When someone’s anger is directed at us, our primary reaction is to defend ourselves by biting back and shouting in return, or we seek cover by making ourselves small and invisible. This actually never helps. If you shout back very hard, you enter a downward spiral of reproaches together, and it becomes increasingly difficult to limit the damage. And if you make yourself small and swallow everything, it can lead to pent-up feelings of revenge that emerge at another time.
Dealing with the anger of others
What can help is to realize that another person’s anger is almost never about you. You are never the cause of someone else’s anger. Of course, your behavior or words may have been the occasion, the trigger, but the cause of someone’s anger always lies internally within them. Everyone is responsible for their own emotions and pain, and you cannot take those over from someone or carry them for them. The only responsibility you can take is how you handle your own emotions that are triggered by the other person’s anger.
Psychotherapist and author Shemsi Prinzivalli beautifully describes in an article titled “The Art of Not Being Offended” that you can actually consider every statement, action, and reaction of a person as the result of their entire life experience up to now. People act from their own emotions, defense mechanisms, and survival techniques. Even if their anger is directed specifically at you, it usually has nothing to do with you but primarily with all the previous times this person experienced a similar situation, particularly in their childhood. All anger, harshness, and criticism is in fact an expression of someone’s (unconscious) pain, powerlessness, disappointment, and sadness, even if it might not look that way on the surface. How often do you react to someone else’s statement by being offended instead of seeing that the other person is actually suffering?
It is not easy, but behind all the reproaches and insults, you can hear someone’s unfulfilled needs. What the other person says or does is, at that moment, the best way they know how to care for their own needs, or as Marshall Rosenberg formulated it: “Every criticism, judgment, diagnosis, and expression of anger is the tragic expression of an unmet need”. When we listen to the other person from this perspective, they transform from an enemy into a human being. We may not agree with their strategy, but we do share the same needs.
(Self-)empathy
This does not mean that you should simply tolerate everything others say to you. But if you are unable to listen with empathy because your own emotions are running too high or you actually need empathy yourself, you can see if it is possible to center yourself with a few deep breaths, or if necessary, indicate that you are taking a time-out. When you no longer believe that what the other person says about you actually has anything to do with you, their angry words will be received differently, and you are no longer dependent on the other person. You can then rely on your own self-worth and no longer feel the urge to convince the other person that you are intrinsically good as you are.
Nonviolent communication
There are various exercises within Nonviolent Communication training that allow you to work on this attitude. And here too, this is not something you learn as a trick in a few days. But every effort you put into it is an investment in your life, and it can bring you much and save you much. View the training offer from Equanimity here.