How Seeing Red Stops You Seeing Clearly

What do you do when you’re angry?

There was a whoosh in my ears, instant heat and a red film in front of my eyes.

I didn’t turn green and rip my shirt off, but the Hulk could have been my alter ego. I was furiously angry.

I had a pronounced side bite as a young child. It was so extreme that the angle of the jaw had started to drag my eye down, so I was given a brace to straighten the jaw before the bones set.

It worked; I had a straight jaw. But, when I got angry, and I got angry a lot, my jaw clicked into its natural side bite. I looked as crazy as I felt.

My daughters tell me that when they were young, and the red mist enveloped me, they shouted to each other, “Side bite, run for your life.”

And they were right to get out of my sight.

Feeling a Red Rage

My dad had a short fuse, so, like most behaviours, my rage was probably learned and copied, although I would have insisted it was innate at the time.

And my dad had a massive heart attack at age 52.

Dr Norman Rosenthal, a psychiatrist and an expert on depression and anger, says that angry people are “always sitting on their arteries”, and a 25-year follow-up study of medical students at the University of North Carolina found that those who scored highest in hostility on a standard personality test were nearly five times as likely to die of heart disease as their less hostile classmates.

So, you know how anger hurts you, but do you realise how your anger hurts other people?

In his book, The Emotional Revolution, Dr Rosenthal says,

‘’People with short fuses are often very self-righteous and unsympathetic about the effect of their anger on other people.”

This was so me.

I would blow up, be fine, and expect everyone else to be. I’d said my piece and was over it, so other people should be too. I never considered the fallout and emotional cost to those around me.

And I thought that my anger was instant. I was known to go from 0 to 100 in a second, but now I realise that isn’t true.

John came to me because he’d been escorted from the family home by police officers and had a court order not to return.

His wife had told him he needed to manage his anger, which was why he was pacing up and down the room in front of me. John had a reputation for angry outbursts and needed to calm down. He told me how he saw the red mist and erupted instantly.

When we discussed his rage, he realised he only got angry with certain people. He had been prone to outbursts with his ex-wife, which is why she was his ex and his current wife, and he didn’t want another divorce. He got angry with his mother but not with his father, and he wondered if he was a misogynist on top of everything else.

But the more we talked, the more it became clear that his rage wasn’t instant. This was something I’d learned about my anger; it was a culmination of thought.

It was a series of drip-fed thoughts about how John felt he was treated. John had always felt dismissed by his mother, and his ex and current wife didn’t listen to his opinions or consider his feelings. Then, when one incident released a tsunami of memories about every time this happened, he blew. It looked as if he reacted disproportionately to one comment, but he was responding to the thousand hits his subconscious threw up.

Why Do You Get Angry?

The human brain is hard-wired for anger and rage. It forms part of your instinct to fight predators, as it can trigger the body’s fight or flight response. But whether you shout or mutter to yourself depends on the prefrontal cortex, the part of the brain responsible for reasoning and decision-making.

In a study, Dr Adrian Raine compared a group of impulsive murderers with premeditative murderers. He found that premeditative murderers had higher activity in the prefrontal cortex than impulsive murderers. It’s thought that this shows that violent, impulsive murderers are less able to resist their impulses.

It’s the same when you see red. At that moment, you have a choice to resist your impulse to anger if you recognise it.

When I learned that anger was a slow build-up that erupted rather than lighting a touch paper, I could stop.

I also learned where anger comes from. We’re conditioned to look on the outside to explain our feelings, and this is what I’d done. I didn’t think I was responsible for my anger; it was always someone else’s fault. They’d made me feel like this.

John thought the same thing. His wife made him angry, and his mother’s treatment of him caused his rage.

But this is never the case. However compelling it is to imagine other people and circumstances cause your feelings, the feeling is always experienced via thought.

When I realised this, I consciously paused as the mist took over and asked myself where I thought the feeling came from.

Naturally, at that moment, I thought it came from my partner, other people, the traffic jam, or my unreasonable boss, but then I had to admit this wasn’t true.

My feelings came from my thoughts about my partner, other people, traffic or my boss. I didn’t want to face this, but when I admitted this to myself, the mist evaporated.

Explaining this to John helped him to see that every perceived slight, insult or roll of the eyes from his wife built up until he got into he erupted. When he saw this, his features softened like someone had erased his hard edges.

“What a relief,” he groaned, “I’m not mad, I’m not violent. I can be different.”

And he was. He understood how easy it was for him to ask himself this question and how, when he did, he had a new thought. He then had a choice to carry on down the angry neural pathway or take a breath.

Final Thoughts

If you experience a red mist, you might have thought or had it suggested that you attend a few anger management classes.

But why do you need to manage an emotion that you’ve created?

Like John, I haven’t got crazy angry since I realised where the feeling came from. It isn’t that my life is all rainbows and unicorns; I get cross or irritated, but nothing makes me that mad for more than a second.

Seeing where the feeling comes from helps you to see clearly.

And far from feeling natural, my side bite never makes an appearance.