The primary condition for the activation of anger in mammals is a state of vulnerability with a perception of external threat. The more vulnerable we feel, the more threat we’ll perceive and the greater our anger—which is why wounded animals are so ferocious. Anger is the fire; hurt or vulnerability is the fuel. We had to practice conditioning, or associating, Patrick’s feeling wronged and hurt with compassion for Mattie’s feeling wronged and hurt. It was no longer Mattie “doing it to me.” Instead, it was “It’s happening to both of us, and I can help her.” Once conditioned, feeling wronged by Mattie would automatically stimulate compassion for her and inhibit abusive behavior. This would allow them to negotiate in safety about whatever had triggered their shared hurt and vulnerability. But to develop this habit, Patrick needed sustained practice, not just an occasional insight.

I concluded that to help Patrick change his rigid habit patterns, I needed to apply the following three fundamental neurological principles that guide learning.

1. Mental focus amplifies and magnifies whatever we’re thinking about, making it more important to us. As psychologist Silvan Tomkins put it, “With affect, the fuel of mental focus, anything is important; without affect, nothing is.” My initial efforts to help Patrick heal the pain of his childhood memories made those memories more important, rather than less influential, in the course of his life. Instead of outgrowing them, he was prone, in the stress of real-life interactions, to reactivate the habit of feeling victimized when Mattie would say or do something he didn’t like. I’d concentrated on the childhood roots of feeling powerless and inadequate, as if nothing else had or would ever make him feel like a powerless, inadequate victim. But as social psychologist Leonard Berkowitz first pointed out, negative emotional states themselves become conditioned to stimulate protective states of anger and aggression, regardless of what triggers them. Feeling sad because of gloomy weather made Patrick, like many of my clients, more prone to aggression, although he attributed his anger to something Mattie had done, not to his sadness, and certainly not to the weather. Over the years, his habit of responding aggressively to vulnerable states had garnered numerous reinforcements by different triggers in different contexts. The feelings simply had too many convoluted associations and triggers to make exploring them gainful. Whichever one we focused on during my initial work with him became more important because of the focus.

When I resumed work with Patrick, I focused not on how he felt, but on how he wanted to feel, how he wanted to think, what he wanted to do. This shift in focus moved him from trying to understand, explain, and justify feelings (which amplified and reinforced them) to changing them into what he wanted them to be; it amplified the desired emotional states, rather than the undesired ones. Patrick wanted to feel closer to Mattie, be more loving, and create a safe and happy household. This desire, reflecting his core values, ran deeper than the ego-defense that made him lash out when he felt disrespected. It’d become the new reference point of our therapeutic work, replacing ghosts of the past.

2. Neural connections forged by repeated focus grow physically larger and stronger, making them prone to automatic activation. This principle was first elucidated in Hebb’s famous law: “Neurons that fire together wire together.” In other words, anything we do repeatedly, we’ll eventually do on autopilot. I hadn’t accounted for this principle in my practice of Christmas Caroltherapy. I’d asked my clients to keep journals to sort through their feelings, but although this sometimes gave them momentary relief, it reinforced their tendency to focus on pain, mistreatment, and diagnosis. In Patrick’s case, reviewing his feelings about his childhood abuse and relating them to present feelings had actually given him a sense of entitlement: because he’d endured so much, his wife owed him special consideration. She offended his sense of entitlement merely by having her own rights and desires. This unconscious cycle was the product of habituated associations of vulnerable states with expectations of special consideration. On the rare occasions when it became a thought process (she knows what I’ve been through, yet she . . .) Patrick could easily catch himself, but on the rapid processing level of habit activation, he had no verbal understanding and little chance for consciously overriding his hostility.

After Patrick’s stint in jail, I changed his journaling and feelings logs to go beyond mere validation, placing heavy emphasis on healing, repair, and growth. He couldn’t just describe what he felt: he had to practice binocular vision, the ability to see Mattie’s perspective alongside his. If Patrick wrote, “I felt rejected when she went on talking to her girlfriend on the phone when I came home,” he had to include her perspective: “She’d have felt rejected if I hadn’t understood that the conversation with her girlfriend was important to her.” In addition, he had to write a solution, such as “Next time I’ll blow her a kiss while she’s on the phone and hug her when she hangs up.” The formula is simple: validate the initial feeling, empower the growth in perspective that changes the feeling (without confusing the former with the latter), and practice behaviors that will build prosocial habits.

3. The brain can’t not do something—thinking about what you don’t want to do usually reinforces the impulse to do it. As the old behavioral adage states, “Where attention goes, behavior follows.” Besides the examples of forbidden fruit in the Garden of Eden and the failure of thousands of diets that focus on what you can’t eat, I have a favorite example that reflects this concept. It’s trivial, but it’s my favorite because it happened to me so often in Catholic school: the nuns would make me write a hundred or more times “I must not talk in class,” making it likelier that Iwould talk in class. After all, that form of punishment required two contrary prefrontal cortex operations: talking in class and not talking in class. Given the impulse to show off in front of peers—and the reinforcing attention of peers when I did so—you can probably guess which step was likely to drop out of my mental processing.

Patrick’s domestic-violence class had drilled into his head the behaviors he shouldn’t exhibit—hit, push, yell, threaten, verbally demean, attempt to control—while I’d failed to practice with him what he should exhibit instead. Now I focus almost exclusively on helping clients develop habits that are incompatible with what they don’t want. In other words, we can’t train clients not to be abusive, but we can train them to be compassionate, take the perspectives of their partners, sympathize with the distress of their loved ones, and invoke their deeper valuing and protective instincts. Once those actions become habits, the people holding them can’t be abusive.

How Prosocial Learning Gets Subverted

Most parents, including Patrick’s, want their children to grow up to be good, kind, law-abiding, nonviolent people. In fact, most people want to be that way themselves. But from time to time, all of us become triggered by events or circumstances that at least temporarily disrupt our better qualities, and we become the angry, unpleasant, depressed, reactive people we don’t want to be. So what happens in the brain that scatters all our good intentions and well-meaning attempts to behave well?

Let’s say you’re living your life, minding your own business, so to speak, when something unpleasant or scary happens because of either an external cue from the environment or an internal cue from a random thought, image, or feeling. Then your partner snaps at you for not cleaning the lint filter in the dryer, or the driver in the next lane cuts in front of you, or any of a thousand different triggers happens. At this point, your brain immediately reacts with three distinct operations.

1. The primitive, limbic area of the brain generates an alarm: something bad is about to happen.

2. The prefrontal cortex interprets the alarm and assesses how bad the situation is, what it means, how it happened, how much damage has occurred, how much threat it represents.

3. A more advanced level of the prefrontal cortex begins acting to improve the situation: to neutralize the threat without doing further damage and repair any damage already done.

Patrick, like a lot of people stuck in a pattern of dysfunctional emotional habits, could never get beyond the first two operations to begin working on the third. He was caught in a self-reinforcing emotional loop between feeling bad as a result of some emotional trigger and negatively interpreting the trigger to justify his bad behavior—which then reinforced and amplified his bad feelings. His pattern went like this: alarm (I feel fear, anger, distress), assessment (I have every right to feel that way, given all the bad things that have happened to me), enhanced alarm (more anger, distress, fear).

In our initial work together, I thought that validating the intensity of Patrick’s states of vulnerability and relating them to the ghosts of his past would nullify the alarm that was blocking his brain’s move to the improve mode. Now I try to help clients merely acknowledge the alarm, without confusing it with reality. The alarm is not the fire! Then I help them assess the damage, and finally, we focus on improving. Clients rehearse the sequence repeatedly until it becomes a habit.

In Patrick’s case, he rehearsed: alarm (I feel ashamed and then resentful when my wife complains),assessment (I’ve lost no self-value from my wife’s complaint, and the shame I feel is a motivation to pay more attention to her, not a punishment for failure), and improvement (I’ll pay attention to her complaint and try to help or support her if I can).

The Power of Practice

Compared to the drama of Christmas Carol therapy, developing habits is repetitious and sometimes tedious. Thus, because of its assembly-line-like quality, I call it blue-collar therapy. The blue-collar therapy mantra is “To get big change, think small.” It has an equivalent in physical therapy and in the muscle memory that athletes strive to develop. Professional basketball players shoot hundreds of foul shots in practice sessions. Three-point shooters take so many practice shots per day that they never have to look for the three-point line in a game—they know in their bodies where it is. Essentially, daily practice of particular and discrete skills for incremental change will eventually lead to larger changes.

Blue-collar therapy requires high motivation on the part of the client to make the effort necessary to develop new habits. Of course, insight about the past can provide useful motivation to be a better partner and parent, but because I work exclusively with clients trapped in destructive habits, I prefer the shorter route of using their core values to motivate practice that will bring about long-term change. This is a necessary approach with most of my clients, whose anger and behavior problems stem from their habit of substituting power for value—perhaps the easiest and most destructive habit we can acquire.

Human beings are prone to learn early in life to associate vulnerability with powerlessness and to associate the adrenalin rush of anger with personal power. The problem is that states of vulnerability are more often triggered by the diminishment of self-value rather than by the loss of power. When people feel devalued, they try to feel superior by exerting power over others overtly through aggression or by mentally devaluing them. Naturally, this tendency backfires: most of the emotional distress that clients suffer—indeed, much of the psychological dysfunction in the world in general—comes from substituting power for value. Temporarily feeling more powerful by driving aggressively or shouting at your spouse is unlikely to make you feel more valuable. In fact, it usually does the opposite. It subverts the motivational function of devalued states, which is to get us to enhance the value of our experience. Substituting power for value is like eating when your body tells you to urinate, sleeping when it tells you to eat, or taking an amphetamine when it tells you to sleep.

Intimate partners motivated to feel valuable tend to show compassion and kindness. Those moved to feel powerful invoke shame or fear to get their way, or use force or coercion to dominate. In our first course of therapy, I hadn’t trained Patrick to do something that, when he felt devalued, would make him feel more valuable. By default, this left intact his habit of exerting power to escape the abyss of vulnerability he felt. The manual override—insight about how and why he felt vulnerable—was an unreliable regulator of this dangerous and entirely automatic habit.

Conditioning Core Value

The goal of blue-collar therapy is to develop the habit of moving beyond the feedback loop of alarm-

assessment-enhanced alarm to the more empowered improve mode of mental processing. The optimal conditioned response is an association of states of vulnerability-threat-injury with motivation to improve-repair-heal, so that occurrence of the former stimulates the latter. Rather than immediately moving from feeling threatened-exposed-weak to feeling angry-defensive-aggressive, the goal is to move from the former to a desire to soften, connect, and feel better.

Step one of blue-collar therapy invokes the high degree of motivation required to practice the behaviors that, with repetition, we want to become habits. Therefore, I first worked with Patrick to heighten his sense of commitment to becoming the person, partner, and parent he most wanted to be. We started the process by using the following questionnaire.

1. What are the three most important qualities about you as a person? (Patrick wrote: “passionate, loyal, hard worker.”)

2. What are the three most important assets your partner brings to your relationship? (Patrick: “sensitive to others, generous, cheerful.”)

3. What are the three most important qualities about you as a husband and father? (Patrick: “affectionate, loving, protective.”)

4. List three ways you’d like to improve as a husband and parent. (Patrick: “more respectful, engaged, and focused on the good moments.”)

5. List the five things you most appreciate about your marriage. (Patrick: “companionship, fun, sensuality, security, vitality.”)

6. Write a brief narrative about yourself, using the 17 items you described above. (Patrick: “My relationship brings me fun, sensuality, vitality, security, and companionship. My partner is sensitive, generous, and cheerful. I’m passionate about doing whatever hard work it takes to be more loving, respectful, loyal, engaged, protective, and appreciative of the good moments.”)

The next step of blue-collar therapy is identifying a repertoire of thoughts and behaviors that make the client feel more valuable. These will be practiced in association with the client’s recall of vulnerable states, with the goal of building new prosocial habits. I begin by asking about times in the past when the client felt more valuable. To help him or her recall these times, I give hints about four general categories that encompass value-enhancing behaviors:

• Improvement (when you’ve tried to make a situation a little better)

• Appreciation (when you’ve opened your heart to be enhanced by the qualities of someone or something else)

•Connection (when you’ve felt attuned to your partner’s positive emotional experience or felt compassion for his or her negative feelings)

•Protection (when you’ve looked out for the emotional well-being of someone else).

In this step, Patrick said he could improve situations when he listened to Mattie, but I had to point out that it was what he’d do differently that would actually make him feel more valuable. When he provided more information to Mattie instead of trying to refute her, for instance, she felt more valued and he felt more valuable. The corrective behavior he then identified was listening without contradicting—which he agreed to practice doing, especially when he felt devalued.

Patrick could vividly recall instances when he’d appreciated Mattie—like the time she stayed up with him all night when he was wrenched with intestinal flu—but he could recall only one example of connecting with her deeper vulnerability when she’d been angry, and that was a time when she’d been angry at her mother, not him. He had a lot of guilt, which led him to focus on how badly he felt when he mistreated Mattie, but he lacked compassion, a quality which would allow him to focus on how badly she felt and what he could do to help. After all, Mattie was just as hurt when angry at him as she was when angry at her mother. I pointed out to him that he seemed to feel more valuable when he regulated his guilt by focusing on compassion for what had hurt Mattie, and asked if he preferred that to being angry at her. Of course, he preferred the more valuing emotional state, so he vowed to practice regulating his guilt by focusing on sympathy for Mattie and offering to help her when she was angry at him.

Patrick easily recalled a time when he’d felt protective of Mattie. A man in the grocery store had called her a “bitch” when she’d inadvertently cut in front of him in line. The man instantly apologized when he saw Patrick, who was much bigger. With encouragement, Patrick recognized not only the fear and shame Mattie must have experienced when the man had shouted at her, but also how much more fear and shame she must have felt when her own husband shouted at her and called her names. He vowed to practice protecting Mattie’s well-being, even when he felt devalued.

Blue-collar therapy strives to develop habits of choosing value over power through a process I call TIP.

Think repeatedly about the desired change, and if you journal, write about it. For example, “When she says I’m selfish, I’ll allow myself to care that she’s hurt and show her that I care.”

Imagine in detail how to overcome any barriers (usually guilt, shame, anxiety) to the desired change. For example, “I feel guilty about having been selfish in the past, but caring about Mattie and feeling connected to her is more important, so I’ll try to focus on what’s most important to me.”

Practice in simulated stress and in real life the specific behaviors likely to lead to the desired change.

In Patrick’s case, practicing in simulated stress meant that Mattie would deliberately provoke him with comments and behaviors that in the past had led to angry outbursts. For example, she’d voice her intention to buy something she wanted, and when he’d object, she’d point out that he was stingy just like his father. (Note that the practice incidents should be varied to achieve a generalized effect rather than just desensitization to one or two provocations.)

My experience of working with clients who habitually tend to increase their power when they feel devalued is that it takes about 12 repetitions per day of associating behaviors that increase value with feelings of diminished value, and it takes about six weeks of practice to form the new habit. Thus, each day while Patrick was at work, I had Mattie text provocative remarks with which he could associate behaviors that made him feel more valuable. For instance, in response to the previous example, he’d write, “Honey, you absolutely deserve everything you want to buy. I know I’ve had a money problem in the past, but money is just numbers, so let’s sit down together and count the numbers coming in and going out and decide together on a budget.” After each practice session, he had to make a mental note of how much more valuable the new behavior was making him feel compared to the old response of anger or aggression.

The frequent practice required of habit-building is likelier to be accomplished if done in a regimen at the same time every day. I urge clients to choose transitional times to practice the new thoughts and behaviors, because what we experience during transitional times—when we stop doing one thing and start doing another—tends to have more carryover effect. Each practice session should be about one minute, three at the most. Using traditional work days as a model, I urge clients to practice first thing in the morning, before they leave the house, before they go into work, at morning break time, at lunch time, at afternoon break time, before they leave work, before they go into the house, before dinner, after dinner, while preparing for bed, and once in bed.

Higher-order prefrontal cortex operations trouble us with thoughts about the meaning of our lives, but lower-order habits create meaning by default. Many studies show that people cite close relationships with family and friends as integral to the meaning of their lives, yet those in the habit of feeling devalued and responding with verbal aggression when they see a bath towel on the floor, for example, will devalue their loved ones who forgot to hang it up and risk damaging their most important relationships with accumulated resentment. To control the meaning of our lives, we have to train ourselves in new habits that make life better, not only for ourselves, but for those around us. Instead of automatically, habitually reacting to irritations and unpleasantness with resentment, self-pity, or aggression, we can train ourselves to respond in ways that will increase a state of genuine self-value while making other people feel valuable. In fact, this might be considered just a westernized learning-theory version of metta meditation, the ancient Buddhist practice of making oneself happier by wishing love, kindness, and happiness for others.

Education theorists consider novelty a primary motivator to learn. The joy of learning is apparent in infants and young children, to whom everything is novel, but even with advancing age, humans feel more alive when learning. Fortunately, as adults, we can invent our own novelty, and the most effective way to do that is by continually developing new habits and skills, while sharpening whatever old ones we deem beneficial. These new habits and skills can be applied to ventures in athletics, scholarship, arts, or psychotherapy. Learning sometimes means rejecting the familiar, but more often it requires going beyond it. Learning to make big therapeutic changes that will endure over time means going beyond the Christmas Carol model of practice and focusing instead on our smaller habits. In the long run, exorcising ghosts and experiencing catharsis didn’t change Patrick: it was the daily practice of behavior rooted in his deepest values that turned him into the loving and compassionate husband and father that he became.

Steven Stosny, PhD, is the director of Compassion Power. He’s the author of Love without Hurt and the coauthor of How to Improve Your Marriage without Talking about It. His forthcoming book isLiving and Loving after Betrayal: How to Heal from Emotional Abuse, Deceit, Infidelity, & Chronic Resentment. Contact: [email protected]