Understanding Anger as part of Mediation

Disputes come in all shapes and sizes, but they all have a common thread: anger. In mediations, resolving the parties’ anger always takes a prominent role. As a result, I spend a lot of my time working on understanding it, and (it might sound strange) harnessing it for good. It’s as true in commercial disputes as in personal ones but it is easily illustrated with a relatable dispute which had started as a purely personal situation.

A woman found out that her fiancé was allegedly cheating, and broke off their engagement a month before the wedding. So far so much private heartbreak; but the wedding booking was largely non-refundable and had all been paid for with loans in only the bride’s name, and the groom refused to help to repay them. She still had the engagement ring, which was a family heirloom of his, and she suggested that she would sell it to cover her debt. He sent a message via a friend (as is the way when tempers are running high) that he didn’t believe she would really do that. Reader, she did it.

She had been angry because she believed he had betrayed her by cheating, he was angry that she had broken it off with him, she became more angry because he wouldn’t pay, he became more angry when she disposed of his family’s heirloom. Mediation would have been quicker and simpler at the point when the argument was about outstanding bills but would still have been possible, and could lead to a better outcome, at this late stage. Going to court after the ring has been sold there is little the law can provide in true remedy: the groom’s family want the ring which cannot be recovered and, depending on what the court finds about the debts and the wedding booking, the bride may be left owing money to the groom tying them together for longer. Nobody can get a judgement that leaves them feeling settled and there will be bitterness and resentment which will continue to impact other relationships in their circle, probably for years.

Sometimes, a problem is escalated by an ill-advised decision made in anger, and sometimes decisions themselves are made in good faith but a miscommunication, a broken promise, or a change in circumstances leads to disappointment and anger.

What is anger? What makes us behave as we do when we are angry? And how can I help to prevent anger from being destructive to the well-being and livelihoods of parties in dispute?

We perceive anger in different lights in different circumstances. We often like to think that our own anger, or that of people we agree with, is “righteous anger”, but in society we also use the “angry young man” trope, and then the “Angry Black Woman” stereotype is very different again. We find angry children funny or cute, and women who openly express their anger are often portrayed as irrational and overly emotional, while men are seen as bold and brave.

It is not always natural to empathise with the experiences behind alarming, threatening or unexpected behaviour in those in front of us.

There’s a fantastic line in Tom Stoppard’s play, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead, when Rosencrantz says to Hamlet “To sum up: your father, whom you love, dies, you are his heir, you come back to find that hardly was the corpse cold before his young brother popped on to his throne and into his sheets, thereby offending both legal and natural practice. Now, why exactly are you behaving in this extraordinary manner?” It’s funny because we’ve all done it.

We may need help to control, let alone articulate, the range of angry emotions we feel when something bad happens to us. When we become enraged it feels like all logic flies out of the window. If we find a particular individual contemptible then all respect for their point of view is lost and they become incomprehensible to us. An event that makes us uncomfortable becomes an irritation. We may be very familiar with a fleeting sense of frustration about one thing or another in our day to day, but if the same thing happens day in day out then those moments might build up into infuriation.

In an enormous proportion of cases of anger, particularly if to the observer it seems disproportionate, it may be a mask for another unpleasant emotion. In her recent book, Atlas of the Heart, Brené Brown provides a “Wheel of Anger” with a wide range of other emotions which might be behind what presents as anger. Many individuals would even identify their own emotion as anger and miss the source emotion. It not only masks it to the outside world, but on the inside it can be anything from a distraction to a disguise for a far more vulnerable emotion that is underlying. Some of these hidden emotions might be: hurt or grief; fear and anxiety; extreme stress; humiliation, embarrassment or guilt; or a host of other negative emotions which manifest themselves in a defensive anger.

Spare a thought for Kenneth and Linda Lipton who believed that they were owed €250 each in compensation for the delay by a few hours of their BA City Flyer flight from Milan to London in 2019. I do not presume to know their actual motivation to start their litigation. It’s certainly a very important post-Brexit test of the transition from EU law. But to the external spectator it could seem disproportionate to the 500 Euros (and being late home from holiday by three or so hours) to end up in the Supreme Court, with the spectre of bankruptcy if you lose. I might wonder if a decision to sue was made in anger, with catastrophic personal consequences.

Expression of anger can provide a release. Many people seem to enjoy and welcome a spot of casual rage and find it invigorating and exciting. Indignation inspires courage in some. For others, the same feelings trigger anxiety and overwhelm but still feel safer than the original emotion.

The media recently leapt on the King’s outburst at a leaky pen shortly after the death of his mother and his accession to the throne. The phrase he used was “Oh god, I hate this” and were I in a mediation when I heard that phrase it would have taken my full attention. Because it’s a funny way to react to being covered in ink. But it’s quite understandable for a man who has lost both his parents within two years, has to travel around the UK within days of his mother’s death while the rest of us might be taking time off work, and must attend the funeral while managing complex personal relationships with his estranged son and daughter-in-law in the glare of international media.

My next question, in that hypothetical mediation, would have been “what is it that you hate?”. And if there had been a dispute to resolve, instead of a constitution to uphold, that would have been the moment we started to get somewhere.