Anger Management Techniques

Viki Forshee

"But why was she mean?" he asked. I paused. The woman had looked a little haggard, a little lumpen. "Maybe she was having a bad day," I admitted. "She's probably unhappy. Maybe she's sad." We walked along in silence for a while.

"I don't want you to yell at people anymore," my son said, looking sad himself. I felt sad too, and ashamed—I was sick over the example I was setting for the kids—but I couldn't stop. I threatened to call the police on a bagel store cashier who refused to give me the correct change after overcharging me (by less than a dollar). I got in a fight with a cab driver that was so intense, he abandoned his cab and chased me down the street, swearing and threatening to kill me. In each of these incidents, I had been wronged, however mildly or grievously, but, even in the midst of my rampage, it occurred to me that it might not just be chance that I was encountering so many...fuhangoles. Why were these people coming out of the woodwork, especially when I was already at the end of my rope?

In true desperation, I took a friend up on her suggestion that I visit her energy healer. I expected an old gypsy in a cramped walk-up, but Tamar Davir, an acupuncturist, herbalist, and ordained interfaith minister, turned out to be a lithe, chic young woman working out of a sparkling Trump building overlooking the Hudson River—a woman so calm and lovely I immediately wanted to spend the rest of my life in her office. ("Be careful," my friend had told me. "I know people who've become addicted to Tamar.") She had me lie on a table, rubbed me down with aromatherapy oils ("whichever ones your higher self asks me for," she told me), and stuck me with a few acupuncture needles. I closed my eyes and listened to her soothing patter. She said at one point that she was bringing in a new female guide for me because my old one was too spacey. She paused for a moment—moving the energy, I guess? Then she laughed in delight. "Good, good! Nice shift. Your guides are funny." She told me I had a lot of fairy energy and I should connect with that. She told me I was very sensitive and I had to block certain people's energy. She told me I had unusually sensitive children, too, and that I should spend more time on their energy level. I think she waved some crystals over me. I felt relaxed afterward, but I must have faulty energy shields, because all it took was a meeting at my son's school—its sinister overlords strongly suggesting a $50,000 sacrifice, er, donation, on top of the $30,000 tuition—to shift my energy back into sputtering, impotent rage.

And then I did something so radical that, almost a year later, I still can hardly believe it: I moved. I'd been living in Manhattan my entire adult life. It was the only place I'd ever wanted to live, the spot where almost everything that had ever happened to me had happened. I love New York—not like in the cheesy tourism ads. I don't "heart" New York. I love it. I raced there the minute I turned 18, as soon as I could leave my tiny New England town.

But two decades later, my retreat from NYC was a grim sprint. My husband and I made the decision with almost no discussion, in a moment of clarity. We told my son's school where they could shove their ¬itsy-bitsy spiders and sold our apartment like a hot car—hastily, in an all-cash deal—before we could change our minds. And then we fled, our belongings in storage, semihomeless, not even sure where we were headed, just away, away, away.

We landed in a bucolic seaside burb, 20 minutes up the interstate from our old apartment. The upper, upper east side, I reassured myself, bracing for a new round of anxiety and sleeplessness as I mourned the city. The mourning came—my husband walked into our spacious, unfurnished living room one evening and found me sitting on the floor, TV remote in hand, watching Annie Hall and weeping—but my anxiety evaporated. My insomnia? Poof!  I haven't taken a sleeping pill since I sizzled the last Manhattan bedbug out of my children's mattresses. I fired my therapist because I couldn't think of anything to say to her. It felt magical. I started to wonder: Maybe Tamar really did "move" something. Maybe I did have a zippy new spirit guide, pointing me in the right direction and bringing me good juju.

But it's not magic, it's my amygdala—at least, according to Srinivasan S. Pillay, MD, an assistant professor of psychiatry at Harvard Medical School, the former director of the Panic Disorders Research Program at McLean Hospital, and author of the recent book Life Unlocked: 7 Revolutionary Lessons to Overcome Fear. The amygdala is an ancient part of our brain that registers fear: Call it instinct, call it the unconscious brain. Pillay writes that brain imaging research and studies on people with damage to their cortex (the conscious, thinking part of the brain) show that we can feel fear in our amygdalae without knowing in our cortex what we're afraid of. Continual activation of the amygdala can lead to stress, anxiety, fatigue, and poor cognitive functioning. And the amygdala is more reactive than accurate—registering fear equally from a coil of garden hose and an actual snake, and picking up the panic of others, even when you yourself have nothing to fear.

The unconscious mind has fallen out of favor in popular psychology, as Freudian analysis (an attempt to probe the subconscious) has given way to more modern practices like cognitive-behavioral therapy (a reworking of conscious thought patterns). Freud, for many years, began to seem a little out there. "For those who required hard evidence—for those who could not heal themselves with abstractions," Pillay writes, "there remained a void and serious cynicism that Freud's conjecture was not grounded in fact, and that it did not have any basis in reality." But now in the age of brain scans, says Pillay, there is hard evidence of our unconscious minds at work.

Finding the sources of our fears doesn't take daily analysis of our oral fixations and Electra complexes, however. Pillay recommends meditation, therapy, and simple attention to our fears to try to suss out their sources. He gives the example of a woman who fell asleep every night to the cops-and-robbers shows her husband watched. She wasn't conscious that the simulated gun battles were activating her amygdala; she just felt like she was losing her mind. Even though her conscious brain knew the TV wasn't dangerous—she told Pillay his ¬theory was "a load of BS"—when she asked her husband to turn off the set, her anxiety levels plummeted.

This Is A Developing Story

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