THE ROAD™ Road Rage: Anger and Beliefs

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THE ROAD™
Road Rage: Anger and Beliefs

Anger arises when your beliefs are challenged.

We each define rules of the road for our own and other drivers‘ behaviour - rules that we believe in strongly and are willing to defend. When other drivers challenge our rules, as they will almost every day, we get angry. If you believe that drivers should drive within indicated speed limits, you’ll become angry if someone goes faster. If you believe that under no circumstances should anyone cut in front of you, you‘ll become angry when that happens.

To understand our anger we need to identify our beliefs and learn alternative beliefs and attitudes towards other drivers that are less likely to have us be angry.

There are five key beliefs that determine nearly all anger on the road. The driver who does not hold to these beliefs scores in the low range of the Driver Stress Profile and will never experience road rage. The driver who holds to all five beliefs will score in the high range and will have, at the very least, short episodes of fury every time he or she drives.

Belief No. 1 - Make Good Time

The person holding this belief feels that he or she should drive to his or her destination as fast as possible within a certain self-prescribed amount of time. Anger results when the rate of speed or time schedule cannot be achieved. Whoever or whatever is deemed responsible for bringing about the delay becomes an object of rage.

Belief No. 2 - Be Number One

This belief holds that the way to gain self-esteem and status is to beat the driver of another vehicle in some self-created contest. Anger results when the other driver appears to be winning or actually does win the contest.

Belief No. 3 - Try And Make Me

This belief hold that although I may not win, I‘m certainly not going to lose. There is a perception that self-esteem is lost by giving in and allowing a demanding driver to have his way. Anger results when the other driver persists, escalates his or her efforts or actually succeeds in achieving his or her objective.

Belief No. 4 - They Shouldn‘t Be Allowed

This belief holds that any driver, vehicle, driving behaviour or activity on a road that fails to measure up to this driver‘s self-created, unrelenting standard should be banned from the road he or she occupies. Anger results whenever this driver observes an infringement of his or her standard.

Belief No. 5 - Teach ‘Em A Lesson

The driver who acts as police and court believes he or she has the right to punish other drivers whose driving threatens, annoys, inconveniences or fails to measure up to his or her self-created standards. Anger, already present in this belief holder, escalates when an infringement occurs and peaks as he or she delivers punishment.

Anger is never due just to the event itself. Its occurrence depends on the context within which the event takes place and the meaning of the event to the individual. The beliefs we hold create the context within which we live. These five beliefs are each attached to the driver‘s sense of what makes up his or her "self".

Our sense of self encompasses certain firmly held beliefs that cannot be transgressed without destroying some of one’s self. A driver will fight, drive dangerously and sometimes even kill to defend them. This is why all anger on the road is experienced as righteous indignation. Drivers with road rage feel aggrieved and are impelled to redress the injustice. They feel like victims, as if they are being unfairly punished for trying to correct what they perceive to be morally wrong. Anger is our way of being aware that something has gone wrong in our world and that some person is responsible. The violation of our beliefs feels personal, even though we know intellectually that it is not. That’s because our beliefs are personal and we experience the violation as a personal challenge.

Viewed in this way, anger has a constructive purpose: It alerts us to the fact that something is amiss in our world. It‘s a vital part of the human consciousness, signalling to us that someone threatens our self-interest, threatens what we believe in. Anger not only signifies the threat, but it initiates the energy that empowers us to take action to put things back in order, our order.

Acknowledgement: The content of this training is based on Road Rage to Road Wise by John Larson, MD (Tom Doherty, 1999 paperback)