Helping someone not to get angry

In a way there is a potential subtle conflict here: if someone is angered by something, shouldn't we, as advocates, help them to express this anger? In this case however the individual had clearly expressed the view that they saw their anger wasn't helping and they wanted me to help them avoid it.

In a way, this situation appeared entirely ordinary to me, and I just saw it as a normal sort of advocacy activity. But then when I was describing some of the work I'd done, to another much more experienced advocate than me, whose work I really respect, they said that they'd never thought of doing that, and it sounded like a really good thing to do. So maybe its a useful thing to write about...?

Hopefully I'll soon be posting a Recipe for paranoia which also touches upon this problem, and maybe this is something like an approach or maybe even a solution to the situation. The context this time was mental health, but I also think it has relevance to any other sorts of client: we all get angry when (allegedly, we feel) spurious events get into official reports or discussions about us. So what do we do?

It seems that often people get more angry about the apparently small issues. The problem is that quite often it seems that small issues for an individual advocacy partner can easily grow into big issues for various professionals. It is the gulf in perceptions that generate the anger or distress however, not the nature of the action (say self-harm or drug use, or sex or travelling on a bus). These issues or incidents then become the focus of reports, especially in this risk-averse society. Social workers or doctors or others then start asking all sorts of questions which aggravate the already antagonistic perceptions and provoke anger or other aggressive or defensive responses.

I used a much more local and specific description of this phenomenon with my partner, but we spent quite a lot of time talking about the things that made them angry or upset or anguished, and we developed ways of dealing with these issues in less destructive ways, and concentrating on making more positive statements, recognising what sort of arguments provoked conflict and which sort of arguments encouraged sympathy and understanding in people.

Here's an advantage of the advocate's role. My partner and I and the professionals all saw these issues as something that needed to be dealt with. The professionals needed to clarify, objectify and assess various bits of conflicting information, so they continued to need to ask objective questions. The fact that my partner would react badly to these questions caused particular difficulties for the assessment part of the process and led back to more questions.

My partner didn't want to talk about these things, because they didn't see them as particularly relevant, or even valid or based in truth. But I could provide a valuable space for them to talk about the issues they didn't want to talk about without getting angry, to talk about how they became angry, to identify the issues and where the problems were developing from. This comes from a basic approach of advocacy: giving people a safe space to vocalise things that they may not have been able to vocalise before, and being able to speak about something is an important boost to being able to think about it, put it in a new perspective, and relax about it.

To me this is one of the important methods of advocacy: to help people express themselves in a way that is more understandable to others and less confrontational. There are risks with this sort of approach: you risk at a not too distant extreme the problem of neglecting people's real wishes in favour of ready compromises. However I believe it is possible to maintain your commitment to specific goals, but develop less confrontational and more effective strategies and tactics to achieve these goals.

I don't know what more to say at this point. I feel as if I haven't really managed in this short space, confined by the written word, to explain clearly what I set out to explain. I seem to have got a bit repetitive, and at this point I wish I just had a few bullet points and a discussion group to explore these ideas. Anyway, as always I'd value comments.

Cheers.