Turning the "Anger Dial" Up and Down

How to use a simple cognitive-behavioural exercise to manage anger

One of the techniques that I’ve found most personally useful for managing anger isn’t widely employed by other therapists. It works for me, and it has worked for many of my clients and students, so you may find it works for you as well. I call it “Turning the anger dial up and down”, because it involves imagining that you have a dial, which you can use to control the intensity of your anger.

Photo by Anastasia Zhenina on Unsplash

There are some techniques used in different psychotherapy approaches, which are somewhat similar. For instance, the Rational-Emotive Imagery (REI) technique used in Rational Emotive Behaviour Therapy (REBT). Albert Ellis, the founder of REBT, describes how this method can be used to overcome your unhealthy feelings of anger.

First, you imagine a negative event that normally leads to your feeling angry. Vividly and intensely imagine, for example, that I not only refuse to share the apartment [we had decided to share] with you and unjustly withdraw from our agreement, but that I also deny I ever made such an agreement with you.

It’s important to actually allow yourself to experience the unhealthy emotion of anger, so that you can carefully observe, in the laboratory of your imagination, how you actually managed to anger yourself.

Now imagine this negative experience and let it evoke intense feelings of anger and rage. Let yourself feel enraged at me, both for going back on my word and for denying we had ever made such an apartment-sharing agreement. Rather than avoid these angry feelings, let them erupt with their fullest intensity; let yourself fully experience them for a few minutes.

Ellis emphasizes that multiple research studies have shown that merely “venting” anger does not tend to reduce the problem in the long-term, and in some cases makes it worse. (Contrary to what some therapists in the past taught their clients.) So, instead of merely attempting to release the feeling by expressing it, Ellis advised his clients to closely study how their thinking and irrational beliefs contributed to their anger, and then to make an effort to replace anger with a more healthy emotional response, and observe how they were able to do so.

After you have really and truly experienced your rage for a while, push yourself—really try to push yourself—to change these feelings. […] If you feel anger, don’t think that you can’t change this feeling by talking to yourself. You can. You can change it at almost any time by working at doing so: by getting in touch with your gut-level feeling of anger and by pushing yourself to change so that you experience different and more healthy feelings, such as keen disappointment and irritation at my behavior.

Ellis taught this technique to hundreds of clients and reported that those who practiced it diligently, for a few minutes per day for a couple of weeks, usually found that they could significantly reduce their tendency to experience unhealthy anger. He observed that they usually found that in order to anger themvelves, they had to focus on certain irrational beliefs such as “People must respect me, and if they don’t it’s just awful, they’re total jerks, and I can’t stand them.” Getting unangry usually involves focusing on more flexible attitudes such as “I really prefer it when people respect me but if they don’t, it’s not the end of the world, and I will survive.”

Ellis employed another technique, which he called “paradoxical intention”, which involves escalating your irrational angry beliefs until they become absurd. He compares this to the philosophical method that logicians call reductio ad absurdum. For example, if you irrationally believe that someone must do what you want, and it makes you angry because they do not, you might practice intensifying your anger and making your demands even more obviously irrational.

“Of course he has to do what I want him to do! I have absolute control over his behavior. If he tells me that he will jump through hoops to please me and then refuses to go through with this jumping, I can easily put him in chains and whip him until he jumps and jumps and jumps! In fact, if I want him to give me a million dollars or to grovel in the dust before me ten times a day, he has no choice but to do my bidding! Because I desire him to do anything whatever, he completely has to do it! And if he refuses, I can immediately send down thunderbolts and annihilate him.”

“If you take the idea of having control over a person to a ridiculous extreme such as this,” explains Ellis, “you will soon see that you really have virtually little control over him and that he has a right to do whatever he wishes even when he unfairly inconveniences you by exercising this right.“

The exercise I describe below combines elements of Rational-Emotive Imagery and paradoxical intention, as well as drawing on principles from other areas of anger management and cognitive-behavioural therapy.

This character in the 2000 AD comic book has an anger-dial in his forehead

The Anger Dial

My favourite exercise is slightly different. I ask people to imagine that they have a dial that controls the intensity of their anger, from 0 to 10. As in REI, they begin by imagining a situation or event that provokes their anger — I’ll call that the “trigger situation”. Initially, this should be a memory, about which they still feel moderately angry. With practice, though, they can replace this with hypothetical or anticipated events, in order to prepare themselves for what situations they may encounter in the near future, as long as they feel angry when they imagine them happening now. For the sake of convenience, we’re going to calibrate the dial so that it is set to five, and that corresponds to your initial level of anger. The reason for that is simply that this exercise assumes you are able either to turn the anger up or to turn it down, from the starting position.

If the fool would persist in his folly, he would become wise. — William Blake, Proverbs of Hell

Continue to imagine yourself in the trigger situation, as if it’s really happening right now. Slowly, turn up your anger dial, though, and imagine your anger increasing in intensity, one notch at a time. In other words, turn it up from five to six, and imagine what you would have to do in order to become a little angrier in response to your trigger situation. Then turn it up from six to seven, and so on, until you reach ten, the maximum level, or as close to that as you can get. Do not view this as a “venting” exercise but as a self-awareness exercise. Your goal is to carefully study how you actually go about angering yourself. What do you have to say? What do you think? What beliefs or attitudes must you focus upon? Do you have to do anything with your attention, facial expression, or body language? Doing this slowly increases awareness of the ingredients of anger, how they function, and also heightens your sense of ownership over your anger. You will increasingly realize that you are responsible for angering yourself and you will notice how you are doing so. You may also notice, as Ellis described above, that in order to escalate your anger above normal levels you will have to make your irrational beliefs even more absurdly demanding.

The next step requires turning the dial slowly back down to five, while continuing to imagine that you are in the trigger situation. Pause for a moment, then continue to turn the dial down, from five to four, observing how you manage to reduce your anger. Then from four to three, and so on, very slowly, all the way down to zero, or as close as you can get to eliminating your anger totally. Pause for a while, and focus on the trigger situation, observing how you are able to remain non-angry or only mildly angry. Do you think differently? Focus your attention differently? Use your body differently? For example, I find it’s difficult for me to really feel angry unless I frown and tense my facial muscles.

Repeat this process about 3-4 times, or more, turning your anger back up again, as high is it will go, and then slowly back down again, as low as it will go, while all the time continuing to imagine you’re in the same trigger situation. Doing this exercise has several benefits. You will probably become much more aware of how your anger functions and more able to spot the early-warning signs of anger when they arise in different situations. Simply noticing the onset of anger at an earlier stage, often means that you will be able to nip it in the bud quite easily.

Moreover, anger can be viewed as a habit. There’s good reason to believe that unwanted habits may become weaker when voluntarily repeated multiple times in a short space of time. This is especially likely if it starts to feel slightly tedious or you approach the exercise with the intention of weakening rather than strengthening the habit. This phenomenon was first noticed, and was called “negative practice”, by the early 20th century psychologist Knight Dunlap.

Indeed, most people who want to eliminate their bad habits try to do so by directly suppressing them — just forcing themselves to stop. Often they find that simply doesn’t work. In his novel Women in Love, D.H. Lawrence gives a truly remarkable description of the opposite technique, which seems to anticipate Dunlap’s theory of negative practice.

“A very great doctor taught me”, [Hermione] said, addressing Ursula and Gerald vaguely. “He told me for instance, that to cure oneself of a bad habit, one should force oneself to do it, when one would not do it — make oneself do it — and then the habit would disappear.”

“How do you mean?” said Gerald.

“If you bite your nails, for example. Then, when you don’t want to bite your nails, bite them, make yourself bite them. And you would find the habit was broken.”

“Is that so?” said Gerald.

“Yes. And in so many things, I have made myself well. I was a very queer and nervous girl. And by learning to use my will, simply by using my will, I made myself right.”  —  Women in Love, 1920

Similar techniques are known by many different names in psychotherapy, e.g., Milton Erickson referred to it as “symptom prescription” and Victor Frankl as “paradoxical intention” — the term adopted later by Ellis. Actively increasing their anger is the reverse of what most people normally expect the therapist to prescribe doing but, paradoxically, it can help you to cope better with the emotion when it arises. It can also help to overcome the tendency to be afraid of anger or unhealthy attempts to suppress the emotion.

This exercise can also feel like role-play. You may therefore feel that as you turn up the dial you’re identifying more deeply with the role or character of an angry person, and less so as you turn the dial back down again. Practice often takes away the “automatic” quality of anger, leaving you feeling as if you could get really angry if you wanted to do so — but why bother? It seems more like a voluntary decisions on your part, as you experience anger increasingly as a verb, i.e., that you are responsible for angering yourself rather than being made angry by other people.