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SELF-WITNESSING REPORT ON
THE AGE OF RAGE Why do I get so angry?
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May 5, 2001
Mizue
Nakamura
Introduction
First of all,
what is rage? When we hear the
word “rage”, many of us probably imagine a person who is being furious with
anger. If so, we tend to think
that we cannot expect to encounter rage scene in our real life situation very
often. Nevertheless, we can
witness others and ourselves in rage much more often than we expect. I learned in the class that we could
say that we witnessed a rage when we saw a co-worker threw his or her documents
on the desk after receiving a harsh comment on the proposal to the new project
from his or her superior. Or we
can sense us being irritated while waiting in a long line. Rage is not necessarily manifested, but
it can be an irritation that we sense as a small movement of our emotion in
many aspects of our lives.
My Report1:
“Annotated Bibliography on the Age of Rage”
To
introduce what kind of rage we encounter in our everyday life, I would like to
review what I researched on the web pages about rage through Internet for my
first project, “Annotated Bibliography on the
Age of Rage”.
Followings
are the categories of rages I wrote on my paper.
Air rage…Air rage is a rage that crewmembers and
airplane passengers experience when they are mentally and physically harassed
by passenger who is engaged in an out-of-control behavior due to excessive
drinking alcohol, for example.
Tourettic rage…Although it is not a diagnostic disease, a
person who has rage attacks has several discrete episodes of failure to resist
aggressive impulses that result in serious assaultive acts or destruction of
property.
Child rage…Violent behaviors that children engage in is
attributed to many factors, such as an excessive exposure to violent scenes in
the media, or a social norm that encourages aggressiveness in sports and in a
way of displaying masculinity in male children.
Workplace rage…A hundred bosses and co-workers were murdered
by employees in 1997 only. Today,
not only the sexual harassment issue is raised its attention from a public, but
also a workplace violence is.
Parents’ sports rage…Parents’ sports rage is
a type of rage that causes the overheated parents while watching their
children’s sports game to harm one another. For example, one father beat up to death after the two
argued over their sons’ hockey game in Boston, on July 12, 2000.
Computer rage…This is a type of rage people experience when
they are using their computers.
According to a survey conducted by Wirthilin Worldwide for Symantec
Australia in 1999, 52% of people claimed that they have experienced frustration
in a reaction to computer problems.
And those who are in rage at computer swear at and hit computers, and
some abuse others to vent for their anger.
These are not
all types of rage listed. I could
find many more while I had searched age related sites in a relatively short
period of time. Until I did this
project, I was not aware of what the rage is about and how often we experience
it. Well, we experience rage very
often. We do not think we
experience rage very often because we usually forget about what we were upset
about or angry at as time passes.
We are living in the age of rage, and we will know it if we pay really
good attention to our own feelings and conduct when we experience anger, or
even a small irritation, in our everyday life.
My
self-witnessing rage report
First, I
thought about what stories I should write as my rage episodes. So I started to think back my past that
was not long ago and remembered the situations that had evoked my rage and I
had exercised a Three-step Method to modify my anger.
Then I
decided that following three episodes were appropriate to report on because
they are the most typical stories in the social situations that I end up
experiencing a rage, and they describe my typical reactions to the person and
the situation that became an object of my rage.
Using a Three-step Method, I acknowledged my
experience of rage episodes and attempted to modify my anger.
According to
Dr. James, Step 1 of the Three-step Method is to
acknowledge that you are experiencing a rage
episode.
Step
2
is to witness. You need to become consciously aware of three elements of
your rage episode. (1) your sensorimotor behavior that is visible to
others. (2) Your cognitive behavior, that is, what you’re thinking,
and (3) your affective behavior, that is,
what you’re feeling.
The key point
here is that you monitor your affective behavior by focusing on your
feeling: What are you
feeling? How unpleasant or
annoying is it? What do you feel
like doing about it? Then Step 3 is to consciously modify
all three elements of your rage.
First, you modify your sensorimotor behavior by relaxing your body and
regain control over your breathing and voicing, etc. And modify your cognitive behavior by interrupting the rage
routines circling in your mind.
Then you modify your affective behavior by invoking a higher affect or
motive. Ask yourself what your
highest loves or goals in the situation.
You will find that it is not revenge, but your highest loves are to be
safe, civilized, and above it. In
this way the new emotions that are positive, tolerant, and civilized interrupt
and transform the negative affect.