For those of you who viewed the movie, Anger Management with Adam Sandler, you would recall a scene where he got himself arrested on an airplane. After repeated requests for a pillow from a stewardess, he became irritated. The stewardess was more interested in telling her fellow stewardess about her romantic adventures over the weekend. Sandler became irritated and asserted himself more. The focus then shifted to him and his vocalizations. Although he was not verbally abusive or rude, the stewardess' were perceiving him to be. With each attempt at explaining himself and that he was not angry, the more defensive the stewardess became. Eventually this lead to an Air Marshall coming in to intervene. Sandler's success in convincing the Air Marshall was equally unproductive. This ultimately led to him being tazered and arrested.
I use this example to demonstrate a couple ideas for those with anger management issues. First, there are times no matter how well you think you are making your point, you may not be able to convince the other person to see it your way. The other person has their own perspective and interpretations of the conversation and may not budge. This could not only apply to the message you are trying to convey but how that person is seeing you. If you feel in control and calm, but the other person is seeing you as angry, perception is reality. They are going to be reacting to their perceptions about the situation and not your beliefs. The longer the discussion continues the more solidified they could become in their belief.
In a similar vein, when trying to make your statement, in most cases it should not take you more than a minute to defend your argument. Even in lopsided disagreements, how many facts could be presented to argue your side? At some time, you will have presented all the information you need to, and the rest is up to the person receiving the information. A key concept in anger management is understanding when to use option B. If you have not been convincing in your discussion or the other person is reacting to how you are presenting yourself, decisions need to be made how productive it would be to continue. Cutting your losses is a viable direction to consider. In the example with Adam Sandler, if he did a better job in understanding where his disagreement was going, he would have saved himself from significant consequences.
