Laura: The High Price of Impatience Laura, who was referred to me by the court for counseling, was arrested because of her impatience and inability to control her impulses. She was taking a flight from Los Angeles to New York foran important business meeting. After working several hours on her report, she managed to fall asleep for several hours only to be awakened by the announcement that the plane would soon be landing. She hadn’t gone to the bathroom for several hours and now she had to go. There was a line for the rest rooms, so she waited impatiently for her turn. Finally, she was next in line, but before she got the chance to open the lavatory door, someone stepped around the corner and slipped in front of her. Laura was furious and pushed the woman aside. “It’s my turn!” she scowled at the woman. “No, it’s my turn,” the woman countered as she pushed her way into the rest room. Undaunted, Laura grabbed the woman’s hair and pulled her back. At this point, two flight attendants appeared to pull Laura off the frantic woman. Laura was livid and started yelling and trying to escape from the attendants. It took two more attendants to tackle her to the floor. When the plane landed, Laura was taken off in handcuffs and charged with endangering the flight and the passengers. After several witnesses were interviewed, Laura learned that there was another line coming around the back of the plane and that in fact it was the other woman’s turn to go into the lavatory. Clearly, Laura needed to learn patience and to control her aggressive impulses. Some people find it easier to tolerate frustration and control impulses than others. This is partly due to individual, constitutional, and temperamental differences, as well as how we are raised. The capacity to experience anger is at least partially programmed into us genetically. But it is also learned. For example, we become angry in situations today that remind our unconscious brain of similar situations from our past. Whereas anger may have served a positive purpose in one or more situations, it may not serve a useful purpose today, yet we are programmed to get angry nevertheless. What worked in the past may now actually work against us. In Laura’s case, she was programmed to be impatient by well-meaning yet poorly informed parents who bent over backward to satisfy her every whim. Instead of delaying gratification once in a while to teach her patience, they gave into her demands just to keep the peace.

MODIFYING OR TRANSFORMING AN AGGRESSIVE STYLE 
Own Your Anger One of the best ways to learn to control your aggressive impulses is to begin to own your anger. Those with an aggressive anger style tend to get angry a lot and to hang onto their angry feelings too long (creating hostility) because they believe that the solution to their anger lies outside of themselves and is caused by the actions of others. They tend to believe that if other people would only act differently, they wouldn’t get angry. But the cause of your anger is not outside yourself. Instead of blaming other people for making you angry, you need to begin to focus on your own emotional response. You must stop getting stuck in the “if onlys”: if only your wife had picked up the cleaning like you asked or if only your employee had done the job right, you wouldn’t have gotten so angry. The cause of your anger doesn’t lie in the actions of others. It lies within you—within your own biological and psychological makeup and reactions. Instead of focusing on what others are doing that makes you angry, you should be focusing on why you get angry at what others are doing. Directing all your anger into coercing or forcing others to change their behavior is not only frustrating but futile. Instead of externalizing your anger, focus on what is happening inside of you. After all, it’s your anger, not theirs. You will never eliminate unhealthy anger from your life until you stop trying to change how other people treat you instead of focusing on changing your own behavior. As long as you externalize your anger—that is, viewing the cause of your anger as outside yourself— you will remain irritated, upset, and stressed. As long as you continue to believe that the reason you are angry so often is because other people are inappropriate, disrespectful, or incompetent, you will continue to have problems with your anger. Forget how others are treating you. Focus on what is happening inside of you