 I know for many of our clients their experience around getting to a place that society would say is success, but internally feeling empty, feeling unworthy, feeling disconnected, feeling lonely, the first emotion that comes up for them is often anger. And then we see this misplaced anger can lead to violence, can harm our communities, and all of the downstream effects it has on relationships. So we're excited to have you on today to talk about anger and how not only men but all of us can be better equipped in managing the anger that comes up from failure, from falling flat on goals that we have for ourselves. And especially I want to talk about today how that anger can corrode relationships that really matter to us if we don't understand it and we can't communicate it properly. Absolutely. As you were doing your intro, it reminded me of a meme I saw recently and it had to do with how the idea that women forever have been known as the emotional sex. And that happened when anger was branded not an emotion because men are just as emotional. We just are socialized to express different ones. And oftentimes that showing of emotion, that expression of emotion is seen as weakness. So we hear this a lot in our X Factor Accelerator program that we talk about emotions are actually what connect us as humans. So you and I listen to different music, different college experiences, grew up in different locations, all of those experiences, all of those passions, pursuits, and interests are tied to emotions that are universal. And the more you can tap into your emotion, clearly communicate emotion and pick up on emotion and others, the easier it is to build great relationships. But men often feel that they should shut down at the emotional level, hide that emotion from others. And then the only emotion that seems to come up is this anger. And oftentimes it feels uncontrollable. Absolutely. My focus of practice is an area called Compassion Focus Therapy, which isn't nearly as fruitful as it sounds. It's really all about how we evolved and how our brains work and how you work with all that. And I started in CFT doing anger groups in a prison setting. And we've got this one exercise where we go through and it's called a multiple selves exercise. We have someone imagine a situation that's really triggering for them and go through and have them express, okay, here's what my angry self is experiencing in relation to this. And then we shift and have them talk about their anxious self. Like, do you feel any anxiety in relation to this situation or what comes up? What does that version of you want to do? Then we talk about the sadness in response to it. And I can't tell you how many times we do angry self, and they can do that. They can say, this is what my angry self has to say. This is where I'm at. But when we get to the anxious self or sad self, they say, no, no, no, no, I feel the anger. So I don't have to go there. So I don't have to feel that stuff. They'll say it even out loud because that stuff feels weak. That feels vulnerable. Yeah, the frustration around being unable to express other emotions will lead to the default of anger coming up as the strongest. Well, it's a trap because, you know, it doesn't matter how much we as men say, I don't feel anxious. I don't feel sad. I'm not, I'm a man. I don't feel that. Well, actually, you're a human being with a human brain. So you do feel that. And when those feelings come up, we've got a chance we can recognize a choice we can recognize and work with it. Or we can do all this stuff to try and cover it up and avoid it, which as you know, creates lots of other problems in our lives and relationships. There's two things that men need to look out for in anger. And I would love to hear your thoughts on this. And one is when anger isn't dealt with, you maybe even use it for fuel, which a lot of young men will to drive them. However, if you're not careful, that fuel that you are using to get motivated to do certain things, if not dealt with or channeled into a productive manner, will consume you. And once it consumes you, you'll be making lots of terrible decisions that are coming straight through that lens. And that lens is coloring everything. And when it consumes you, you can't see your way out of it. And then the other point to that is when anger is all that you face, and the patterns that you have developed keep running, and you haven't dealt with those or learned to break those patterns. At some point, if anger doesn't consume you, you just, you submit to it. And then you just look for ways to be content in life. So you don't have to face any challenges that start to stoke that anger. I love doing compassion work with men specifically. And part of the reason I love doing that is that people have a lot of misconceptions about what compassion is. They think it means being sweet and soft and nice and letting other people off the hook or letting yourself off the hook or, you know, everything's okay, it's going to be okay. And that's not what compassion is. Compassion is what we do when shit gets real. Compassion is what literally what we do in the face of suffering or struggle, right? And if we look at people who struggle with almost any major emotional disturbance, anxiety, anger, whatever, what that's about is trying to find ways not to feel uncomfortable. Things go bad and it's like, how do I, how do I not do that? So compassion is really about being able to be courageous in the face of that stuff when it's painful, when it's uncomfortable. Some of the most painful, uncomfortable stuff, as you guys may know, is the stuff we hate about ourselves, right? The things that sort of shadow sides of us that we see that we're really uncomfortable with that we just rather pretend don't exist at all. It takes a lot of courage to face up to that and say, okay, this is what it's like in my life right now. What would be helpful to work with that? That's really what it's about. So and that I mentioned these groups we did in the prisons, I can't tell you how many times the first day when I mentioned compassion, these men would roll their eyes at me like not metaphorically, like literally roll their eyes at me. And then about session five or six, it clicked for them. You know, I'd ask something like what's stronger, right? The anger you use to not feel fear, anxiety or sadness, or the compassion that allows you to turn and face it and say, wow, this really hurts. What would help me work with that? Now, Johnny, the point you made on anger is fuel, I think is really important, because in some ways we like propagate that. We like say you can use it, you can use it as your fuel. But but there's some problems with that. And one of the big problems is that anger really it's an evolved threat response. The reason we have anger is to help us fight off the kind of threats that our ancestors faced like 100,000 years ago. And so when people talk about fight or flight, these days we talk about fight, flight, flee and fawn, they're different sort of ways to respond to threats. Anger is the fight response. The energy of anger is inherently aggressive. It's inherently hostile. And so it can fuel us, right? Particularly if you're like an MMA fighter or football player or something. But but I tell people anger is a wonderful sign, but it's a terrible strategy. Because most of the stressors that you and I will face in our everyday lives, anger is horribly suited toward if we act out the urges that our anger is bringing up in us, the sort of primal aggressive urges, we're going to mess up our relationships, we're going to mess up our workplaces, it's going to create more problems for us. But can we just use it? Can we just harness it a little bit as fuel? Well, we can, but it's kind of like the dark side of the force. I hate to use a cheeky Star Wars metaphors, but it's kind of like that. The way the human brain works is that everything we do or say or think or whatever we do, we're activating patterns of cells in the brain. We're linking up patterns of cells. And every time we light up that set of cells, it strengthens it. That's how habits are built, right? When we practice a new guitar chord, right? I learned a new guitar chord the other day. And you know, the first 50 times you put that on, it's like, oh, it's so hard. And then, you know, you sleep and then the next day, it's a little easier. And then you sleep and you practice and then at some point, boom, right? It just slaps on effortlessly. That's because that pattern of cells in the brain was activated so many times that the cells and the connections between them were strengthened. So what happens? Same thing happens when we're using anger as fuel. Every time we connect with those angry patterns of being in the world, every time we indulge in like angry fantasies or angry thinking, we're strengthening the patterns of the brain that are going to make it increasingly easy for us to go through the world as an angry person, right? Because once those patterns are worn in, they just fire off automatically after a while. So it's about starving those patterns by recognizing them and saying, I don't think I want to be like that. And then thinking about, well, what kind of man do I want to be? What kind of person do I want to be in the world? And how do I build new patterns that reflect and then activate those patterns again and again and again so that they strengthen the other ones gradually weaken and then at some point, the balance shifts. So that's my problem with anger as fuel. Even if it pays off in the short term, we're probably shaping our personalities because we're shaping our brains in ways that are going to cause problems with us going forward in our lives. I know people who are currently predisposed to anger, short fuses, right? And they're not people you want to spend much time around. And you can see, AJ, that's a great point. You can see how it becomes self-perpetuating, right? Because if anger is manifesting us in these sort of hostile ways of being in the world, people start shifting back. They start avoiding you. And a lot of people who struggle with anger, like me, I mean, if you saw my TEDx talk, you know, that's historically been a struggle of mine. And what happens is you notice people starting to avoid you. You notice like, wow, sometimes I'm the problem and people don't want to be, and that hurts. And the easiest way to do it, that hurt. I mean, it's hard to deal with that hurt by saying, oh, look, I'm doing things that are driving things away. How do I do better? It's much easier to just say, well, they're jerks. People are jerks. So we'd retreat back into the anger. It makes it very hard to escape, right? Because escaping means sort of taking responsibility for stuff that feels really vulnerable and really scary and like being willing to, I got to work on me's stuff, and I don't quite know how to do that. And that feels really scary. It's easier to retreat back to, well, everyone else is, they're the problem. They're the jerks. Yeah. And then Johnny's flip side of this, and we see this in our clients in X Factor and something we work on is then it slides too far the other way where, okay, I can't manage this anger. So I'm going to try to avoid putting myself in any difficult situation where it will appear because I know that it doesn't help me. It's pushing people away. Maybe it's hurt me at work. Maybe I've had a terrible performance review. I've split up with a partner who had issues with my anger. And now I'm going to escape from it. Might be video games, might be Netflix, might be avoiding people entirely. And that's also not a great coping mechanism for this anger that's gone awry in our lives. That's why self-compassion, I think, can be a critical component of working with anger. What you just described is a very, that shutting down process, I'm just going to shut down and avoid, is a common experience when people experience shame, right? And shame is different to guilt, right? Guilt is, oh, I did something not so great and I want to do better. I feel bad about it. I want to do better. That's great. That motivates us to do better. Shame is, I did this and that means I'm bad or there's something wrong with me or I can't handle it. And there's no place to go from there, right? That shuts us down. And that's when you start people pulling back and avoiding and just feeling really lousy about themselves. What we want to do is to help people explore their anger and their relationship with it in a way that helps them understand it without shaming or beating themselves up. So they recognize, oh, yeah, I struggle with anger. So I'll just, just as an example for you guys, I'll just ask you, I'll invite you, bring to mind like sometime that you've struggled in the last two or three weeks, right? There's a time, maybe it was a situation, you just really had a hard time managing or maybe you reacted in a way that you're not proud of and that when you go back, you're kind of critical of and, you know, it just didn't go well. It's not the version of you that you want to be, not the man you want to be. Have you both got something? Yep. Happens just yesterday, unfortunately. I'm sure, I'm sure if I think hard, mine did too. Here's my question. Given what you know about you, given everything that's happened in your life, given how you were raised, what you learned, what you were taught, what you didn't learn, what you weren't taught, all the cultural factors that sort of surround you, all the things that have happened to you in your life, normal and traumatic, given all of that stuff, does it make sense that you would have struggled with that situation you just identify? Absolutely. Yeah. What's it like to recognize that to yourself to go, yeah, of course I would struggle with that. Frustrating because it's not the person I want to be in that moment and it's not how I want to appear for my partner in particular and that's where it was happening. So that anger and then the shame tied to it of like, I know I shouldn't be angry at this point and me being angry and communicating and directing anger towards her is also not helpful when it was something that was completely out of both of our control. But does it make sense? It does. That you did have that happen, right? That that anger did blow up for you in that way. It does. So what we want to do is to help you and me and everybody just sort of recognize, oh yeah, yeah, this is something I struggle with. I was really, I was really kind of happy and inspired when you said that's not the man I want to be, right? Because that's the beginning of that. That's what fuels the courage to do it a little differently. The trick with self-compassion then, instead of hating that angry version of you that showed up yesterday, instead of hating him and saying, that's not okay. He's not all right. What if instead, we tried to understand him, right? We know how he got to be the way he is. We know how that angry version of you learned to be this way. We know that he's struggling for reasons that we can completely understand. What if we asked, what can we do to help him? What would he need? What would be helpful for him to respond differently in that situation? And when you begin to ask that question, right, responding with anger is all about being stuck in threat. But if you can begin to identify the situations that put you in to that, and you just, you mentioned your partner, a lot of, particularly men, it's like relationship triggers. That's the stuff that gets, well, okay, so what we want to do is get really familiar with those relationship triggers and then ask the question, and instead of waiting for it to happen and just reacting in those ways that our brains are just primed to do from all our experience, we want to plan for them and think, okay, I know I'm going to face this sort of situation in the future. How do I get really curious about noticing when it starts? Because that's what we want to do. The next time I'm in my relationship with my wife and we're having that same kind of conversation that has blown up the last 10 times, what I want is the compassionate version of me who wants to figure out a better way through this to recognize, okay, here it is, this is the moment of truth. What would be helpful to do now? And we want to plan that ahead of time. And actually, for men, this is a very familiar exercise, right? If you're an athlete, you game plan tricky situations. If you're on a football team, you figure out what are the tricky moments that are going to happen in the game? And you practice those over and over and over. Military folks do it for combat all the time, right? They do all these drills. So when they're in the moment where everything goes wrong, the automatic responses kick in, right? The same thing in so many different contexts, what men aren't used to doing is that with regard to our emotions. But we can do that. If we know, okay, I tend to blow up. I tend to get angry in these situations. Well, when I'm not in that situation, I can sit back. I can game plan it. I can figure out, you know, if I was the man I want to be, how would I understand the situation? What would I pay attention to? What would be helpful for me to do? We plan it out ahead. We practice it, right? Going through it. We can use imagery to practice it in our minds so that when we're in the situation, we don't have to be creative. We already sort of know what we're going to do. And of course, you know, we do that for a while and things get better. And then a new situation that we didn't anticipate pops up and we have to do it all again. But if we, I think if we approach it from, we start from that compassionate perspective of thinking, okay, what would be helpful rather than shutting down and just concluding, I'm a horrible boyfriend or a horrible husband or a horrible partner or whatever. And just giving up if we say, yeah, that is a situation that's really tricky for me. What would be helpful? That opens the doors to all sorts of things we can do. People tend to be pretty creative actually when they ask themselves that question. Brought back memories of how I dealt with anger when I was younger. And of course, younger, I was mad that I got angry and that I was like, you're tougher in this, you need to keep your cool, you need to keep pushing, you're just going to plow through this and you're going to grin and bear it and you're going to deal with it. There was no pushing away or getting tougher. There was a limit to where I was where frustration kicked in and rather acknowledging that limit. I was budding up against it and doubling down to push even harder and then get mad at myself that I was getting so angry. Where now at 49, I know where those limits are. I know what causes those triggers and for myself, the first thing is I need to slow down. I need to think of what is the task, the one thing that I can do now to move things forward, everything else has to stop and I'm not trying to advance myself of being able to handle this better. As we grow older, I think it's just inevitable that you're going to learn to understand yourself a bit more, but it's that idea of there is no pushing those boundaries. It's dealing with the boundaries as is. The tools that you use to deal with that, that's what's going to make you be able to handle these situations better. Not doubling down, I'm barreling your head off the wall. Well, I'm guessing part of the reason you have to slow down is the physiological response that's going along with this. I have to play a little bit of devil's advocate for the listeners who are like, okay, everything's great. Mike Tyson said it. Everyone has an awesome game plan until you actually get punched in the face. Anger feels like a punch in the face. I'm sitting in traffic yesterday. My flight was delayed. I'm going to miss my call. My wife is late for her appointment. We're both feeling stressed because we have these two really important things and I'm getting hot, like physically hot. I'm turning up the AC. My wife is telling me, turn down the AC. I'm freezing. I'm having a physiological response here that, yeah, hey, I would love a game plan. I would have loved to dissect exactly what to do in that moment and have played it out, but the physiological response was often overriding. My ability to even think about a game plan and think about who I want to be in that moment other than snapping. I know that snapping at each other gets us nowhere. Then the other 40 minutes in traffic home was just silence. That's terrible. AJ, that's why the first step in your game plan, which you can't create on the spot. You have to do it ahead of time, is slowing down your breath, doing something to actually, as Johnny said, slow down and shift out of that threat state. In compassion-focused therapy, we group emotions according to evolutionary function into three systems. The system that we're talking about, if I had a piece of paper, there are three. We usually represent them in circles. The first one, we call the threat system. That's anger, anxiety, fear, disgust. That's the stuff that evolved to help us identify and respond to threats. Then there's drive, which excitement, interest, engagement, and that's all about pursuing goals. Well, a lot of men, by the way, deal with threat by going straight into drive. I feel threatened, so I'm going to work harder, work harder, work harder, work harder, which is what Johnny was talking about. Well, AJ and I both grew up in factory, working-dad households. That was their go-to. Hard-wired. Yeah. Now, the third system, and both of those systems, by the way, are activated in our culture all the time, because if you hit people in threat or drive, that moves behavior, and particularly, it moves behavior like buying things you don't need, which your economy relies on. If you turn on the news or on the advertising, it's threat drive all the time. You look like crap, but if you buy my special shirt, it clings just right. You'll look great. Threat, drive. Johnny's got a few of those. I think we all do by now, but this third system, we call the Safeness and Soothing System. We have physiological systems in our brains designed specifically to slow us down, to help us feel safe, to help us feel calm. This is really important, because when you're in threat, when you're angry, when you're anxious, whatever, everything shrinks down to the threat. Our attention, our thinking and reasoning, all of that narrows. When we feel safe, when we slow things down in the way Johnny was talking about, it opens back up again. When this happens, I can be creative. I can problem solve. I can empathize. I can see things from different point of views. This is why arguing never works. If you look at conflicts, since we're talking about anger, we should probably talk about conflict and how it plays out in relationships. If you look at people, groups of individuals, groups of people, if you look at nations, whenever there's conflict, what you're going to see are two threat systems bouncing off each other. I feel threatened, so I get angry or scared, and I interact with you in a way that is almost designed to trigger threat in you. You feel threatened back and forth and back and forth and back and forth. What we need to do, and this is why the game plan part is important, to recognize when that's happening as soon as possible so that we can stop interacting with the other person or even interacting with ourselves through our imagery and fantasies in ways that fuel threat. Let me give you an example in terms of, when I say relating to yourself. Sometimes I'm working with people using imagery, and they say, oh, imagery, I don't want to use imagery. That's no good. That sounds stupid. I'm going to have pictures in my mind. My response is, dude, you're already using pictures in your mind to work with your emotions. Think of what happens when you're angry. What are you doing? You're playing it again and again, going back through the situation, and then you're imagining what you could have said, what you should have said, what you will say next time. All of that is gasoline that goes right on your anger. We can harness that if we recognize that we're starting to do that, particularly if we do it early, before we're in full rage mode. We can go, okay, here I am. I'm doing that thing that's going to fuel the anger rather than soften what do I want to do instead? The first recommendation is, okay, slow down the breath and then, if it involves my wife, maybe try to remind myself how I feel about her and how I want her to experience me. I want to speak to your point, too, that everyone's got a plan to you get punched in the face. With regard to anger, a question I get a lot of the time, too, is, what do I do when I'm in full rage mode? Like, something's triggering me and I am there, right? I'm right there. And it's like people want me to tell them, well, here's this magical psychology technique that you can use, and whoo, it'll be gone. Well, you and I, both of them, that doesn't exist, right? When they ask me, what do I do when I'm in full rage? The answer is, well, not much. What you want to do is create space between you and any other person or any other situation that you're going to engage with to make it worse, to create that space so you can then do what we're talking about. Slow down, notice what's going through your mind and think, okay, how can I shift to something that'll sort of help me feel safe? And it only takes so many times to relive that pattern of getting angry, figuring out how you're going to do it while you're angry and everything is distorted, coming back to that situation, that much more angry because you've been stewing on this, dealing with the problem and how you've pictured all this in your mind, only for everything to go sideways because half the stuff that you pictured in your mind isn't even happening. The other person wasn't even feeling, they're looking at you like, what are you even talking about? Absolutely. Well, here's the thing and actually one thing that can be really helpful in working with anger in terms of preventing those unwanted consequences is things is to sort of recognize what anger is like. Anger is really interesting. There's a lot of scientific studies that look at the nature of anger and there's some interesting things. So it's designed to motivate us to respond right now. So there's a feeling of urgency that comes up with anger like, I got to do something now. And so one thing I ask clients all the time is, okay, next time you notice the anger coming up, if you get just a second, right, particularly before it builds too high, ask, is this feeling of, do I really need to do something right now? Or is this just what anger feels like? 90% of the time it's what anger feels like. I think part of dealing with anger is giving ourselves permission to not figure it out while we're angry because whatever solution we come to, as Johnny says, is not going to work anyway. When I was working with the guys in the prison, we realized that working with anger, there's a rhythm to it. And the rhythm is when the situation triggers the anger and you notice anger coming up in you, you shift your focus from the situation to the anger. You work with your own emotions first, slow things down, do whatever you need to do to feel a little safer and only then approach the situation. I told you about my music room a little earlier. It's been a while since my wife and I had a big fight. It doesn't happen very often. But I remember a couple years ago, I don't even remember what the topic was, but it was, I was angry. And I caught it before I got really angry and I said, I've got to go. I just, I can't do this right now. Now is not the time for me to have a conversation. So I went down to my music room, closed the door, put on a record, and I sat there for about 20 minutes. Just, and I'm starting to soften, but it was still, I was in it. I wasn't ready. And my wife comes and knocks on the door and opens up and said, can we talk? And I said, actually, no, right now, I need, I need a little more time. I'm not there yet. So, you know, if you'll, I'll just come to see in a little bit, but not right now. And then she left and I want to make it clear when I, when I asked her to leave, I wasn't pushing her out. I was keeping me in because in that moment, I knew there was nothing coming out of me that was going to be helpful at all. And so I think part of it is giving yourself permission to not solve it right now, to say, right now, my job is, is to manage my emotions. And I'll figure that the future version of me who's not completely angry and isn't crippled by that anger, who's able to think and do all the things, he'll handle that. The important piece there, because I know some of our fans and certainly some of our X Factor members and I've had the same thing in the past, is you have to take responsibility and then go approach your wife and you're really ready to have that conversation. Go approach your significant other, your girlfriend, your boyfriend, because if you just push them away and you get to a place and you solve it, but that issue has not been resolved and communicated through, it creates distance in your relationship that doesn't allow your partner to feel validated in the emotion that they were feeling that led to the conflict. That's the difference between coping and avoidance. Avoidance is the situation blew up, so I'm just going to move away from it, but I never come back and deal with it. What we're talking about is the situation blows up, you step aside, get yourself together, get balanced, and then you come back and deal with the original situation and deal with the problem. Because if we don't come back and do that, if it's not that problem continues, it'll be other ones, like as you say, the relationship. There's no resolution on the other end, so it's all about coming back, shifting back away and then balancing and coming back. Now, growing up in a Catholic family, shame was a very powerful motivator to discipline and raise kids. I know you talk a lot about attachment as well, and I know many of our clients, the next factor, have an uncomfortable relationship with shame, because it's been used as a weapon by their parents, they've tried their best to avoid it, or they're holding on to one intense moment of shame, and they can't diffuse themselves from that feeling, so that leads to avoidance in other areas of their life. I'm glad we brought up shame because anger is certainly part of it, but shame seems to be even more difficult for many of us to manage. There are different ways anger can play out, and I think for a lot of people, the reason their anger problems are ongoing is shame. I think some of us, we see ourselves acting out in ways that are harmful to people we care about, and then very quickly we have this shame response that comes in, oh, I'm a bad partner, I'm a bad whatever, there's something wrong with me, I'm the guy that always effs it up. That's so painful that we then move into avoidance, and when you're angry, avoidance strategies look a little different than they do in other places, for example, blaming. That's a primary avoidance strategy, I only said that to you because you and that avoidance prevents us from ever figuring the situation out or doing better. I think another way that anger can play out in tricky ways are people who have a lot of shame initially, who haven't learned to connect well with others, maybe they're avoidantly attached, they didn't have caregivers that were there consistently when they were distressed growing up, so they didn't learn to be soothed through connection. When difficult emotions like anger or whatever else comes up, they don't know how to soothe. They haven't learned that if I connect with people that care about me, I can feel better, and so what happens is you get people who, instead of, you may have heard, if you can't beat them, join them. Have you heard that phrase, if you can't beat them, join them? That's not how we're wired at all. I think the way it works with humans is if you can't join them, beat them. We're designed to join, to feel better through connection, but when you've got people who can't do that because they don't have the skills or their history hasn't taught them how, and they're distressed, they think, well, if I can't, I can't join you, better that I be more powerful, more dominant on top of the hierarchy. These are the people who will lash out in anger. The other people recede and they think, yeah, look at me, I won. There's a lot of that in the culture right now too. Those are two tricky ways anger can play out and shame intersects with in a way that's really difficult. The way to approach those is to help people slow down and identify how it works in them and what the triggers are, and then also to get them thinking about things like, well, what role do I want to play in the lives of my partner, my wife, my kids? How do I want them to feel when I'm around? Do I want them to feel loved and safe or do I want them to feel threatened? How do I want them to feel about themselves when I'm around? A lot of how we relate to ourselves is shaped by how other people's treat us. So if I treat you respectfully and lovingly, you'll come to experience yourself as someone who's worthy of respect and love. If I treat you dismissively or critically all the time and attacking, you learn that, oh, I'm someone who doesn't do anything right, right? And I think most people, no matter how hostile, when they really sit back and think, gosh, what role do I want to play in the lives of the people I care about, they want other people to feel safe around them. They want other people's lives to be enhanced, to feel better. That's your fuel. That's your fuel, not the anger. Your fuel is the kind of person you want to be. And once you're courageous enough to ask, how do I want to show up in the world and what do I need to do? What would be helpful for me to do that? That's a different approach to it than, oh, look, I do this thing and I'm horrible because I do these things and I've got to do something. If we approach working with our anger in critical ways that keep us in threat, then we're stuck in the same loop, right? It's just like if we attack somebody else, we're not going to get someone else out of their anger by convincing them that their anger is wrong. Absolutely not. It never works. Now, thank you so much for sharing this with me because it's certainly helping me personally and I want to ask the flip side. In the moment where your friend, spouse, significant other is angry and you're not the one who is angry. I tend to be pretty easygoing. Johnny can attest to this. It takes a lot to get me fully riled up and into that angry state. Oftentimes, I encounter anger in others more frequently than I experience it myself and I would love to raise my EQ and to be more adept in those situations to help the other person that I care deeply about who's experiencing uncontrolled anger. What can we do in those moments? Think about those three systems, right? The question that's governing your behavior in that moment needs to be, how do I help them feel safe, right? How do I engage with them in a way that helps them feel safe? This is why the kind of stereotypic Mars and Venus stuff, you know, when they talk about, well, you know, these people listen and these people want to problem solve. This is why coming in with problem solving when someone's upset doesn't work because it keeps them in threat, right? It doesn't help them feel safe. So what I want to do is think, what would help if I was in that person's shoes, what would help me feel safe? What would help me soothe and to do that? I think most often the answer is listen and believe their experience and say, I can tell you're really upset about this right now. It makes sense to me that you'd be really angry. I mean, we can figure out what to do about it together, but of course, you'd be angry. Who wouldn't, right? So instead of arguing with someone's anger, acknowledge what they're feeling as valid, help them understand how it makes sense. And what you're doing is you're not giving them anything to fight against, right? I'm angry. I'm really angry. Oh, yeah. Well, it makes sense. You'd be angry. You know, that may even piss them off for a little while, right? It's like, are you trying your psychology stuff on me? We have these relationship patterns where we're threat systems bouncing. When you stop bouncing back, it can be disorienting. But when people feel heard and feel understood and feel like, oh, you recognize why I'm upset and it makes sense to you, that naturally helps us feel safe. We naturally kind of come down. You'll certainly get farther with that than saying, I know you're wrong or I know you're upset and you're wrong for being upset. And here's why. I'm glad you brought up the problem solving because that tends to be our default mode in many of our careers, right? Problem solving leads to achievement, leads to great test taking, leads to promotions, leads to success in your career. And often when we bring it into our relationships, we don't realize that other people can perceive our problem solving as judgment. Yeah. You couldn't figure it out for yourself. Right. We're saying we have the answer and you didn't have the answer. That's what's happening subconsciously is like, oh, you didn't see this path? Well, this one's the obvious one. And that is not helpful in these moments, especially in a moment of anger, but in many other contexts in our relationship. And oftentimes just stopping and asking, do you need to vent? Would you like me to listen? Or are you looking for a solution? Can distance yourself and catch you before you go to your default problem solving mode that pushes people away? It's not our fault that we do that. I mean, it's kind of a part of male socialization, solve the problem, figure it out. And so when men do this, or when anybody does it really, it's coming from a place of I want to help you. You've got a problem. I want to help address the problem. But the problem is that that response, as you say, isn't helpful in that incident. So what's really great is that what you're describing, the helpful response is actually much easier. Because the people around me have a lot of problems that I may have ideas about how to solve it, but I probably don't know everything. So that's a lot of pressure. What if I just say, yeah, that sucks 99% of the time? That's a lot more helpful. If we just acknowledge, yeah, that sucks. I'm sorry. That's horrible. And then if they ask me, hey, would you help me figure this out? Well, of course I will. But it's a lot easier actually to be empathic and just recognize someone suffering than to rush in with a problem, a solution to a problem we may not fully understand anyway, right? So it's not only is it more effective, but I think in many cases it's easier. Yeah, it definitely takes the pressure off. One other thing that happens, I think, particularly if you're in someone who's in that kind of problem solving mode, I'll give you an example from my own life. I'm the cook in my household. I'm the one that cooks. And because I'm the one who cooks, I'm also the one who does most of the shopping. Right? So I'm the one who gets the stuff and makes sure we have all the things. And my son, I've got a teenage son who is much better with his hair than I am. And he's got the whole, but he's got his product game down, right? And one day I was rushing around in the morning and he's like, dad, I'm out of hairspray. And immediately I go into shame mode. I'm like, oh my gosh, there's something my family member needs that I didn't provide, right? Because I'm the one who does the shopping. And I start going up. I'm like, well, you got to tell me. How am I supposed to know? You need hairspray. You got to tell me when that's going to happen or I won't be able to get it. And my son, to his credit, looked at me and said, dad, I wasn't blaming you. I just was saying I'm out of hairspray. And I think it's really easy if we, particularly if we're people who do all the things by people who are high achievement, kind of drive focused people, when other people in our world sort of complain or just, like my son was just verbalizing, I'm out of hairspray, it's easier for us to experience that as criticism or to take it personally or to imply that we didn't do our job. And what if we just pause and just let the other person feel what they were feeling or just acknowledge, okay, that's the information. Oh, you need more hairspray. Okay. I could have handled that perfectly. Just say, yeah, I'll pick you up some next time I have the store. What brand you want? Because I don't know anything about hairspray. So I think that's the other side of it. I think we rush in. I think if we have this idea that I need to be the one that fixes everything, not only will we tend to respond to other people's distress and unhelpful ways, but it also lends us to reactivity when things kind of go wrong because we can perceive it as criticism when in reality it's just, you know, whatever happened. Wow, that hit me really hard. That was very poignant in my own experience, a lot mirroring how I feel and show up, especially being the problem solver. So that's a very helpful lens to bring in to the conversation. I think the last piece I'd love to chat about because this comes up for a lot of our clients when we talk about self-compassion and Johnny, I just got back from Miami, you know, we've had a client there who the, in our bootcamp program who basically the pandemic just wrecked his entire social life, all connections in his life and some family difficulties. And in that moment, it's easy to feel compassion towards someone else who's suffering and struggling. It's so much harder, I find, when we add the self into the equation. So do you have some practices that we can bring forward to increase our self-compassion if we find ourselves much more adept at feeling compassion for others but not really looking inward with that self-compassion we need? Absolutely. I've got two or three things just right off the bat, just kind of quick things you could do. The first thing I would encourage you to do whenever you're having a hard time, I call compassion in two questions, right? And the first question is the one I asked you earlier, when you're struggling, just ask, given what I know about me and all the things, does it make sense that I would struggle with this? And the answer to that is always yes. By definition, our struggles occur within context in which they make sense. That's why I struggle with stuff that Johnny doesn't struggle with, right? And Johnny struggles with stuff probably, AJ, that you don't struggle with. AJ, I don't know if you struggle or not, but if you do, I bet maybe there are things you struggle with that I don't, right? Because we're shaped in different ways. So we ask, does it make sense I would struggle with this? And then we answer, oh yeah, yeah, of course. And what happens is that doesn't make the struggle go away, but it shifts us a little bit out of the shame because instead of my struggle being something that's wrong with me, it's, oh yeah, of course I learned to struggle with this because I watch my dad do the same stuff or whatever. So once we've got, yeah, of course it makes sense. The second question is just to ask, given this, right, given this is what's happening and I'm feeling this stuff and I'm struggling with it and it makes sense that I would, what would be helpful, right? What would be helpful? Now, asking that question is really important, but there's some trickiness to it because particularly if you're a guy that's been socialized to be a problem solver, you can hear what would be helpful as what would fix this situation. And a lot of times the stuff we're most bent out of shape about are not situations that we can just immediately fix. So a lot of times the answer to what would be helpful is what would help me be as comfortable as possible as I go through this really difficult experience. What would help me kind of slow down and be the best version of me while I go through this tricky business that I've got to navigate, right? How do I help myself? I think this question is an important one to think about. What do we do when we have to go through something that is just going to be hard and we can't escape it? And to try and find some ways that help us feel safe and encourage us as we do it. So anyway, that's the first thing. Does it make sense that I would struggle? And after we've answered yes, what would be helpful? A second practice that I think is really good, it gets at that perspective difference you were talking about, AJ. A lot of times when we see someone else struggling or suffering, if we don't fall into the trap of giving them solutions and telling them what to do, we can be pretty good if we think what would be helpful for them, what would help them feel seen and validated and encouraged and supported. So what we can do is imagine if someone that I really loved and really only wanted to help was going through this exact thing I'm going through, what would I want to say to them? If you're someone who you have compassion a lot easier for other people than yourself, just imagine giving it to someone else and then saying, okay, what would it look like if I gave that to myself? What would I say to myself? When I'm doing therapy a lot of times, I use kind of a languaging trick. You may have even heard me use it a little earlier, hopefully it wasn't a disorienting. I talk about versions of the self. So for example, I say that angry version of you and I actually, I just did a training the other day and I have some graphic that I used in here. So one of the things that happens, this is my compassionate self chart here. Love that. If you put anger in the middle, feelings and motives like compassion aren't just how you feel. So if I put anger in the middle here, we could put attention and thinking and reasoning and imagining mental imagery, motivation, behavior, and then the felt emotional experience and when your anger, all of that becomes organized by the anger, all of it. So it's like there's a different version of you that's paying attention to the threat and focused on the threat and can't stop thinking about it and is responding in a hostile way. We can't get rid of that version of us. We can't get rid of the angry version or the anxious version of any of those because those are all, they're part of our brain, right? They're part of our evolved brain and we have those emotions for really good reasons. But we can stop sending them to the gym, right? We can cultivate other versions. So in CFT, we talk about the compassionate self, which is a version of the self where we're working on being, having characteristics like courage and confidence, a lot of the stuff you're training your clients in, right? Confidence, wisdom, kindness, and a commitment to be helpful. And so what we want to do instead of getting rid of the angry version of the self to ask, what is that version of that angry version need? It sounds really through through a theoretical, but you know what? When you can do that, when you sit back, what would I say to someone I really cared about who was angry? It kind of gets back to your question before. I wouldn't judge them. I wouldn't say, oh, you're so stupid, you're so weak, you're a terrible husband or a terrible father. We never say that to someone else. Why would we say it to ourselves? We'd say, oh, yeah, it makes sense that you'd be so angry. This is really hard. I'm sorry. I wonder what would be helpful in working with this. And if we can begin to say those things to ourselves, what we're doing is we're slowing things down and we're bringing that safeness system online. And the more we gradually feel a little safer, the more it kind of opens up and we can be creative. The royal road to that safeness system is carrying connection. You hear this term emotion regulation, we did not evolve to regulate emotions. We evolved to co-regulate emotion with people who accept us and care about us. So I've got a buddy, my buddy Shane, I actually, our wives set us up because we're both obsessed with going to music shows. We're both obsessed with going to concerts more than our wives wanted to. So about 15 years ago, they set us up as concert buddies and we've probably gone to 70 concerts. We're headed to Portland actually to see Springsteen this weekend together. When I'm really in that angry spot and I'm really struggling, I'll call Shane and I'll say, hey, you got time for a burger and a beer and we'll go out and we'll just sit and I'll just share what I'm going through and he'll just listen and go, oh, that sucks. Right? Sorry about that. And then he'll tell me what's going on in his life. Right? He didn't solve my problem, but having that moment to share it and to have someone not judge me, but just accept it brings me down to a place where I'm feeling safer and I can come back and work with it. And you might ask, well, how is this related to self-compassion? It was my compassionate self that reminded me today would be a good time to get a beer with Shane. Right? And not someone else who's going to roll with my anger. Right? I have other friends, but probably if I told them something I was angry about, they go, yeah, man, you should be. I don't have too many of them, but I know that guy's not going to help me tonight. What I need is the one who's going to listen to me and help me feel safe. And that my, my compassionate self isn't necessarily the one who has to solve the problem. But if I can recognize what would be helpful here is to connect with someone else who could hear me out, who isn't a part of this situation, that's an act of self-compassion. I think that's one of the parts that is just missing in our culture, because sure, we want to share the emotional experiences of the good times, but we neglect to understand how important it is to share the emotional experiences of troubling times, hard times, that, that is where we really bond because getting through those brings us so closer together, because this person has been there thick and thin just as I was telling you the story earlier about the beginning of COVID, not knowing what was going on. And for me, it was about falling in love with music again, because as a music lover, music has been a large part of my entire life, no matter how lonely, how dark times have gotten, especially when you're a teenager and you can't figure out who's a close friend and what's going on and your hormones are just raging and you can't settle in on anything. Music was always there. If music was always there, the good times, the hard times, and with the, the unknowing of what was coming with COVID, those dark times, unforeseen. Absolutely. And what you're describing, Johnny, actually, is you're using music to hack the affiliation centers of our brain to help us feel safer, right? Because when you put on that music and they're singing about what you're feeling, there's a felt experience of connection. Someone gets it. Yes. And to go along with that, to then experience that live with somebody, right, with your concert buddy, because they have their own times tied to that music as well. And you're sharing that experience of being there, but both of your emotions that you're feeling from the music coming off that stage. Absolutely. And so that's something I think is so really, I'm glad you brought up music because, you know, you can have people like me on your show and I can say, well, this is the kind of stuff that can be helpful and this can be helpful and this can be helpful. And what I'm doing is I'm describing practices and techniques and things that we've kind of learned from studies and things that tend to be helpful for different people. But that doesn't mean that any one thing is going to be super helpful for any one person. But what we can do in our own lives, we listen to the experts, I hope people do, but we want to get really curious and just sort of notice as I get to know myself, what in the past has been helpful for me, right? What helps me feel safer? What helps me feel connected? There are studies that show there are lots of sorts, all sorts of things. Being out in nature is helpful for a lot of people listening to music. People use reading books for social soothing. I've got a series of fantasy novels that I read sometimes when everything's going crazy in the world. I know what's going on, but it's like hanging out with friends without any social obligations on my part, right? Or putting in a silly movie. I want people to get really curious and noticing what are the things that help me when I'm struggling and collect those experiences, right? Get a list of these are the things in case of emergency that are likely to be helpful to me so that when we find ourselves really stressed or angry or hostile, we don't have to problem solve. We don't have to generate. We don't have to think about what to do because at that point we're horrible at it. We can go to our list of, oh, maybe I'll put on a record. Maybe I'll call Shane. Maybe I'll see if there are any shows. Maybe I'll read this book. Maybe I'll put in that movie. Maybe I'll go for a walk in the woods. So if we collect those experiences, that way we've got a repertoire of things we can do that potentially can be helpful when we need them. Thank you so much for joining us, Russell. We are curious. What is your X factor? What makes you unique and extraordinary? I think I don't plan that much. I think my superpower is that I point myself in directions in life that feel important to me. And then whatever I'm doing in this moment, I try to do it the very best I can to just really, whatever I'm going to do, my names on it, I want to do it really, really, really well. And just keep moving in that direction because I've found that if I do that, then this podcast is a perfect example. Then beautiful opportunities just fall in front of me. If I'm just kicking ass at this thing and generally, and every once in a while, my direction will get off a little bit. I'll get off kilter and there's got to be a willingness to go, oh, I need to redirect. Is my life really moving the direction I want? And maybe that's the other thing. I'm sort of willing to recognize when I've screwed up and to say, okay, how do I do better without turning that into this means I'm a bad person, this means I'm a failure. To be able to just check in and go, okay, am I in the direction I want to go? I don't know. I think that's probably my x-factor. Am I willing to try again? Powerful. Work in our audience, find out more about you and what you do. Well, I need to get my website back up. I have a website called CompassionateMind.net, but it's down now. The easiest way to find me, my name is Russell Colts. It's R-U-S-S-E-L-L-K-O-L-T-S, which it turns out is a ridiculously unique name. There's no one else with that name as far as I know in the world right now. So if you Google me and you spell my name right, you will only get me, which is like a good thing or a bad thing, depending on how well-behaved I am. But that's probably the easiest way. I've got books on the major retailers and things like that. And my email at Eastern Washington University is pretty easy to find. Well, thank you so much for joining us. Glad we could make it happen. This is really powerful. Cool. Well, thanks for having me. This was great. I love what you're doing.