Steven Stosny, Ph.D., is the founder of CompassionPower in suburban Washington, DC. Dr. Steven Stosny’s most recent books are Empowered Love and Soar Above: How to Use the Most Profound Part of Your Brain under Any Kind of Stress. He has appeared on “The Oprah Winfrey Show,” “The Today Show,” “CBS Sunday Morning,” and CNN’s “Talkback Live” and “Anderson Cooper 360” and has been the subject of articles in, The New York Times, The Washington Post, U.S. News & World Report, The Wall Street Journal, Esquire, Cosmopolitan, O, Psychology Today, AP, Reuters, and USA Today. He has offered hundreds of workshops all over the world and has presented at most of the leading professional conferences. A consultant in family violence for the Prince George’s County Circuit and District courts, as well as for several mental health agencies in Maryland and Virginia, he has treated over 6,000 clients for various forms of resentment, anger, abuse, and violence. He has taught at the University of Maryland and at St. Mary’s College of Maryland.
Scott Douglas Jacobsen: Physiologically and psychologically, what is anger, and what is the purpose, evolutionarily, of anger?
Dr. Steven Stosny: Physiologically, anger prepares us to fight, with a burst of adrenaline and by sending action signals in the form of peptides to the muscles and organs of the body. It evolved as a survival emotion, activated by a real or imagined threat to life and limb, loved ones, property, or territory. Psychologically, it protects the ego. The bigger and more fragile the ego, the more frequent the anger.
Jacobsen: How do compassion and self-empowerment work into the work of cognitive-behavioral therapies?
Stosny: Compassion is an emotional regulator, incompatible with resentment and anger. We can’t be compassionate and angry at the same time. Self-empowerment puts focus on the ability to improve, appreciate, connect and protect, whereas the blame inherent in anger almost always makes matters worse.
Jacobsen: What does the study of emotional regulation tell us about the treatment of domestic violence and family dynamics for relationships and intimacy?
Stosny: Emotional regulation means transforming an emotion likely to motivate behavior against one’s best interests into an emotion that enables behavior in one’s long-term best interest. Physical or verbal aggression against loved ones is self-destructive. Compassion for loved ones is transformative.
Jacobsen: Why the emphasis on self-empowerment for clients rather than more traditional therapist led approaches?
Stosny: Anger is a cry of powerlessness. Traditional treatment for abusers urges them to give up power when they feel powerless. When empowered to regulate their own emotions, they have little interest in exerting power. Family relationships must be about value, not power. They like themselves better when valuing loved ones than when devaluing them.
Jacobsen: How can self-empowerment and the development of more emotional self-regulation make for healthier relationships with deeper intimacy?
Stosny: By definition, intimacy is letting down defenses, which you cannot do in the presence of anger and which becomes easier when compassionate. Healthy relationships are marked by safety, respect, compassion, and kindness.
Jacobsen: What are limitations still in your theoretical foundations in the CompassionPower model?
Stosny: The limitation is that it takes practice to gain self-regulation skill and change a lifetime of blame, denial, and avoidance into a future of improve, appreciate, connect, and protect. Some people want a quick fix.
Jacobsen: What are some common myths about anger that you encounter, and how do you address them in your work?
Stosny: That it means someone is trying to threaten you or valued persons or things. The perception of threat is necessarily tied to a perception of vulnerability. The more vulnerable we feel, the more threat we perceive. In modern times, we have attached anger to protecting the ego. Anger tells us more about a fragile ego than actual intended threat.
Jacobsen: Can you share simple techniques people can use to practice emotional regulation in their daily lives?
Stosny: There are no simple techniques to regulate anger, only to distract from it, which produce more anger in the long-run.
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Scott Douglas Jacobsen is the Founder of In-Sight Publishing and Editor-in-Chief of In-Sight: Independent Interview-Based Journal (ISSN 2369–6885). He is a Freelance, Independent Journalist with the Canadian Association of Journalists in Good Standing, a Member of PEN Canada, and a Writer for The Good Men Project. Email: [email protected].
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Photo by Brian Lundquist on Unsplash
