Look Back in Anger

If you take measures like these, I believe you’ll gradually see your referrals pick up. In the meantime, by harnessing your friends’ and colleagues’ good will and active support, you will feel less angry and alone.

My client is the widow of an office worker killed in the World Trade Center attacks. She’s furious that so much attention has been focused on the firefighters and other uniformed workers who died, and so little on people like her husband, who may also have been a hero in trying to aid his co-workers. She has a point, but this “injustice” is becoming a fixation with her. How can I help her? Your client is certainly not alone in her views. When I was a guest on a recent broadcast of “The Dolans” radio program, the widows of two Cantor Fitzgerald employees joined us to lament the lack of support for people in their situation.

Once your client knows you have heard her fully and empathize with her feelings, I would urge her to get together with others bereaved by the catastrophe. A self-help group doesn’t need a leader in order to foster support and healing. Further, this group might create some type of memorial to unsung heroes like her husband.

By encouraging her to transform her anger into action, you can help her feel less victimized, more empowered. With your support, she may well turn her life around.

When a client couple came in for an annual portfolio review, their tension was immediately obvious. The wife is angry with her husband because he refused to take money out of the stock market two years ago to buy a vacation home. Now, of course, their portfolio has lost value while second homes are pricier than ever. She’s angry with me, too, for going along with his decision. How should I handle this? I think a key question is whether their assets were appropriately diversified for the goals they wanted to reach. If this was not the case, you may need to acknowledge that the husband’s decision two years ago was probably unwise. In any event, you should validate the wife’s righteous anger about the way things turned out.

Once you salve her wounds a bit, remind both your clients that no one can accurately predict either stock prices or real estate values. Then, if they are willing to stick with you, revisit their goals so you can be sure of developing a plan that meets both the wife’s and the husband’s needs.

Sometimes it’s not possible to please both partners equally. In that case, it seems to me that the wife has a valid reason for feeling that her vote should count a little more heavily. But the solution ultimately has to feel like a “win” to them both, or it will become the source of further discontent.

A colleague in my planning practice has become extremely critical of me lately. He takes issue with everything I say. and speaks coldly to me. I’m at a loss to explain his hostility, unless it’s because he recently saw me laughing with another co-worker over lunch in a nearby restaurant. But this explanation seems so juvenile. Should I just wait to see if his anger blows over? If I were you, I would start by inviting this colleague to dinner. Tell him you value his friendship, and that it has been too long since you got together. Once you’re in a relaxed atmosphere, try to find out whether you have offended him. Even if you suspect that his anger is a defense against feelings of hurt and rejection (which are not exclusive to teenagers, I assure you), the true cause may be something else entirely.

In this delicate inquiry, an indirect approach may be best. Asking your colleague why he’s been acting so cold and critical might make him feel too vulnerable. Instead, begin by asking how things are going with him. This may help you see if his anger results from some kind of stress that’s spilling out inappropriately all over his life.

Once you get a sense of where he is in general, you can home in more specifically on relations between the two of you. I would start by telling him what you’ve always valued in him, or in your relationship with him. Then ask if you’ve done anything to upset him.

Listen for his response, then see how he acts after the dinner. If he stops attacking you, you’ve resolved the problem. If not, you may want to explore further what might be changing between you. But if nothing improves after you’ve given it your best, it’s time to back off and protect yourself from this guy’s bad vibrations.

Remember, anger is often a defense against hurt, helplessness, or fear. The better you understand your own anger, and how this emotion works to mask more vulnerable feelings, the more successful you will be in helping clients or co-workers address their own core motivations.

Above all, when anger flares up in your office, don’t meet it with defensiveness and anger of your own. Instead, try to “dance with the anger,” as an aikido master might put it, joining with disgruntled clients and providing them space to get their anger out. In this way, you can lessen anger’s emotional charge and transform it into something more positive that will enhance the success of your work together.