We love mysteries.
It’s partly why we love our work. We get to spend our days being detectives, investigating lives—our clients’ and our own.
A decade ago Bill and I worked together in a completely different capacity and wrote a 400-page murder mystery titled, Glass Falls. The action takes place in a small town that, we were shocked to learn, bore a striking resemblance to the town in the first two mystery novels of the Canadian author, Louise Penny.
Her third book was yet to be written and she was not the superstar then that she is today. We wrote to Louise and she answered—the same day! We struck up a correspondence, and she eventually read our first 50 pages and gave us notes. She was very warm and kindly encouraging.
Louise writes novels that explore what makes people do what they do, including murder. Our interests too! We work with people who (like us) acknowledge they may contemplate murder but resist the urge. In other words, humans.
Life happened and Glass Falls remains in an unfinished third draft. We decided to turn our focus to actions that were more closely related to our work as psychotherapists. Gretta wrote A Practical Guide to Being Human: Map and Navigate Your Life Journey, and Bill worked on composing music, drawing illustrations and making animations that could communicate our ideas. All are coming to fruition as we move more into the electronic ether-world of social media posts, webinars and online courses.
People come to therapy for many reasons. Something needs to change. Conflict with other humans is a major source of unhappiness. Relationships are not what we want them to be. We get frustrated, disappointed, confused, sad, scared—and angry. We have done a lot of “research” on anger and its many manifestations and offer useful concepts and tools to turn destructive fights into constructive conflicts.
We all have had the intense sensation we call anger. Some people are wired to get that reaction more often and with more intensity than others; some have had frightening and frustrating experiences, igniting a trauma response that joins with the anger, increasing its force; for some it is the normal means of communication in a family or culture, where they learn anger as a habit; and some cultivate anger because it feels both pleasurable and powerful.
There is the initial, internal physical sensation, and there is the resulting behavior. Both get called anger. We use the term activation to refer to the initial sensation, and then separately describe the various behaviors emerging out of that sensation. Loud, verbal, physically expressed anger is often easier to identify than the silent seethe or the numbing shut-down of thoughts and feelings.
When the outward reactions to an internal experience of anger are immediate and unconscious, we say that a Bodyguard has stepped in—an internal protector, formed at an earlier stage of life, whose job it is to ensure our survival. Anger can also move us to conscious, considered, deliberate action—the motivation to make the world a better place, or to murder.
Those who react with words and actions that reflect the inner, violent sensations create both hurt and fear in others. They often have the belief that they are only being true to themselves and that there is no other alternative. How another person experiences his or her behavior is irrelevant. There is no responsibility for the behavior.
Humans can learn to suppress the expression of their inner rage so they do less harm to others. But bottled-up anger can turn inward and do a different kind of damage. The silent seethe and other methods to shut down and numb out are short-term solutions that also have long-term effects.
We suggest viewing anger as an alarm, telling us that Something Important has happened or is happening and we need to investigate in order to determine how to act. Rather than sending in the Bodyguards with their SWAT team tactics—or a hit man—we recommend sending in the Detectives.
Vive Gamache!
You can buy Louise Penny's latest mystery, Glass Houses, here.
And if you're new to her Three Pines/Gamache series, start with Still Life, here.
