Self-help Articles

by Raymond Novaco, Ph.D.

Self talk is one of the most effective ways to deal with anger. The things you say to yourself can make you angry and can prolong the emotional upset long after it might otherwise have passed. Better yet, just as our self talk (also known as "self-statements") can stir-up and prolong anger, they can also be used to prevent and control angry reactions. In this regard, they become self-instructions to guide the process of coping with aggravation and conflict. This can be a very powerful anger management and coping skill.

In using self-instructions, you should first break down the anger experience into a sequence of stages. This will help you deal with the provocation one part at a time rather than all at once. Here is how the stages go:

a. Preparing for provocation. This applies when you know that you will face something that is going to make you angry. This is not always possible, as anger is at times triggered without warning. However, as you will learn from keeping an anger diary, much of the time you get upset about things that happen again and again. By anticipating a problem, obstacle, or annoyance, you can work out a strategy for coping with it in advance. You can form a mental set that is conducive to anger control.

b. Impact and confrontation. This pertains to the immediate experience of the provocation, which might happen suddenly, or it may develop gradually. Whatever the process of triggering may be, during this stage you recognize that you are in a situation that is making you angry. The early signs of anger should become signals or cues for you to start using anger control coping skills.

c. Coping with arousal. Being aroused by a bothersome situation is very normal; but agitation and tension might to set in as the provocation progresses. This stage also covers the possibility that your attempts at anger management may not be successful. This may be due to a variety of reasons, including the severity of the provocation. Anger escalates as antagonism builds and diminishes as resolution is achieved. Mastery is an ideal that is not always possible to achieve.

d. Reflecting on the provocation. It is very likely that you will remind yourself about what upset you. Perhaps you will re-live the experience, and you may even evaluate its effect on you. After a provocation the kinds of thoughts and feelings that you have will depend upon the outcome of the conflict. If the conflict remains unresolved, continued mental coping is necessary. If the conflict has been resolved by your constructive action, then it is time for self-praise.

The idea of self-instructions is to guide your thoughts, feelings, and actions in a way that deals with a particular problem or situation. Therefore, you need to come up with self-statements suited to the particular situation. This is an important difference between self-instructions and simplistic "positive thinking," such as making mindless statements to "not be bothered by this or that" or to tell yourself that that some obnoxious person is "really a nice guy" or to say over and over again that "everything is fine." There is no reason to believe that such simple-minded messages will be helpful, and they can even make someone become more angry.

Just as self-instructions are used by high-performance athletes in competitive situations to guide their attentional focus, to promote relaxation, and to cue skillful execution of motor movements (e.g., a basketball player shooting a free-throw with the score tied at the end of the game, a golfer hitting a tee shot on the first hole, or a diver preparing to dive from a high platform), you must develop self-instructions that are tailored to your objectives in the situation and to its anger-provoking elements. You should work with your therapist or counselor to create a set of self-instructions that will be effective for you in achieving anger control.

By thinking of anger as something that happens as a series of stages, you thereby break the provocation down into separate chunks. You may find that you do better or worse in one of these stages than in the others. Nevertheless, working with the separate chunks will make the task of anger coping more manageable and the problem situation more understandable. It also enables you to tailor the self-statements for more specific purposes of coping.

About the Author

Raymond W. Novaco, Ph.D., pioneered cognitive-behavioral therapy for anger, coining the term “anger management”, and demonstrated the effectiveness of his treatment approach in empirically-based clinical research. He received the Best Contribution Award from the International Society for Research on Aggression (1978), the Distinguished Contributions to Psychology Award from the California Psychological Association (2000), and the Academic Award from the Division of Forensic Psychology of the British Psychological Society (2009). Dr. Novaco is a professor of psychology in the Department of Psychology and Social Behavior, University of California, Irvine.