CBT Imagery Exercise for Anger
How to use mental rehearsal to change angry habits of thinking
In this article, I’ll briefly describe an imagery exercise that combines several cognitive-behavioural therapy (CBT) techniques for dealing with anger. It’s loosely based on various common techniques such as Rational Emotive Imagery (REI) and Imaginal Exposure but tailored slightly for anger and incorporating some more recent (“third-wave CBT”) exercises.
Preparation
The Target Situation
The most important thing is that you’ll need to identify a scene that makes you feel angry when you imagine it. Ideally that would be a recent event that you can relive in your memory, although it could be anything, as long as it does evoke anger. Often, instead of remembering a past event, you will want to anticipate an event that may happen in the near future in order to prepare yourself to cope without anger. You should rate the intensity of your anger using a scale from 0-10. (We call this a SUD scale, which stands for Subjective Units of Discomfort.)
Imagine the anger-provoking scene as if it’s happening right now, what you would see but also what you would feel, what you would be doing with your body, perhaps even what you would smell or taste. Don’t just picture it but really imagine that you are there as if it’s happening right now, and get your senses more involved. Focus on the most upsetting aspect of the scene – what really makes you angry? Note your initial SUD rating. Ideally, it would be roughly 6-9 at first (moderate or high intensity) but it’s possible to work with any rating.
Angry Thoughts and Beliefs
Next, you’ll want to identify the thoughts that make you angry. Sometimes that’s easy and other times it’s more tricky. Some techniques you can use are as follows:
Think of the event that makes you angry as a trigger and your anger as the response but ask yourself if there were any negative automatic thoughts that happened between them, i.e., after the trigger event happened but just before you began to get angry in response to it.
Notice all of the thoughts that went through your mind in relation to the anger and ask yourself which one makes you most angry when you focus your attention on it for a while.
Imagine that you can translate your anger into words and ask yourself: “What does it feel as if I’m telling myself?” or “What does it feel as if I’m thinking?”
If you notice questions associated with your anger, try turning them into statements, and perhaps asking yourself what would be so upsetting if that were true? For example, if you keep asking yourself “Why is this guy treating me this way?”, you may really be thinking “This guy should not treat me this way, and if he does that’s totally unacceptable.” In cognitive therapy, it’s easier to work on this statement rather than the question.
You may also find it helpful to use what we know about stereotypical angry beliefs as a guide. For example, when we’re angry with another person, we tend to have underlying beliefs such as (some but not necessarily all of) these:
Someone has done something they should not have done. (They’ve acted unfairly or unjustly, for example, or are guilty of wrongdoing.)
They are a terrible person. (They’re an idiot, they’re awful, they’re evil, they’re a crook, and so on.)
They deserve to be punished. (I ought to teach them a lesson, I hope they get what they deserve, etc.)
I can’t tolerate their actions. (This is unbearable, I can’t handle it, can’t stand it, can’t accept it, or can’t cope with it.)
I have to react aggressively. (Yelling or using violence, or otherwise showing my anger, is the only way I can get them to listen or do as I say.)
With mild irritation the thoughts might be similar but less extreme. For example, “My kids shouldn’t take so long to get dressed for school, it’s not acceptable, I have to raise my voice and snap at them to get them to hurry up.” Sometimes you may also be angry with yourself or with a situation, rather than with another person, in which case your angry beliefs may be slightly different. For example, “This situation is unfair”, or “I should not be so stupid”, etc.
Upsetting thoughts tend to form clusters, and can be seen as specific examples of more general underlying beliefs or attitudes. For example you might tell yourself “This guy’s being rude to me. Why can’t he talk to me properly? He’s not treating me right”, etc., if you have a strong underlying belief that says “People must respect me.” Many psychotherapists believe that the most disturbing beliefs are rigid “should” statements – the so-called Tyranny of the Shoulds. This type of thinking is particularly prominent in many cases of anger. Shoulds can actually be phrased as “must”, “have to”, “need to”, “got to”, etc., but they all express a rigid categorical imperative or demand, usually imposed on other people when we’re angry, but sometimes on ourselves or life in general.
For example, suppose I rigidly believe that “People should respect me”, “Life should be fair”, or “I should always get things right.” I’m creating, to put it bluntly, an obvious “recipe for neurosis”, because whenever those demands are not met, I’ll get upset. It’s almost as if I have an algorithm programmed in my brain that says “People must respect me because if they do not I will get angry.” To overcome your anger, you may need to change any programming of that sort.
The Process
Now you’re ready to begin. Close your eyes and imagine yourself in the target situation, as if it is happening right now, and allow yourself to feel angry. Check your initial intensity rating: How upset do you feel from 0-10? Here’s a basic outline of the process with detailed information below:
Accept your angry feelings, view them with detachment, and let go of any struggle against them
Observe your angry thinking from a more objective point of view, e.g., by picturing it as writing you can observe from a distance
Optionally: Dispute your angry thinking by labelling cognitive biases that it contains and listing reasons for changing your perspective
Generate more rational alternative ways of thinking and rehearse asserting those beliefs in your imagination
Practice, practice, practice – until it becomes a habit
1. Emotional Acceptance
First, allow yourself, paradoxically, to stop trying to control your emotional pain or anger. Let go completely of any struggle against those unpleasant feelings or any desire to eliminate them or change them in any way. Relax into radical acceptance of the angry feelings. Feelings change naturally, they never remain static, so allow them to come and go freely, and evolve naturally. Think of this as allowing your brain to digest your feelings of anger, by experiencing them patiently and without resistance. In fact, you’re simply allowing natural emotional processing to take place, by giving yourself a bit more time than normal to experience your upsetting emotions. Notice where your anger is located in your body, and what sensations you feel. Notice things you hadn’t noticed before, such as slight changes in your breathing or in your facial expression. (Often people frown or stare, when angry, for example, and some people clench their jaw or their fists, often tensing their neck and shoulders – but everyone is different.)
Patiently accept your feelings, and sit with them for a while. Think of them as “over there” in your body. Think of consciousness as the space within which thoughts and feelings occur, and view them as occupying just one small corner of your awareness, as if those feelings are the size of a marble in the middle of a huge football stadium. Don’t avoid your feelings of anger, though, but radically accept them, and allow yourself to fully experience them.
After a while, check your intensity rating again, by asking yourself “What number do I have now?” You may find, ironically, that accepting your feelings in this way, causes them to reduce in intensity. In any case, letting go of any struggle against them is an important first step.
2. Cognitive Defusion
Now turn your attention to one of the main beliefs that’s contributing to your anger. Again, you’re not trying to get rid of these thoughts or the beliefs underlying them but rather to accept them in order to experience them from a different perspective, with greater self-awareness, detachment, and objectivity.
For example, imagine you are looking through a big window at the target situation, so that you can take a marker pen and write your angry thought on the glass. Look at the belief, written on the window, but also look through the window at the scene. Think of this as representing the way you look at real events through the filter or lens of these beliefs. Now imagine the colour of the writing changing a few times, and the size of the writing, and the font or typeface of the letters. You’re just doing that to encourage your mind to spend more time than normal focusing on the image of the writing, so that you get used to experiencing the thought as an object “over there” before you, instead of becoming too absorbed in it. Another way of doing this, instead of the window, is to imagine your key angry beliefs written on big white labels, which you are sticking on objects or people in the target situation.
Again, take time to picture the words as if they are located “over there”, so that the experience becomes more familiar, and you get used to looking at them from this perspective. Notice how it changes the way you think and feel about those beliefs, when you view them with greater detachment and objectivity, in this way, almost as if you were observing someone else having those thoughts. You may find that you spontaneously begin to question your own angry beliefs, perhaps they seem mistaken, distorted, or even absurd to you, from this point of view.
Alternatively, you may want to substitute a more verbal defusion exercise for this visual one. For example, you can employ self-talk in various ways to shift your perspective on angry thoughts quickly. Say to yourself about three times: “I notice right now that I am angering myself by having the thought ‘[insert thought].’” For instance, “I notice right now that I am angering myself by having the thought ‘This guy isn’t being fair, he’s a total jerk, I should teach him a lesson!’”
By saying “I notice…”, etc, you encourage yourself to slow down and adopt a detached observer perspective on your angry thoughts.
By using the verb “to anger” you force yourself to take more responsibility for your emotions.
By being specific about the thoughts that you are using to anger yourself, you stop externalizing blame by identifying the real causes of your emotion.
By using “I talk”, you shift attention back on to your own thoughts and actions, holding a mirror up to yourself, as it were, rather than losing awareness of the present moment by focusing exclusively on the object of your anger.
After a while, check your intensity rating again, by asking yourself “What number do I have now?” You may find that getting used to viewing your main angry beliefs from this perspective reduces the intensity of your emotions, but it will also tend to increase the flexibility of your thinking, and therefore of your behaviour, and your ability to cope with the situation, especially over the longer-term.
3. Optional: Cognitive Disputation
The two preceding steps may suffice at first but, over time, you may find it helpful to also begin challenging or disputing your angry beliefs and attitudes. In my view, the best way to do this is to begin by noticing any errors or distortions in your thinking. Therapists make lists of common “thinking errors” to help clients do this but generally, as Aaron T. Beck pointed out, most errors fall into one of four basic categories:
Extreme thinking, i.e., you may be exaggerating (magnifying) or trivializing (minimizing) certain things. Are you blowing anything out of proportion or “catastrophizing” events unnecessarily? Are you underestimating your ability to tolerate or cope with the situation?
Selective thinking, i.e., you may be ignoring certain details, or focusing too much on others. Do you have tunnel vision for the aspects of the situation that make you angry? Are you guilty of selective attention or selective memory with regard to these events? Are you maybe not telling yourself the whole story?
Overgeneralization, i.e., talking as if something is “always” or “never” the case. Someone may indeed have done something wrong but do they always act that way? Do you never do anything wrong yourself?
Unfounded assumptions, i.e., jumping to conclusions. Are you “mind reading” people by falsely assuming you know what they’re thinking? Are you “fortune telling” by assuming you know something will definitely happen in the future when, in fact, it’s uncertain?
To realize that a thought contains an error, and consistently view it from that perspective, is to weaken the belief. The previous step of cognitive defusion will make it much easier for you to see the shortcomings of your own beliefs.
Another useful form of disputation is to ask yourself “How is that way of thinking working out for me?” or “How is it going to work out in the long run?” A more elaborate version of the same strategy consists in listing all the negative consequences of holding a particular angry belief. (If you like, you can weigh up the pros and cons of your angry thinking, although I think that’s better done afterwards rather than during the imagery exercise.) Another simple question I like to ask, from the Stoics, is this: “What does you more harm, your own anger or the thing you’re angry about?” (After the exercise, you may also want to use other forms of cognitive disputation, such as listing the evidence for and against your unhealthy beliefs.)
Again, rate the intensity of your emotion from 0-10 – what number do you have now? Focusing on the flaws in your reasoning is likely to weaken the intensity of your anger, but so is learning to view the situation from different perspectives, because it introduces more “cognitive flexibility”, and therefore less rigid thinking, and anger generally requires rigid thinking.
4. Generation of Alternatives
I usually ask clients to do this during imagery techniques, even if we’ve only touched briefly on the cognitive disputation stage. Ask yourself: what would be a more rational way of thinking about the situation? Or, if you prefer, you can ask what would be a more realistic or more helpful thing to tell yourself – but keep it honest and rational. Another similar technique would be to ask yourself what a non-angry person, who is coping better with this situation, might say to themselves about it. It can take some time to find the right phrase but treat that as a process of trial and error learning. Experiment with different ways of looking at the situation, and explore new ways of thinking. Again, being flexible in your thinking is the opposite of anger, which requires rigid tunnel vision.
I also like to ask people, while they’re still imagining the situation, to repeat the rational alternative beliefs to themselves about three times in a calm and assertive tone of voice, in their mind. Or to repeat it as if they believe it 100% at an emotional level, and to imagine what their voice would sound like in that case. Then, one last time, rate the intensity of your anger, from 0-10 – what number do you have now?
Practice
Most people experience obvious improvements the first time they do this sort of exercise. However, repetition makes those changes stronger and more habitual. Ideally, you want to make a powerful mental association between the target situation and the new way of thinking and feeling. You can also think of the initial feelings of anger and the angry thoughts as triggers that you want, through association, to evoke your new rational perspective.
Keep working on one scene at a time. Once you feel certain it doesn’t bother you anymore you can move onto a different scene. Finish working on one situation, though, before you start working on another one. In my experience, if you repeat this sort of exercise for about 5-10 minutes each day, for about 1-2 weeks, you’ll normally be able to observe signs of improvement.