talked earlier her about Richard Lazarus's concept of coping appraisal. One of the things that strikes me about angry people, yeah all of us, when we're at we all get angry, um is that when people are angry,
00:56:28
Donald Robertson
this you know One of the interesting things in psychotherapy is kind of just observing recurring things that people say, almost cliched stuff that people who are anxious say or people who are angry say.
00:56:39
Donald Robertson
i It strikes me that one of the cliched things that angry people tend to express is the belief that it was necessary for them to respond with verbal aggression.
00:56:51
Ray
Yes.
00:56:52
Donald Robertson
i had to I didn't have any choice but to punch that guy in the face. He needed to be slapped. or I had to yell at the kids. It was the only way, the only way that I could get the kids to do what I want was to yell at them aggressively. I think what we see often in anger is a kind of interestingly narrow and rigid conceptions of the coping strategies that are available.
00:57:21
Donald Robertson
but I've only got one coping strategy and that's, yeah, I agree it's like the club, right?
00:57:23
Ray
And I want to use that.
00:57:27
Donald Robertson
The big stick is the only coping strategy that I've got. And I feel compelled. Of course, I'm going to feel compelled if I am really hurting, I don't, this is a painful emotion.
00:57:39
Donald Robertson
like I'm upset. you know the Things are getting a bit crazy in here. And I can only see one way that I could potentially respond to this, and that's by yelling or lashing out or something like that.
00:57:51
Donald Robertson
Whereas non-angry people, as I sometimes like to to put it, might think, well, I guess I could yell at the kids. Or I could walk away from this and have a think about it. Or I could just sit and you know ask them more about how they're feeling and what their perspective it um Maybe have a bunch of different I have a repertoire, flexible repertoire of potential coping strategies.
00:58:10
Ray
Right? Yeah.
00:58:12
Donald Robertson
And that, I think, is more characteristic of somebody who's not freaking out or not angry.
00:58:16
Ray
yeah
00:58:17
Donald Robertson
Whereas when we freak out, I think we often feel there's only... So learning to substitute alternative ways of responding, whether it's compassion or empathy or patience or whatever it is, potentially stretches...
00:58:36
Donald Robertson
our coping appraisal and makes us feel like we have more flexibility in that regard. We're not just forced to respond in one rigid way.
00:58:44
Ray
And usually the forced response, I think that people can do over and over, hasn't resolved their anger or resolve their conflicts.
00:58:49
Donald Robertson
Yeah.
00:58:50
Ray
And it just keeps them in a position of feeling in charge or whatever. Now, what you're describing sort of fits some of the acceptance and commitment therapy approaches to treating anger.
00:59:00
Donald Robertson
Mm-hmm.
00:59:02
Ray
One of my ah close friends and colleagues, a guy named Frank Gardner at Toro University, was one of my first dissertation students. He has an approach to anger treatment like that, where he sort of argues that the aggression and the yelling is really an attempt to shut down the other person who may be saying or doing things that you don't like.
00:59:22
Donald Robertson
Right.
00:59:23
Ray
So it's a discomfort intolerance strategy to end this negative experience.
00:59:27
Donald Robertson
Right.
00:59:31
Ray
And it doesn't really resolve the conflict in the long run.
00:59:31
Donald Robertson
Yeah.
00:59:35
Ray
um
00:59:35
Donald Robertson
Yeah.
00:59:35
Ray
I've done some research on this because I was a little bit of a skeptic. And what my research has shown is that The motive two to stop a negative experience or to escape a negative experience is actually endorsed by people more often than revenge.
00:59:49
Donald Robertson
Right.
00:59:55
Ray
So if revenge is a really common component of anger that we've identified for the last 2000 years, this idea is that my aggression and my anger will shut down things I don't like so I can escape discomfort.
00:59:56
Donald Robertson
Right.
01:00:03
Donald Robertson
Right.
01:00:12
Ray
may be equally as, equally not more, characteristic of anger.
01:00:13
Donald Robertson
right
01:00:19
Donald Robertson
Okay, so it's it's about control and experiential avoidance, maybe.
01:00:23
Ray
Yeah.
01:00:24
Donald Robertson
right. all right So let's look at another cluster. um I feel like now we're getting a little bit more, correct me if I'm wrong, but you you may see ah some things that look a little better sound a little bit more RABT coming up here, possibly. He says, first of all, remember that you yourself often do wrong and are no better than them.
01:00:49
Donald Robertson
Even if you refrain from certain kinds of transgressions, you still have the capacity within you to commit them. Now, I think he's challenging there a kind of double standard.
01:01:02
Ray
All
01:01:02
Donald Robertson
So the stuff that you're angry with them about, that you think is unjust when they do it, but it's okay when you do it. So you're applying a rigid standard to other people, but you're a bit more lenient, a bit more flexible when you apply.
01:01:16
Donald Robertson
It's not disrespect when I do it, because I didn't really mean it to come across that way, or I didn't think it was a big deal, or but when they do it, it's a big deal, right?
01:01:18
Ray
right
01:01:26
Donald Robertson
So he thinks you you do the things that yourself that you're angry with them about. I think I really I would link that to a kind of rigidity. ah so rit For example, if I rigidly demand that other people respect me, i how would I feel if they rigidly demand that I respect them?
01:01:45
Donald Robertson
ah I'd probably start looking for exceptions and stuff like that. This is a very common strategy that I think also comes from the Socratic dialogues. You know, the idea, it really boils down to the idea that I'm contradicting myself at some level in my thinking. And actually, specifically, Socrates will often highlight double standards.
01:02:06
Donald Robertson
So one of my favorite dialogues, Socrates asks a young man, what qualities would you look for in an ideal friend? He says, well, that's easy. Socrates usually asks an easy question. And then follows it up with a harder question.
Questioning Anger: Socratic and Stoic Approaches
01:02:19
Donald Robertson
this young guy says, well, they'd you know lend me money if I needed it. They'd come and visit me if I'm sick. you know Maybe if I was doing stuff that was wrong, they'd gently correct me and so on and so forth. That'd be like an ideal friend.
01:02:31
Donald Robertson
And then Socrates says, how many of those qualities do you possess yourself? And he says, well, I don't know. Not very many, probably. you know So he highlights the fact that he's applying a double standard when it comes to what he expects from a a friend.
01:02:48
Donald Robertson
like He has quite specific to views about what makes someone else a good friend, but he doesn't really apply the same standard to his own actions. He doesn't attempt to be a good friend in that regard. So Marcus here fundamentally saying there's something...
01:03:02
Donald Robertson
about anger that entails a similar kind of double standard, there's some kind of hypocrisy or contradiction to it
01:03:07
Ray
Right.
01:03:08
Donald Robertson
Because often we get mad at other people, and whereas if we were capable of the same thing or did the same thing, we'd probably make excuses for it.
01:03:18
Ray
I think that's a pretty unique strategy. I think it does come closer to Ellis who would say, you know, you want to accept yourself and you want to accept the other person. And you may have to accept the other person for things that you don't like about them, but they may mean that you're going to accept them like you accept yourself.
01:03:37
Ray
I'll tell you it really sort of sounds like Christianity, you know, like do unto others as you would have them do unto you kind of things.
01:03:40
Donald Robertson
Yeah. No.
01:03:45
Ray
um But I think that this idea is very common that that angry people will certainly condemn someone else for doing something that they do rather regularly.
01:03:57
Ray
And pointing that out is, again, maybe a strategy that Tim Bex would use to sort of use that Socratic dialogue.
01:04:06
Donald Robertson
yeah
01:04:06
Ray
Not talked about a whole lot in, I think, anger treatments, but a really good idea.
01:04:09
Donald Robertson
no Judith Beck talks about it in her book, or the famous one, what's it called? big Basics and Beyond or something like that.
01:04:16
Ray
Behavior therapy, cognitive therapy and beyond. Yeah.
01:04:19
Donald Robertson
Yeah. ah she calls She calls it a double standard strategy.
01:04:21
Ray
Right.
01:04:22
Donald Robertson
And I think you find it kind of implicitly in some books on cognitive of therapy, but maybe not highlighted quite as much as this. Now, the final one, this is the 10th one, although we you know we we missed one out. we'll cut I've left the first one to last.
01:04:35
Ray
Okay.
01:04:36
Donald Robertson
But in Marcus's list, this is the final one. And actually, he says... that these there are nine muses in Greek mythology. And he says these are gifts from the nine muses.
01:04:47
Donald Robertson
And the 10th one comes from the leader of the muses, which is the god Apollo. Now, the god Apollo is the god of medicine and healing. He's the god of therapy, as well as a kind of patron of philosophy. So he's quite an appropriate person for Marcus to link these strategies to.
01:05:05
Donald Robertson
So he says you can accept a 10th gift from Apollo, the leader of the muses. the proposition that it's insanity to expect flawed men never to do wrong, because that would be desiring the impossible.
01:05:21
Donald Robertson
Now, I think that sounds more obviously like the concept of irrational beliefs or rigid demands in REBT. Marcus says you're demanding the impossible. why When you insist that other people, about all people are flawed in socialism,
01:05:38
Ray
Yes. that That's really, it's a statement about human nature that reminds me again of an Albert Ellis statement.
01:05:43
Donald Robertson
Yeah. Yeah.
01:05:46
Ray
Albert always used to say, all human beings are out of their mind, including you and me, you know, and that all people are a little bit crazy.
01:05:53
Donald Robertson
yeah
01:05:53
Ray
All people have flaws.
01:05:54
Donald Robertson
yeah
01:05:55
Ray
And, you know, if you think you're going to get a friend or a partner, lover who doesn't have any flaws, good luck. That's what you get for hanging around with mere mortals. You know, they're going to be flawed.
01:06:07
Donald Robertson
well Here's a little anecdote for you. ah you you may A lot of people don't notice this at first, right? But most ancient schools of philosophy are named after their founder.
01:06:16
Ray
Yes.
01:06:17
Donald Robertson
Obviously, Platonism is named after for Plato. Aristotelianism named after Aristotle. Pythagoreanism is named after Pythagoras. Epicureanism is named after Epicurus. But Stoicism is not named after its founder, who is called Xeno. It's not called Xenonianism.
01:06:33
Ray
Right.
01:06:33
Donald Robertson
Although actually, we're told that it was very fleetingly at the beginning, and then they changed the name. And one of the reasons for that is that the Stoics were known for insisting that even Zeno, the founder of stoicism, was unwise, that he was fallible and that he they refused to put their founder on a pedestal and claim that he was perfectly enlightened, which is something kind of warm to actually in the Stoics.
01:06:59
Ray
kind of allows us to have our own flaws.
01:07:02
Donald Robertson
Yeah, they say even Zeno wasn't perfect, right?
01:07:05
Ray
Right.
01:07:06
Donald Robertson
And the same way that Ellis is saying, I'm crazy too, in some way.
01:07:08
Ray
Right.
01:07:09
Donald Robertson
like They say, like, Xeno was insane, technically, as some people will point out. At least, you know, maybe he'd made more progress, but he wasn't perfectly enlightened, so we have to question everything that he said.
01:07:22
Ray
I remember when I was in graduate school, I had a very influential professor, meantmont model, ah Julia Vane and Julia Vane once said that if you got angry at your friends every time they had flaws, sooner or later, you're not going to have any because all people will let you down in some way once in a while because they're going to have flaws.
01:07:44
Ray
And I always remember Julia's comments. They were just really very true. You all your friends will be flawed.
01:07:52
Donald Robertson
It reminds me a little bit of a quote that I really like from Seneca. Seneca says that if it was appropriate to get, if it was rational to become angry in the face of injustice,
01:08:07
Donald Robertson
then the wisest among us would be the angriest of all because the whole world is full of injustice. So the wise man, the sage, would be angry at every injustice that had ever happened and he'd be consumed with rage.
01:08:23
Donald Robertson
This is Seneca's argument. It's kind of reductive, I'd absurd them argument for say, you know, disputing the idea that anger is an appropriate or healthy response to perceived injustice.
01:08:26
Ray
Right.
01:08:34
Donald Robertson
But there's loads of injustice in the world. So you'd be constantly angry. if that were true. and And clearly, you know, perpetual anger, ah everything in the world doesn't seem like a desirable state of mind to be in.
01:08:46
Ray
And I think the anger at injustice is the one area that psychology and maybe philosophy has the greatest difficulty with anger.
01:08:52
Donald Robertson
Yeah.
01:08:55
Ray
You know, like, what do we do about injustice?
01:08:56
Donald Robertson
Well.
01:08:58
Ray
Myisha Cherry's book again, and I think is really great on reviewing this.
01:08:59
Donald Robertson
Yeah.
01:09:01
Donald Robertson
Yeah.
01:09:03
Ray
Malcolm X has some great quotes. What do we, what, what are the, how does anger that is effective at changing social injustice differ?
01:09:05
Donald Robertson
Yeah. yeah
01:09:15
Ray
You know, Martha Nussbaum and Myisha Cherry would say it lacks, um revenge. It focuses on change, which means that it may be qualitatively different in some regards.
01:09:30
Donald Robertson
Is it still anger per se?
01:09:30
Ray
you know
01:09:31
Ray
Right.
01:09:32
Donald Robertson
That's when it gets a little bit fuzzy.
01:09:32
Ray
Okay.
01:09:34
Donald Robertson
Now the story, here's a whole can of worms. like let's like like Let's open a can of worms and we'll leave it for another day.
01:09:38
Ray
Okay.
01:09:40
Donald Robertson
right One of the fundamental philosophical debates here, I think, is, is there such a thing as healthy anger? why or is all anger intrinsically? Now, that would seem like a crazy suggestion to many, probably most modern psychotherapists would say, no, there's good anger and bad anger. There's anger in the face of injustice and stuff like that.
01:10:01
Donald Robertson
There's appropriate anger, right? But it's not an unheard of idea. The Stoics believe that all anger is irrational and unhealthy and that they're not alone.
01:10:11
Donald Robertson
One of the few groups of people that kind of align with that are the Buddhists. Most traditional Buddhists also believe that anger is a poison of the mind and that in general it's unhealthy.
01:10:24
Donald Robertson
And I read a really good book recently by Owen Flanagan.
01:10:27
Ray
Yes, I know him. Yes, great.
01:10:28
Donald Robertson
Yeah, who adopts a cross-cultural, anthropological, social psychological perspective on anger.
01:10:36
Ray
Things we know about emotions or things we say about emotions. Is that the book? With emotions, yeah, yeah.
01:10:40
Donald Robertson
I think it's like how to do things with emotions and then amen it's about shame and anger, which is these two parallel moral emotions.
01:10:45
Ray
And anger.
01:10:50
Donald Robertson
and But I think he makes a very fundamental point that runs through the whole book. It's a really good point. And it links to what we said earlier about kind of cognitive flexibility and being able to see things from alternate perspectives.
01:11:01
Donald Robertson
The very act of engaging in cross-cultural research kind of forces us to realize that people do anger and do shame differently in different parts of the world.
01:11:13
Donald Robertson
And that potentially allows us to kind of take a step back from our own anger and view it from different perspectives. We think maybe there's maybe the way that we feel about anger, the assumptions that we have about anger,
01:11:28
Donald Robertson
Not everyone agrees with that. Not everyone experiences anger in the same way. People in Tibetan exiles living in Nepal have a very different perspective on anger as an emotion, for example.
01:11:42
Donald Robertson
um People are in Asian countries in general why tend to have a more negative view of anger than Americans do.
01:11:47
Ray
Right.
01:11:49
Donald Robertson
And I think he implies this. And I'd go further and say, I think there are uniquely Americans assumptions about anger. um And I think to some extent they're rooted in the civil rights movement.
01:12:04
Donald Robertson
I think Americans have a more entrenched belief even than Brits, for example, or Scots like me. Obviously, the Brits are pretty similar to Americans in their thinking generally.
01:12:14
Ray
right
01:12:15
Donald Robertson
But I think in America, i one of the things that kind of struck me at first is these got these Americans kind of think a little bit differently about anger. like The association with the civil rights movement, I think, leads Americans to have a a more widely entrenched belief that anger towards social injustice can be constructive if it's channeled into protests and things like that.
01:12:39
Donald Robertson
Whereas other people might say, even if you channel into protests and stuff, the anger still damaging you.
01:12:40
Ray
Thank
01:12:46
Donald Robertson
right it's a it might not be the best um emotion. You can still protest. You can even protest quite aggressively. You can even yell at people without necessarily feeling anger inside. So you could potentially get the benefits of expressing aggression are or protesting forcefully against things without necessarily feeling as much outrage inside.
01:13:13
Donald Robertson
And maybe the outrage isn't healthy. Now, I think there's a slightly different perspective there, even between Americans and Canadians and Brits, right?
01:13:23
Ray
ah
01:13:26
Donald Robertson
But certainly, once we broaden out and look at a a preliterate cultures and you know, East Asian cultures, you know, at Buddhist societies, we, it becomes easier, I think, to view anger almost from an external perspective.
01:13:47
Ray
So that this may be where the stoic view has influenced psychological research. um There really is not much written on adaptive anger.
01:13:58
Ray
Like what is adaptive about my anger?
01:13:58
Donald Robertson
hmm.
01:14:00
Ray
Remember that, you know, anger is a response. It's an emotion. It may have evolved for some reasons.
01:14:10
Donald Robertson
Mm-hmm.
01:14:10
Ray
It may have provided some good at some place.
01:14:10
Donald Robertson
Mm-hmm.
01:14:15
Ray
in in our evolutionary past, but we really haven't studied it. So while people, I think, who study anger don't say, oh, Seneca was right, there's no such thing as healthy anger, they kind of say that with their feet. you know They don't march to produce studies on that.
01:14:32
Ray
And I have sort of like two studies that I'm in the process of collecting data on. One says I've created a lot of statements of what people say are their productive anger or adaptive anger. And I want to see how does that correlate with maladaptive or anger disorder type information?
01:14:54
Ray
I'm still collecting the data. So, you know, we'd have that. And then, yeah.
01:14:59
Donald Robertson
research is required. yeah but
01:15:00
Ray
and and And then, then we're trying to do some research on my, you should cherries idea that there are characteristics of anger, which are, you know, towards social injustice.
01:15:01
Donald Robertson
the jury's out.
01:15:06
Donald Robertson
Mm-hmm.
01:15:10
Ray
And that's a kind of a harder, thing to do, but she's very clear about what are the characteristics of adaptive and maladaptive anger towards social injustice, which creates a very scientifically testable hypothesis.
01:15:24
Ray
But we don't really study it. So I tend to think that um Seneca was right and that when we have that channeled anger, it really is almost a different thing.
01:15:39
Ray
you know, Martha Nussbaum calls it the transition.
01:15:39
Donald Robertson
and
01:15:42
Ray
When I give up revenge, she she she said, I call it the transition.
01:15:42
Donald Robertson
Yeah.
01:15:46
Ray
And if we don't call the adaptive anger by a different word than the maladaptive anger, people are not going to be able to distinguish it. So we have a linguistic problem in addition to a conceptual problem.
01:15:56
Donald Robertson
Yes. Well, now you actually sound little bit like Al. like Because I looked very closely at Albert Ellis's
01:16:01
Ray
Okay. Mm-hmm.
01:16:05
Donald Robertson
book on anger. And I noticed it seemed to me... of the other things I respect about Ellis is in some ways he's quite open about uncertainties that he has.
01:16:16
Ray
Yeah.
01:16:16
Donald Robertson
like At times, anyway. like So when talking about anger, there are places where he seems to say he's not really sure if that if we can talk about healthy anger. But he actually, he adopts a position that's pretty close to the Stoics.
01:16:31
Donald Robertson
He says if there is such a thing as healthy anger, he thinks it's quite unusual. And because almost all anger, from his point of view, has irrational beliefs and rigid demands implicit in it.
01:16:44
Donald Robertson
And I think in particular, he he he talks about whether it's really possible to be angry with somebody without globally rating their character or vilifying or damning them.
01:16:52
Ray
them right. See,
01:16:55
Donald Robertson
Like, you know, if you think, well, I really disapprove of a thing that they said, but that's just one small aspect of the character as a whole. Can I still really be angry with them? Or is it somewhat, should we really call that emotion something else?
01:17:10
Donald Robertson
You know, does it kind of lose the essence of anger if we start changing some of these cognitions and making them more flexible?
01:17:15
Ray
I think this is the really hardest area in the philosophy and psychology, the science of anger is what do we call this adversarial reaction that feels like anger has the same physiological responses that energizes us.
01:17:21
Donald Robertson
Yeah.
01:17:29
Donald Robertson
i
01:17:32
Ray
So lots of people do believe that those emotions energize them to do things, but is it really the same experience? I'm not sure.
01:17:43
Donald Robertson
But Ray, suppose i don't have the physiological ah route. Like, suppose um my blood pressure is not going through the roof. Suppose I think I really like it if you would respect me. In fact, I'd love it if everyone would respect me. But if they don't,
01:17:59
Donald Robertson
Like, I'll survive. It's not the end of the world. And I kind of feel like yelling at you and giving you a piece of my mind, but i don't have to do that. I could potentially deal with this in other ways.
01:18:10
Donald Robertson
And um I really don't like the thing that you said, but it's not catastrophic and it doesn't define your character a whole. like So suppose this is my whole way of thinking.
01:18:19
Ray
Right. Well, what do we call the emotion?
01:18:20
Donald Robertson
ah which is What is that? I don't think that's anger, right?
01:18:23
Ray
Yeah. That's right. I don't think it's anger anymore.
01:18:26
Donald Robertson
I don't think that's anger.
01:18:27
Ray
Right. don't think it's anger.
01:18:28
Donald Robertson
Like...
01:18:29
Ray
It's not anger, but we don't have a good word for it.
01:18:29
Donald Robertson
ah
01:18:35
Ray
Right.
01:18:35
Donald Robertson
Yeah.
01:18:35
Ray
Yeah. We don't have a good word for it, but let's change it more to a social injustice issue.
01:18:36
Donald Robertson
Uh-huh.
01:18:40
Ray
if you belong to a group that people are prejudiced against, maybe we don't like people with Scottish accents around here, you know, and and people are going to go and criticize you and boycott you and treat you unfairly.
01:18:46
Donald Robertson
Yeah. Who does?
01:18:50
Donald Robertson
Yeah.
01:18:52
Ray
um You might feel commitment to challenging that prejudice and it might generate a lot of pro-social behavior
01:19:00
Donald Robertson
Mhm. Mhm. Mhm.
01:19:06
Ray
But again, i don't know if that's anger. It may be closer than the example you used before. But our vocabulary isn't as rich enough to describe all these different experiences.
01:19:19
Donald Robertson
And now that's no surprise because our emotional vocabulary is is kind of rubbish, right?
01:19:24
Ray
Yeah.
01:19:25
Donald Robertson
Basically, it's very limited and not very nuanced in many regards anyway. So it would be no shocker if it turned out on close analysis that we lack a good folk psychology vocabulary for expressing important distinctions in relation to anger.
01:19:44
Ray
Yeah, I think you're right.
01:19:44
Donald Robertson
Right. And
01:19:44
Ray
And I think that, you know, like, like yeah, I'll come back to Myisha Cherry, whose work I really like. She gives it different names. You know, she says, oh, I think I can identify four different, five different kinds of anger that you could have towards social injustice.
01:19:52
Donald Robertson
right.
01:19:58
Ray
Let's give them names and hear the characteristics of them. And that makes them easier to identify and talk about. So I think it's helpful for us if we acknowledge that our language is too imprecise.
01:20:11
Donald Robertson
social, like in the grand scheme of things, or preventatively, you know, maybe one of the main things that we could do is refine the emotional vocabulary that we have.
01:20:19
Ray
Yeah.
01:20:21
Donald Robertson
You know, it's it's an uphill struggle, a sense. Therapy is a Johnny-cum, therapy is a Johnny-cum lately on the scene, right? Because it's remedial. But if we wanted to be act more preventatively,
01:20:32
Donald Robertson
You know, we have to educate like young people about their emotions better. And the first step in doing that would be having a better vocabulary for doing it.
01:20:40
Ray
Yeah.
01:20:41
Donald Robertson
If the vocabulary is really not conducive to that at all. I want to ask you another quick question that's really probably a tangent, but I'm going to slip it in cheekily towards the end dinner anyway.
01:20:48
Ray
Okay.
01:20:50
Donald Robertson
But as we're defining different types of anger, there are a bunch of ways that we can carve up anger and distinguish it. ah One of them is though that, you know apart from the fact people get angry with themselves, we usually, the the the stereotypical example we tend to think of is other directed anger.
01:21:07
Donald Robertson
But you also people also get angry with inanimate objects, allegedly. So people get angry with a laptop if it's not working.
01:21:16
Ray
Inanimate things.
01:21:16
Donald Robertson
right Inanimate, thing like people get yeah beyond like people people get angry with it if they can't get the key to work in and the lock or something like that. umm they get angry you know They get angry with technology all the time. It's it's pretty familiar,
Human Anger Towards Objects
01:21:31
Donald Robertson
right?
01:21:31
Donald Robertson
Now here, there's clearly some kind of fuzzy distinction between what you would call frustration and dying and genuine anger, right? But I wonder, when people say, no, I'm not just frustrated, I'm actually angry with my mobile phone, i threw it across the room.
01:21:49
Donald Robertson
And I believe there is some research that might speak to this. To what extent do you think they anthropomorphize the object when they become genuinely...
01:22:03
Donald Robertson
i Because you do see people say things like, this stupid bloody mobile thought...
01:22:07
Ray
Right. oh i think very highly they answer. Like this computer is definitely out to screw me over.
01:22:12
Donald Robertson
It's out to get you.
01:22:13
Ray
Yeah. You know, like we, we, we give it the same kind of, you know, attribution for hostile intent.
01:22:14
Donald Robertson
Yeah.
01:22:18
Ray
And tendon we do some person, we think of it as purposely trying to get us.
01:22:21
Donald Robertson
And...
01:22:24
Donald Robertson
And we take revenge against it.
01:22:25
Ray
Yeah.
01:22:25
Donald Robertson
like we We throw it out the window.
01:22:27
Ray
I'll show that. All right.
01:22:28
Donald Robertson
hi I'm going to teach this thing.
01:22:29
Ray
So I think we do anthropomorphize a lot. And, and so I think, I think anger at, objects is kind of different.
01:22:39
Ray
um And there's, there may be an sort of interesting as a behavior in the research we've done, we've made a distinction between hitting things and hitting objects and verbal aggression, you know, yelling and screaming, ah depending on your age, hitting objects, factors or loads with physical aggression towards people or verbal aggression. So for a lot of people,
01:23:05
Ray
hitting objects ah for older people, let's say adults, that sort of correlates more with verbal aggression.
01:23:09
Donald Robertson
a
01:23:12
Ray
I i curse at you when I bang my fist on the table, really as a show of force, but we really haven't studied the anger at the object.
01:23:19
Donald Robertson
Right.
01:23:22
Donald Robertson
Yeah.
01:23:22
Ray
So that's another real hole, I think, in the literature to see how much we anthropomorphize. That's what'd be interesting.
01:23:30
Donald Robertson
And actually, there's kind, arguably, another type of anger that we don't really hear much about today. Maybe, doesn't it? barely exists to the same extent, but it was relatively common in the ancient world. They often talk about being angry, not with objects, or with other people, or with themselves.
01:23:46
Donald Robertson
like like Sometimes in the ancient world, people talk about being angry with the gods.
01:23:50
Ray
Yes. There is a literature on that.
01:23:51
Donald Robertson
Like...
01:23:53
Donald Robertson
Ah.
01:23:53
Ray
There are several articles that have been published about anger at God because, you know, if you're religious and you believe in God and God makes decisions, you know, about then you certainly could be angry at God and maybe you know better than God.
01:24:00
Donald Robertson
Yeah.
01:24:04
Donald Robertson
Wow.
01:24:06
Ray
um
01:24:07
Donald Robertson
I mean, I blame him for everything.
Rational Beliefs and Human Capacities for Empathy
01:24:09
Donald Robertson
Like...
01:24:09
Ray
Well, how do you know it's a hymn?
01:24:12
Donald Robertson
That's true. That's true. I guess I should suspend judgment a bit. but There's one that we missed, right? I deliberately omitted the first thing that Marcus says, because I think it's kind of the most opaque in a way, although he refers to it he refers to selections from this list of 10 things repeatedly throughout the meditations.
01:24:21
Ray
right.
01:24:23
Ray
right
01:24:31
Donald Robertson
Now, I could be wrong. This is my interpretation. But that indicates to me, i sometimes I'll read a book by someone and I'll think, they're saying stuff, but...
01:24:41
Donald Robertson
It doesn't seem to me like they they really understand what they're saying and in much depth. Some authors, you know, someone will rattle off a list of ideas and I think they're just copying this from another book or something like that.
01:24:54
Donald Robertson
Marcus, I really get the impression, understands these 10 strategies and it has memorized them because he returns to them repeatedly and it's
01:25:03
Ray
Repeatedly.
01:25:04
Donald Robertson
so different selections from him. applies them to different things. He phrases them in different ways. This comes from deep within him. like This is something that's very familiar to him. ah I think that's how it comes across to me.
01:25:17
Donald Robertson
And so this one, he he mentions more than any others. And he he names it first, right? He says, when you're beginning to get offended with other people, remember the various kinds of relationships that you have with others and that we were born to help one another.
01:25:36
Donald Robertson
Now, he also mentions that in the example I gave earlier, where he's speaking to someone he calls my son, whether it's common to us or not. The first thing he says is, we are not born for this, my son.
01:25:47
Donald Robertson
We're not born for aggression or conflict. Now, obviously, in a sense, we are. I think Ellis used to say, Everyone has a natural capacity for irrationality and also a natural capacity for rationality.
01:25:57
Ray
And rationality.
01:25:59
Donald Robertson
i think that's what Marcus is talking about here. He wants to say, I believe, that you should remember that you have a natural capacity for reason and pro-social behavior.
01:26:10
Donald Robertson
And I think all of the other nine strategies that we've just mentioned are basically examples of what he's referring to here.
01:26:17
Ray
Bulls of that.
01:26:20
Donald Robertson
Like, for instance, you have the capacity like to take a step back and notice that your beliefs are the upsetting you more than the thing that you're angry about.
01:26:26
Ray
you
01:26:32
Donald Robertson
You have the natural capacity to take a step back and notice that you have the same flaws. So you have a natural capacity for self-awareness and for modifying your beliefs in accord with reason.
01:26:44
Donald Robertson
like And his point is, you know, the problem is you we arere not we're just not utilizing that to its full potential. And it's a bit like, I was trying to think, do we do this in therapy? And again, I think maybe we kind of do it implicitly, but maybe there's certain...
01:26:58
Donald Robertson
protocols or schools of thought where it's emphasized more than others. But we might say to clients, look, you know, for instance, in an assessment, you might say, what existing coping strategies do you have that you've used in the past? And, you know, all you do mindfulness meditation, for example, perhaps we could utilize that in the therapy by building on your existing skills and resources.
01:27:21
Donald Robertson
And I think that's a little bit like Marcus saying, recognize, remind yourself that you have a repertoire of you're capable of empathy, you're capable of self-awareness, you're capable of reason and make better use of those skills.
01:27:32
Ray
Yeah. See, I would add another thing. I think you're correct that what he's referring to maybe is the paradox of human nature. For a guy who was an emperor conquering the Germans and fighting those wars, you know, he it's it's unusual for him to say, you know, we're not an aggressive species, you know?
01:27:53
Ray
He wrote a lot of this when he was fighting a war.
01:27:54
Donald Robertson
Yeah.
01:27:56
Ray
And so humans have always had war. and There's not a piece of like arable, farmable land on the planet that wasn't sort of captured and taken away from some other people by war.
01:28:07
Donald Robertson
Mm-hmm.
01:28:07
Ray
So we have this predisposition towards anger and aggression, but we have this other part of us.
01:28:14
Ray
We survive by cooperating with people. You know, we we survive by getting along and none of us could do all the things we need to do to live. We need to rely on each other. So I think that there's a paradox.
01:28:27
Ray
As you said, Albert Ellis believed that people had irrational beliefs and rational beliefs. I remember Tim Beck saying, you know, cognitive therapy teaches you a skill, but you almost always keep creating these negative thoughts that pop into your
Cognitive Biases, Aggression, and Social Status
01:28:44
Ray
head.
01:28:44
Donald Robertson
Yeah. Mm-hmm.
01:28:44
Ray
That's the way we are.
01:28:44
Donald Robertson
Mm-hmm.
01:28:45
Ray
and You know, Kahneman, the psychologist that won the Nobel Prize, talks about system one and system two, that we have these two differential systems that are in balance.
01:28:57
Ray
And I think that's really the issue, that the nature of human ne nature is to have these competing issues. I think the message is I may always have a predisposition to get angry at people And I always can implement the skills to counter it.
01:29:17
Donald Robertson
Yeah.
01:29:17
Ray
Don't assume that because I've learned these skills, I'm not going to have the urges to get revenge. I'm not going to have anger pop up once in a while. We're just complicated.
01:29:29
Ray
we We didn't evolve to be happy and peaceful. We evolved to be both. And I think that that's that's an important message to give people. <unk> says i don't believe in cures in psychotherapy.
01:29:42
Donald Robertson
yeah
01:29:44
Ray
I believe that you teach people coping strategies for the problems they have to face the rest of their life.
01:29:50
Donald Robertson
Yeah, curing is for kippers and bacon.
01:29:50
Ray
And I, that's for an antibiotic, you know, it's not for.
01:29:54
Donald Robertson
Yeah. They say, they say, so Ray, hang on a minute. Like Marcus Releus has got this pretty extensive repertoire of coping strategies for anger, like that would maybe put many modern psychotherapists to shame, but he's not perfect, as we've admitted.
01:30:03
Ray
Right.
01:30:12
Donald Robertson
Like, what's missing here? ah there Are there other relevant attitudes? It was coping with anger that Marcus Aurelius doesn't mention.
01:30:23
Ray
I think one of them is this idea about displaced aggression and what I call the code of honor. You know, very often...
01:30:37
Ray
um There's a guy named Barish from University of Washington has written a book called Payback, where he argues that people take out their anger aggression on others who haven't attacked them to sort of make some what he calls displaced aggression.
01:30:53
Ray
So maybe someone insults you and you sort of take it out on a third person.
01:30:56
Donald Robertson
Right.
01:30:59
Donald Robertson
Yeah.
01:30:59
Ray
And that is a very common, almost ubiquitous behavior in most species.
01:31:03
Donald Robertson
Mm-hmm.
01:31:07
Ray
And Barish would go on to say that it is a pretty ubiquitous thing in humans. And I think that one of the things that we do is believe that if someone hurts us, we have to put on a display of power to prevent others from hurting us.
01:31:15
Donald Robertson
Mm-hmm.
01:31:28
Ray
So if someone hurts me, i have to attack a third person just to point out that for any observers,
01:31:28
Donald Robertson
Right.
01:31:35
Donald Robertson
and
01:31:36
Ray
you better you You attack me, you're going to get something in return.
01:31:40
Donald Robertson
Right.
01:31:40
Ray
And that that it very often has to do with your status in society and your sense of esteem.
01:31:41
Donald Robertson
Right.
01:31:45
Donald Robertson
Yeah.
01:31:50
Ray
What Marcus Aurelius doesn't talk about is sort of your social status much in front of other people.
01:31:50
Donald Robertson
Yeah.
01:31:57
Ray
I think people are in a pecking order and they want to be thought of highly.
01:31:57
Donald Robertson
Right.
01:32:03
Ray
And if I put other people down, so if you insult me, i may insult my graduate students. I'm not necessarily getting revenge on you because it may not hurt you, but I'm showing other people that they can't mess with me because I want to maintain a certain status because I have a self-view. And I call that kind of the honor code.
01:32:23
Ray
I have to protect my honor.
01:32:24
Donald Robertson
right I recognise that, but i think there might also be an additional reason reason for it and and Maybe there's another perspective on the same kind of behaviour. It sort of overlaps with it a bit.
01:32:35
Donald Robertson
I think people assume that their anger is more selective than it actually is. So I get angry with somebody that bumps into me in the street, right? And then I go home and I'm still angry and I snap at my kids and my wife, right?
01:32:48
Donald Robertson
And it's not, in those cases, it I don't think it's necessarily that I'm kind of displacing anger for a display of dominance or something like that. It's just that I think I'm angry with the guy that bumps into me in the street.
01:33:00
Donald Robertson
But what i'm kind of underestimating is that my brain has now gone into an angry state of mind in general.
01:33:06
Ray
And so generalizes.
01:33:07
Donald Robertson
i yeah It generalizes because my perspective has shifted.
01:33:11
Ray
Yeah.
01:33:12
Donald Robertson
I've activated a bunch of biases. I'm now engaged in hostile attribution bias. ah If there's something that's ambiguous, I'll lean towards interpreting it in a hostile way. And so I am i am now angry, right and I'll perceive my wife and my kids through the lens of anger.
01:33:29
Donald Robertson
And I think partly because people kind of underestimate that, they tend, that's one of many reasons why they often underestimate the negative consequences of anger. They think it's okay.
01:33:40
Donald Robertson
And that would also be a problem for people that believe in righteous anger.
01:33:45
Ray
right
01:33:46
Donald Robertson
ah So if I am Martin Luther King and I'm getting really, really angry, you know, or not, like with protesting against injustice, you know, it may be that that anger affects my relationship with my friends and family as well, if I'm not careful.
01:34:03
Ray
yes so i i think that that lots of people do get angry about others who don't expect them i mean one of the big issues in psychotherapy is that people believe that angry, aggressive people are angry because they have low self-esteem.
01:34:21
Donald Robertson
Mhm.
01:34:21
Ray
But we don't have any evidence that building up their self-esteem gets them to be less angry.
01:34:23
Donald Robertson
Yeah.
01:34:26
Ray
We do have evidence that maybe they have unstable, high self-esteem. They're angry because you don't think I'm as wonderful as I think I am, and you better believe it.
01:34:32
Donald Robertson
Mhm.
01:34:37
Ray
And so it's not low self-esteem.
01:34:37
Donald Robertson
Mhm. Mhm.
01:34:40
Ray
It's this idea that you have to be thought highly of by other people. We did a study here, which we haven't published yet because I want collect more data on it, but we presented it as a poster.
01:34:53
Ray
um And we did it in a prison, in a federal prison with a guy named Mike Wido.
01:34:54
Donald Robertson
Yeah.
01:34:58
Ray
People who endorse more self-acceptance were less likely to have this code of honor where they had to accept themselves.
01:34:59
Donald Robertson
Yeah.
01:35:06
Ray
So accepting yourself the way you are may prevent you from having to present this great image and have other people think you're wonderful.
01:35:16
Donald Robertson
yeah
01:35:16
Ray
Psychotherapists kind of believe that almost everything is a result of poor self-esteem. I
Self-Esteem and Unconditional Self-Acceptance
01:35:21
Ray
think high self-esteem is equally dangerous.
01:35:21
Donald Robertson
and yeah
01:35:24
Ray
When you think you're better than everybody and they better believe that I'm as good as I think I am.
01:35:24
Donald Robertson
Yeah. yeah it's and And I think what, like, conditional self-esteem, as Ellis puts it, by its very nature, makes you dependent on externals, as the Stoics would say.
01:35:36
Ray
Right.
01:35:38
Ray
Yeah.
01:35:38
Donald Robertson
you know, I'm going to make something as fundamental as my myself worth, depend on, like, the you know the spin of the wheel, you know, and whether people are approve of me or disapprove of me, or or is there a way that I can cultivate unconditional self-acceptance?
01:35:52
Ray
So I think this is the one area where I think Marcus Rolus didn't add, but he, you know, it's okay. He got the rest of them right. Yeah.
01:36:00
Donald Robertson
It's just pretty good. Okay. So I think we've covered as much as we can for today.
01:36:07
Ray
Yeah.
01:36:07
Donald Robertson
Like, but there's more we've highlighted. There's so much more that we could talk about in relation to anger. So thank you very much for spending some time with me, Ray. I really appreciate it. You know, you've got a lot of wisdom in this area.
01:36:18
Donald Robertson
I think it's a practical value to the people that are are listening to this podcast. um So thanks for joining me.
01:36:26
Ray
my pleasure we had fun
01:36:26
Donald Robertson
And to the, We had a lot of fun. We hope that everybody has as much fun as we did listening to it Please share the link for your friends and subscribe to the Stoicism Philosophy is a Way of Life newsletter on Substack for more podcasts and articles on philosophy and psychology.
01:36:41
Donald Robertson
ah Thanks once again for listening. Goodbye from me, Donald Robertson, and from my guest, Ray DiGiuseppe. Bye, everyone.
01:36:48
Ray
but bye