Anger as the Tip of a Pyramid

• Here's Wishing I Can Proffer A Sympathetic Bit by Jim Duffy, 4/30/97
  
  

Jim,

Thank you for your wonderful post. I hope many will read it, experience the collegial intimacy it generates by helping re-connect all of us with the interest-excitement it triggers, and that all who participate in this forum will use it as a learning/teaching model of what we want this forum to be about.

Now to the strange title of my post. The way I think about anger since learning Tomkins is that any moment of anger is simply the tip of a pyramid of events over minutes, weeks, months, and years. The last split second before the anger (the moment when that final straw is placed squarely on the camel's back) provides only the final stimulus--one that might actually be a very minimal stimulus--to raise the stimulus density in the central nervous system above the point at which anger is triggered. This represents the tip of the pyramid.

As you look further down the pyramid to the next level, you find the stimuli of the past few minutes; further down, the stimuli of the past few hours; further down, the stimuli of the past few weeks; and so on until you get to the base of the pyramid where you find those stimuli of earlier childhood whose effects are worked into scripts, e.g., the anger of an attack other script in response to shame.

I came upon this metaphor because I wanted to give couples a method of understanding their anger in a way that would permit each to accept responsibility for their own anger that also helped detoxify their shame about being angry so that the need to attack other (blame the anger on something the other did) would be avoided.

One variation of this technique that I really love is to ask someone who is telling me what the other did to make them angry whether that act by the other made them more or less angry this time than it did the last time the other did it. Honest folks will pause a minute and own up to the fact that there is a difference in the intensity of the anger each time the act takes place. Then one can point out that the difference is in what the one who got angry was dealing with on this day as opposed to that other day.

My favorite story about this is one I tell about my wife and I. She simply loves to take off her shoes wherever she happens to be in the house when her feet send her the message to remove them. This means that she is usually in a major corridor of the house and the shoes are left right where she is at the moment she takes them off. So, of course, I come home and trip over shoes in the middle of the kitchen floor or the middle of the family room or the middle of the bedroom. Some days when I trip, I have a snap of anger and angrily mutter to myself: g..damn her, why the hell can't she move those damn shoes! Other days when I trip, I think to myself with a smile: Yup, that's my lady, her feet sure must have been bothering her today.

The difference in these two responses clearly has nothing to do with any change in my wife's behavior. What is different is that my baseline level of stimulus density is different on different days. When I go back and re-examine what was going on in me the days I have an angry reaction to tripping over the shoes, I find that I was already in distress because of other things that had happened during the day, that I still had to do on arriving home, or that were worrying me about something else. The days when I do not get angry when I trip are clearly days when my baseline level in much closer to a neutral state or I am so interested in something else that I do not pay much attention to the negative stimulus.

There is obviously more to the pyramid of my anger when tripping over the shoes, but this post is already long enough. I hope it adds something to your excellent thinking about the innate affect that is triggered by an above optimal, steady-state of stimulus density--anger-rage. Too much cognitive meaning has been attributed to this affect over the years and that has seriously clouded our ability to work with it and not feel shame about it.

• Marvelously Interesting and Useful Model by Jim Duffy, 4/30/97