How do you know happiness?  Is the reality of your happiness different from my own?  I think you would be “happy or feel content” realizing that what you are experiencing now is not what you once experienced.  Which reminds me of a situation I had two weeks ago:

In my office, I held a family intervention for a client who was in physical pain, and also addicted to his pain medication.  In the course of the intervention, when challenged, people started to experience intimidation.  In their moments of personal threat, words were shared that were quite heated.  Suppressed feelings were openly expressed, and in the mix of this experience, it suddenly occurred to me that my only conflict for that day was having to fold clothes from earlier laundry.  This situation helped me put into perspective our goal, and that was to create a wedge between my client’s physical pain and addicted mind-set.  We did, and he signed himself into a detox.

How do you know?  How do you know what you are experiencing in the moment you experience when your eyes look out and not in?

Think about it, one would think a former Massachusetts Turnpike Authority Chairman, Matthew Amorello, would know the dangers and be influenced by not only his position, but the consequence,  not so (www.salemnews.com 8/17/10).  How about Richard Simard, the former New Hampshire liquor commissioner (www.wmur.com 8/17/10)?  Again, not so.  Here is the fact of the matter: as long as there are mind/mood altering substances, there are going to be people who fail to take into consideration the consequences of their actions.

This may sound or read as overly simplistic, but MyDiscover Inc. has come up with a constant reminder for people to take into consideration the consequences to future actions.  We offer a simple red wrist band that has the wording, “Who is in control?”  The idea is whenever faced with a situation that may or may not have negative consequences, to stop and think (red band) and read the words.  The two seconds one takes to read the words is all it takes to establish a window of opportunity to implement control and in a phrase, “choose the right thing.”

If you’re  more interested in the three primary psychological constructs that influence repeat offending or irrational behavior, look for our articles on the disinhibition and reinforcement effects; of course the other being the desensitization effect.  Since behavior is defined as a pattern of thinking, feeling, and acting, but controlling your thoughts, by default you control your feelings and actions.  We are all responsible.

The cognitive problem solving skill of “Who is in control?” is used within our Discover Addiction Recovery, Anger Management, and Domestic Abuse programs.  It has proven to be simply effective.

After performing a pre-test Anger Disorder Scale assessment (DuGiuseppe, R. and Tafrate, C. R.) on you, your Anger In Risk Rating was in the 91 percentile, which is quite significant.  The underpinning to this risk rating were your perspectives on resentment (98 percentile) and Suspiciousness (93 percentile).  Considering the fact you scored in the 92 percentile for Duration of Anger, and 96 percentile on Scope of Anger Provocation, what this shows us is you have a certain way in which you need the world to operate.  Any situation that breaches that need is a trigger for you, and quite frankly, this has been going on for a good portion of your life.  It is your suspiciousness that constitute your resentments that necessitate your tendency to hold your anger in as you personalize and catastrophize to a point of release.  This alone suggests that you have taught yourself that anything that does not go your way, you are going to perceive as a personal threat and act accordingly to eliminate or at least minimize that threat.  After all the shaded lens that you employ to look upon life is, “People should….”  It is out of this reasoning, when you are angry, you look outside of yourself for validation: “He pissed me off.  They make me so $&*# angry.  She makes me mad.”  It doesn’t work this way.

Getting back to resentments and those points I made with you in session, those points of  accepting the notion that your resentments are value statements to yourself in how people should act, be, and treat you, you pointed out that it, your resentment, is produced by your value perspectives; “something I don’t like.”  Clearly, your certain way of thinking manifests in expectations, and when violated, you harbor resentments.  Over the years, you have conditioned yourself to personalize, catastrophize your breached expectations to the point you are suspicious of anyone’s interactions with you.

Let me ask you, what does resentment mean to you?  Before, when I pointed out to you that resentment is a value belief, you identified the ideal that people should treat you the way you treat them.  As I shared, this is basically a fallacy of fairness.  In effect, the world is not shaped to your liking.  People have agendas, and many could care less how you treat them, they are more concerned about what favors them over you.  The fact is, no two people share the same perspective of reality. With this point made, if you treat yourself with respect, and embrace the control you have over your life, just by default people will treat you with respect; but do not expect that to be the case all the time.  Which brings me to the point that in review of my Session Notes, you harbor several cognitive distortions, yes, distorted ways of looking at the world.  These are the perspectives you filter your life through as you sit with your frustration, which by the way is another word for stress, hence your distress.

As I pointed out, you mentally filter every thing and then think how things should be, and then make demands as such.  Then you take it the next step and project how people and events are supposed to be and do your best, pro-socially or not, to make them happen.  This is a trap.

What happens “to you” when people do not respect your boundaries, your expectations?  We both know, you get mad.  You get mad because they crossed the line, the boundary that you present to the world as a zone of comfort.  Cross the zone and you are threaten, respect the zone and life is good, at least in your perceptual field.  I see this a lot in my domestic abuse cases, people who are not treated well at work, beat themselves up on the drive home, only to demand at home what they could not receive at work.  I have also seen similar instances of relapse back onto alcohol and drugs.  The person is struggling, actually part of the grateful dead in recovery, those who are grateful to be sober, but interpersonally dead, flat lined, such “fuck it,” and fall to their thinking of it is easier to drink and drug.  Just as this is examples of entitlement and addictedness lost control, the same can be said of your zones.  It is your zone, your boundary and because you do not embrace control and teach people how to treat you, every situation, event, or person is a threat, and your suspiciousness and suppressed resentments make for a perfect storm of lost control of “your” anger.

Here is the deal, it is your responsibility to teach people how to treat you, if not they will indeed walk all over you.  The whole idea of “people making you upset” is not taking responsibility to be constructive and assertive in defining your interpersonal boundaries, expectations and in so doing showing others what is and is not acceptable.  I know this reads a bit touchy feely, and I know you know my perspectives on that, however, the fact remains, communication, how you communicate your perspectives to the world is sixty percent through your body language, thirty percent,  the tone of your voice, and ten percent the words you use.  Without the compliment of assertive and respectful behavior, talk is cheap.   Remember, whatever you are experiencing, you are indeed are allowing to happen.  If people continue to cut through your boundaries, you allow this to happen by maintaining those irrational perspectives.  There is a lot to be said in that people know you not for who you are, rather what you do.  It is out of our physiology that I eyes look out and not in.  I see you, you see me, and in that we see what each other does, and from that perspective evaluate each others motives.  You best serve yourself by walking the walk of assertive confidence.

So, you let others walk all over you, cross your boundaries, and “get” mad.  Paraphrasing this, you allow yourself to surrender control.  Naturally, we are talking about anger, but what is anger?  As you have said in the past, “It is just something that happens,” and yet you now know better than that.  As you sit and read, you are not angry, why, because there is not threat to your boundaries. Something outside of you or a way of thinking in response to you has to trigger anger.

Anger is a reactive feeling, it has to be triggered.  There are two parts, so to speak, to feelings.  Those parts are the thinking brain and the emotional brain.  The emotional brain sits deep in the confines of your head.  Isolated from the world, it has no connection.  Your emotional brain has no clue as to what is going on outside of you.  The emotional brain produces the physical actions to what you think is occurring outside of you, or as shared, what “you” think is happening.

In terms of emotionality, there are basically two, and those are approach and avoidance.  When someone says or does something bothersome to you, crosses your boundaries, your higher ordering thinking brain makes that call and signals to you emotional brain to avoid or eliminate what is occurring, a sort of threat to you.  When your higher ordering brain signals something as complimentary, the opposite of a threat, your emotional brain motivates you to approach what is occurring.  When it comes to approach and avoidance, complimentary or threat, we instinctively follow our emotional brain.  Another way of putting is is to suggest the events outside of you that motivated to approach are comforting and desire based.  The events outside of you that are motivated to avoid are discomforting and fear based.  After all, boundaries are in place to protect your fears.  In one instance you are goal directed to avoid, minimize, eliminate, and in the other embrace, maximize, and share.

Think of it this way, when someone says something you don’t like, you are motivated, by your way of thinking, to pull back, avoid the threat which triggers your emotional brain to act.  In turn, your emotional experience of avoidance triggers perspectives of losing control.  Now, you are motivated to approach and eliminate the threat along with the goal of establishing control; a vicious cycle.

The bottom line is it is your way of thinking, your insecurity and intimidations, do your best to protect.  When someone scratches, you react, and when  you react your thoughts of threat trigger the emotionality around fear, and you act to eliminate the treat. Managing your impressions increase your frustration tolerance which enhance impulse control.  It is your responsibility to teach people your boundaries, realize that whatever you experience you all to happen, and accept the fact that it is not what happens to you that makes the difference, rather how you respond.  This is anger management.

What do you want to do different this year from last year?  After all, if you do not know where you want to be, no matter what you do, you won’t get there.

As I have written in the past, we all seek control, in fact the human condition and its two needs of competence and independence predispose our thirsts for control.  It matters little if it is a word of insult or threat of losing a job, viscerally the human body is going to respond the same way.  The mitigator so to speak is our perspective of “who” we think we are and “how” the world should/must treat us (e.g., control).  When faced with threats to our perspectives of control, it is not the threat itself, rather it is the expectation to the threat that facilitates action.  All action is goal directed. Look to the consequences of the action to understand the goal.  When threats are personalized and catastrophized, in effect, desperation breads fanciful fictional perspectives of self-rightiousness as I am sure will be discovered in this incident.  Keep in mind, alcohol and drug abuse, addiction, domestic violence, anger, and workplace violence are all outcomes to personalized fanciful fictional thoughts in relation to the world lived.

LINK:  I want my McNuggets By the way, when she went to court, she said she was intoxicated.  With this added information, does she need Anger Management Courses, Domestic Abuse Counseling, or Alcohol and Drug Abuse Counseling?

As I have pointed out, the element that each and everyone of us experiences from one moment to the next is conflict.  We were born into conflict, that duplicity between comfort and discomfort.  Faced with this element, we are driven to maximize our needs for competence and independence.  When we anchor and allow ourselves to be lost in addiction, become overwhelmed and threaten by anger, or abusive through domestic and workplace power and control, in effect, we allow ourselves to lose control as we self-defeatedly seek to establish delusions of control through our mediums of abuse.

Who Is In Control?

We have purchased wrist bands that state, “Who Is In Control?”  The idea behind these bands is quite simple and practical.  In those moment when you find yourself validating thoughts of drug or alcohol use, anger, or coercive power and control, look at the band and read the words.  By reading the words to yourself you literally interfere with your thought processes.  It is your thought process that hold you at-risk to losing control.  Doing so, reading, validating the question imposed on the bands provides you the window of opportunity for you to remove yourself from the situation or change your perspective.  If that does not work, then take the band off of your wrist and hand it over to the person or event that is challenging you.  This act is symbolic of you giving control over to the other person or event.  In reality, that is indeed what you are doing.  Thoughts of alcohol and drugs occur in your head, the same is true for anger and the perspectives of entitlement behind coercive power and control.  No one has access to your thoughts or feelings but you.  So when angry at someone, for example, you are allowing that person to control your feelings by giving over to that person your control; you are out of control.  When validating drugs, you are allowing yourself to be controlled by the drug, and when challenged by inadequacy, you are thinking about your powerlessness of self as you manipulate, feed off of others.

Something to think about

On the bands it states, “Who Is In Control?”  We all seek control through satisfying our needs for competence and independence.  As I have stated elsewhere, the human element is competition.  Since no one is ever completely satisfied with his or her human condition, then all of us are members of the In Group.  The In Group consists of Inferiority, Inadequacy, Insignificancy, in effect, insecurity that intimidates our being.  We are always doing our best to escape from our source of intimidation.  If you reframe Independence and remove the prefix In from Independence by ascribing it to competence, you find Incompetence.  No mater how you manipulate it, you will never be satisfied with the consequences.

In effect, youth today lack the skills to manage their feelings let alone their behavior.  For this reason, I am confident of my choice not to teach.  As one associate professor shared quite well,  ”It’s all about acting out aggression now.  They don’t hold anything back (Ms. Almquist, an associate professor of foreign languages at Frostburg State University).”

The motivation behind abuse is every bit a part of the human condition as are safety and security; both are outcomes and both are goal-directed for validation and cooperation.  As I have pointed out before, the human condition is a wanting condition never satisfied.  The drives to wanting are independence and competence.  All behaviors are motivated by these drives.  Motivation alone does not necessitate behavior.  The instigation to all human behavior is either the innate need for comfort over discomfort or the processing of fear or desire.  Understand the motivation and one can understand the behavior.  Understand the behavior, and one can implement an efficient process of change.  Without understanding the human condition, all change is short-lived.

Put into Action

Humans all think the same way, and yet, what we think and feel is unique.  No two people share the exact same images and self-talk, either real or contrived.   When we think of what was or will be, we validate an image.  All images are neutral until we apply thought.  We all think in words, and the vocabulary we use in our thoughts gives meaning to our images.  In turn, we validate what we are experiencing as real.

Perceived reality is conflict.  It is the conflict of reflecting upon what was, realizing what is in the moment, and projecting it into the future as fear or desire.  Or, it is the conflict of reaching into the future, filtering the future through what was, experiencing the past in the present moment, and projecting it into the future as fear or desire.  After all, fear and desire are the two emotional responses that instigate all behavior.  Understand the fear or desire and you can understand the motivation.  Everything else is fanciful fictional magical thinking orientated to feel better about one’s self.