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Anger Management In Sobriety with Gill Tietz

SUMMARY KEYWORDS

anger management, sobriety, sobriety challenges, emotional regulation, self-awareness, communication skills, empathy, validation, trigger identification, self-regulation, crisis intervention, emotional resilience, personal growth, relationship dynamics, coping strategies, anger awareness, angry, stop drinking, anger, resentment, fighting, huge trigger, drinking, stop drinking, stuff it, stuffers, explode, explosion, manage, Sober Powered, Hello Someday podcast, emotional sobriety, good emotional space, anger awareness, choice, anger build up, physical sensation, defense mechanism, passive person, passive aggressive, shame, self-esteem, sober, changing your perception, learning how to reframe learning empathy for yourself and others, change the way I think about things, my interpretation of events, my last phase is communication style, coping skills, perspective shifting, all a person wants is to be validated, de-escalating, global statements, empathy, you can only control yourself

SPEAKERS: Casey McGuire Davidson + Gill Tietz

00:02

Welcome to the Hello Someday Podcast, the podcast for busy women who are ready to drink less and live more. I’m Casey McGuire Davidson, ex-red wine girl turned life coach helping women create lives they love without alcohol. But it wasn’t that long ago that I was anxious, overwhelmed, and drinking a bottle of wine and night to unwind. I thought that wine was the glue, holding my life together, helping me cope with my kids, my stressful job and my busy life. I didn’t realize that my love affair with drinking was making me more anxious and less able to manage my responsibilities.

In this podcast, my goal is to teach you the tried and true secrets of creating and living a life you don’t want to escape from.

Each week, I’ll bring you tools, lessons and conversations to help you drink less and live more. I’ll teach you how to navigate our drinking obsessed culture without a buzz, how to sit with your emotions when you’re lonely or angry, frustrated or overwhelmed, how to self soothe without a drink, and how to turn the decision to stop drinking from your worst case scenario to the best decision of your life.

I am so glad you’re here. Now let’s get started.

Hey everyone. Today we are talking about

anger management in sobriety

with a very good friend of mine, Gill Tietz.

You probably know her because she is the host of the Sober Powered podcast and has been on the Hello Someday podcast many times, I will link to the episodes I’ve done with her before on understanding what alcohol does to your body and post-acute withdrawal syndrome, as well as a bunch of other ones.

Gill is one of my favorite people, and she is also a Certified Anger Management Specialist and a Certified Crisis Intervention Specialist through the National Anger Management Association.

Getting sober in 2019 inspired Gill to start her podcast where she utilizes her biochemistry background to teach others how alcohol affects the brain and why it’s so hard to stop drinking.

So, Gill, welcome.

Gillian Tietz  02:21

Thank you. And I’m excited to be back.

Casey McGuire Davidson  02:24

Yeah, I’m excited too.

And this is something that I know you’re really passionate about.

anger management

because you have a personal history there, as well as from being your friend. I know you are helping so many men and women deal with this, which is a big deal in sobriety, and it’s not something that I have a ton of expertise in. So, I wanted you to basically, like, teach us about when people need anger management, how to deal with it. But will you start off with what got you interested in doing this work.

Gillian Tietz  03:00

Yeah, I was a really angry kid. I was a I was a kid that really would have benefited from some form of an intervention, but I went undetected, because I was just this little, shy, high achieving, sweet girl, and nobody could see the boiling rage below the surface. So, I was a very, very angry kid. And when you have such intense, overwhelming negative emotions, eventually you’re going to look for things outside of yourself to deal with them. And that’s what led me to all sorts of self-destructive things, including alcohol. And I noticed when I started drinking that the anger went away. And I thought it was a coincidence. I’m like, Oh, it’s just my life is better. And it was because I was drinking every day.

Anger was a huge trigger for my drinking. But then when I quit, a ton of rage came back into my life, like rage that would prevent me from even living. It would blow up to 3 days at a time of just pure anger, and I didn’t understand why I was feeling that way, and then I made the connection like, oh, you never dealt with it before. So here it is again. So, it was a significant struggle for me. It really impacted the quality of my life.

Casey McGuire Davidson  04:31

So, as a kid, people really didn’t know that you were angry. You were masking it so well or stuffing it down.

Gillian Tietz  04:38

Yeah.

So, there’s 3 ways that you can deal with anger.

You can stuff it, you can be explosive, or you can manage it, which is eventually the goal. But people are usually either stuffers or they’re more explosive.

And people that stuff like you can’t do that forever, eventually you do explode in some way. So, I just want to clarify that. But yeah, I was a stuffer, okay?

Casey McGuire Davidson  05:08

And how did that feel like when you were growing up, completely out of control?

Gillian Tietz  05:14

It just felt like there was no safe place for me and everywhere I went, my life was not in my control.

Casey McGuire Davidson  05:27

So, I thought it was interesting that you said that your anger went away when you were drinking, because I am not typically an angry person. I don’t feel a lot of anger or rage, but I also hate conflict.

So, when I was drinking, that is when my resentment, irritation, anger would come out.

And one of the reasons I actually wanted to stop drinking is because I would get, you know, in disagreements, fights with my husband, and literally could not hold on to the thread of why I was so angry.

I couldn’t make my case, and I wouldn’t remember much of the conversation in the morning. So, my anger only came out kind of when I was drinking. I pushed down all the resentment, of course.

But like you said, that when you drank, the anger went away. How did that work? Do you have anger now? Like in all your years of…

Gillian Tietz  06:25

Yeah, some people will like people that have alcohol induced anxiety, which is what I had.

Yeah, if I don’t drink, I don’t have crippling anxiety. Some people just based on like your genetics and your brain chemistry, you’re more likely to get really angry when you drink, or if you’ve been stuffing everything. Of course, it’s going to show up in a crazy way when you’re drunk, but I think that’s interesting, that you don’t have much anger at all now.

Casey McGuire Davidson  07:01

Well, I love that you are helping people deal with anger, because, of course, it’s a huge trigger, and anything that you want to drink to get rid of, like you were talking about, um, is something you have to deal with in sobriety, and I’m sure it causes a lot of issues with relationships and getting the support and the community you need as well.

Gillian Tietz  07:25

Yeah, yeah. Anger is really isolating, because if you’re a stuffer, maybe you feel a lot of shame about your anger, and if you’re explosive, it’s really impacting your relationships. People could be afraid of you, or they don’t want to be around you, and both sides, I think, negatively impact the relationship.

Stuffers will have a bunch of resentments towards other people. They may be passive aggressive, and that’s the only way that they can kind of state their case. And studies have even found, too, that people that are more angry are more likely to relapse.

So, if you can’t figure out how to regulate it, you’re in the danger zone. I mean, I didn’t relapse from anger, and I had a ton of it, so it’s not like if you’re angry, therefore you’re going to relapse. It just increases the risk.

Casey McGuire Davidson  08:19

Yeah, that makes sense, because emotional sobriety and sort of keeping yourself in a good emotional space is really important.

You talk about, sort of the 5 signs that you need anger management.

Will you tell us about those?

Gillian Tietz  08:35

Yeah, so there’s a few signs of angry people. There’s a few things that most of us have in common. Maybe you don’t have all of them, but I think a lot of people will resonate with this feeling of being rushed and maybe highly anxious. People will feel that way as well. But when you’re really angry, your breathing is shallow, everything feels like an emergency and like a big deal, but also a huge frustration. And because you’re rushing around, that’s when people get their shirt caught in the door and then they freak out, or they drop everything and freak out like you’re just more likely to escalate your own anger, but when you’re walking around overwhelmed all the time, of course, you’re going to feel rushed and urgency because you don’t know how to regulate the overwhelm and bring it down. That was when I had a lot.

And there was, I don’t know if you scroll reels very much, but there was this reel of this boy, maybe like 10 or 12, and he was coming home from school, and he had stuff in his hands, and he’s trying to get the door open, and the screen door like slams on his back, and he flips out like he’s. F bombs everywhere. He’s like, punching and kicking the door, and people laugh when they see that, but like, that’s a really angry kid who needs a hug and a lot of support. So that rushing feeling is going to make everything a huge deal, and also low patience.

Everybody is an idiot. Nobody has any common sense. Why don’t they just do it my way? If only they would, everything would be better. So not being able to tolerate other people’s stuff, feeling like you need to recover for long periods of time after you get angry. That’s because if you get angry enough, you have a rage hangover, where all of the stress chemicals make you feel physically ill, and then it shows up a lot with communication style.

So, people will be passive aggressive. They might steamroll other people and be really controlling and aggressive with them, or they may just be completely passive and never communicate their needs and just stuff it and resent everybody. If you have ever thought in your head that people should just know that’s a sign that you need to work on your communication, because nobody’s going to know your rules for a living and your needs and your expectations unless you communicate those things.

Casey McGuire Davidson  11:39

That makes a lot of sense. So, when you sort of identify like, Okay, I think the strategies I’ve been using to deal with my anger, the way I feel or these overwhelming feelings, haven’t been working. I know that you help men and women with anger management.

Will you tell us some of the steps that you take people through how, what the beginning is of being helped?

Gillian Tietz  12:09

Yeah, the very first step is anger awareness. Because once you have awareness, you have choice.

And you might be thinking like, Well, duh, they know that they’re angry. That’s why they’re talking to you about it. And yeah, they know that they’re angry, and they know that they blow up, but they don’t have awareness of the process of the anger building, and that, just like with drinking, you can have a craving that builds all day long, and you’re not aware of it until it’s an emergency, and then you can’t cope with it and you drink.

It’s the same thing with angry people. It builds most of the time, and if you can bring awareness to the process of it building up, you can actually use tools to regulate it. It’s really hard to regulate anger when you’re in like, full outrage mode. So, I think that is the first step for everybody.

Casey McGuire Davidson 

Hi there. If you’re listening to this episode, and have been trying to take a break from drinking, but keep starting and stopping and starting again, I want to invite you to take a look at my on demand coaching course, The Sobriety Starter Kit.

 

The Sobriety Starter Kit is an online self study sober coaching course that will help you quit drinking and build a life you love without alcohol without white knuckling it or hating the process. The course includes the exact step by step coaching framework I work through with my private coaching clients, but at a much more affordable price than one on one coaching. And the sobriety starter kit is ready, waiting and available to support you anytime you need it. And when it fits into your schedule. You don’t need to work your life around group meetings or classes at a specific day or time.

This course is not a 30 day challenge, or a one day at a time approach. Instead, it’s a step by step formula for changing your relationship with alcohol. The course will help you turn the decision to stop drinking, from your worst case scenario to the best decision of your life.

You will sleep better and have more energy, you’ll look better and feel better. You’ll have more patience and less anxiety. And with my approach, you won’t feel deprived or isolated in the process. So if you’re interested in learning more about all the details, please go to www.sobrietystarterkit.com. You can start at any time and I would love to see you in the course 

Casey McGuire Davidson  13:06

And so how do you bring awareness to the anger? Is it like journaling or noting how your body feels or like what the trigger was?

Gillian Tietz  13:15

Yeah, trigger identification is eventually critical so that you can adjust the way that you think or adjust the trigger.

A lot of anger build up is going to start as physical sensations.

So, you might notice that your hands are starting to clench, or everything feels really tight. You’ll notice that you have that rushing feeling where everything’s urgent, but you’re not really sure what is urgent, and you might have anxiety that builds a loss of control feeling. And there’s also going to be some repetitive spiraling thoughts that appear that are really uncomfortable.

So, anger is a defense mechanism to stuff that’s uncomfortable.

So, something happens. It makes you feel vulnerable, small, out of control, and that’s really uncomfortable to feel. So instead, you get angry about it. So, you have to detect also, like, what’s that emotion that anger is protecting you from? Is it pain? Is it embarrassment? Is it anxiety? Is it grief? So, there’s a lot going on. There’s a lot of detective work in anger management, but it’s possible to regulate it and feel better.

Casey McGuire Davidson  14:45

Yeah, so you mentioned that there was sort of this anger and shame loop that people go through. Does that happen regardless of whether you’re stuffing it down or it’s explosive and what does that feel like?

Gillian Tietz  15:03

Yes, I can tell you both versions for the stuffers and the people that are more explosive.

The explosive people are going to be ashamed of their behavior because they’re scaring other people. Maybe they’re being violent like maybe they’re wall punching, maybe they’re self-harming, and they’re ashamed of that behavior. So ,that’s the majority of their shame.

The stuffers, a lot of times they’re just ashamed of the fact that they are angry, like they’re ashamed of having the emotion at all, not even their response.

If they’re a passive person, they might be ashamed that they Oh, I didn’t stand up for myself again. They might ruminate on what they wish they said to that idiot for like, 3 hours at night, or the passive aggressive person feels ashamed of the awkward, passive aggressive comment that they wish they didn’t say, but a lot of times it’s people being ashamed of being angry at all.

So how can you cope with something that you’re so uncomfortable feeling?

Casey McGuire Davidson  16:13

Wonder if that’s when you said that I’ve had a lot of discussions with people about being a woman in the emotions that we are not supposed to feel right. We are always supposed to be nice and helpful and accommodating and kind and definitely not angry or bitter or resentful. I mean, anger is a huge one that I feel like you are not supposed to feel. Do you feel like that? I mean, I would assume both sexes do the stuffing and the explosive. But is there any difference? Do you think in terms of who feels what? More?

Gillian Tietz  16:50

I think women will have more shame about the actual emotion. Men will have more shame about what they do in response to the emotion.

Women will have both. Some, I’ll take that back. Women just have shame about, like, the whole thing, having the emotion at all because they’re women aren’t supposed to be angry. Then they’re ashamed of how they didn’t deal with it, or how they did deal with it, and men are more typically ashamed of the after part, like what they did about the anger, whether that’s taking it out on themselves some more like self-harm kind of stuff, or wall punching, or if they, like, get really aggressive in other people’s faces, they’re typically ashamed of that part because anger is more acceptable for men to feel than women.

Casey McGuire Davidson  17:37

Yeah, definitely, and the loss of control that happens with the explosive behavior. What does that look like and feel like? How do you manage that that comes with anger awareness?

Gillian Tietz  17:52

Because, um, once you get to a certain level of anger, your brain starts kind of shutting down. A lot of people who have significant anger will say that they like blacked out and they don’t remember what they said. And it’s not because they’re an idiot or it’s like a defense mechanism. It’s because once you get really, really filled with rage. It starts shutting down the higher order parts of the brain and the memory center and all that, so you can’t make a rational choice. You are losing time and memory, and you’re just reacting impulsively and instinctually. You feel like you’re being threatened, and you’re at risk.

So, anger awareness is about trying to prevent people from getting to that level of anger, because once you’re there, you’re very limited with how you can deal with it, because you can’t use your full brain power.

Casey McGuire Davidson  18:58

Yeah, and so as you are working in anger management, I know you have a fantastic course. I want you to tell people about, sort of what you help take them through. And I know you work one on one, and sometimes with groups of people on anger. What does that look like? I mean, we talked about awareness. We talked about, you know, identifying the emotions. But how would someone if they’re feeling angry, if they were working with you in your course or something else, what would they go through?

Gillian Tietz  19:30

Yeah, so the beginning, I feel like there’s 3 phases that I like to take people through.

The beginning is a lot of anger education, anger awareness like, what is that turning point for you? Because your anger looks different from my anger. I can’t really tell you what the turning point is for you and bringing awareness to earlier in the path of getting rageful, once you identify that you. It’s a lot of thinking work, angry people make themselves angry because we take a situation and we interpret it in ways that are really painful, and we take things personally, we make it all about us, and we’re not just reacting to one situation. We might be bringing in, like, 20 years of stuff or stuff from our childhood, and looping that in with the current situation. So, then it’s really upsetting.

And like I said earlier, people will tend to ruminate. So, they’ll think about what that person said and what they wish they said. And if you think about something in a loop for three hours in the middle of the night, it’s going to make you angry.

So, a huge part of the process is working on changing your perception, learning how to reframe learning empathy for yourself and others. That’s been critical for me is to change the way that I think about things and my interpretation of events, and then my last phase is communication style.

So, whether you’re aggressive or passive, aggressive or passive, working you towards being able to set a boundary and communicate your needs, how to like say no to people, how to tell people what you want, how to be just direct and to the point. And that will help people prevent, like, all this interpersonal anger that happens, like with idiots at work.

So, I feel like it’s the awareness and coping skills and communication style and perspective shifting, and that’s like a secret sauce for anger management.

Casey McGuire Davidson  21:52

And does it help? I know in your group, you know your group coaching, you bring people together. Does it help to be around other people who are struggling with similar things.

Gillian Tietz  22:02

Yeah, I’ve heard, I’ve heard both, some people prefer to work on it privately because they feel ashamed of it. Other people really like being in a group environment, because they hear stories from other people, and they’re like, Oh, wow. Other people do that, or other people feel that way. I know a lot of men have benefited from any time I have like an aggressive woman in the group, they’re like, oh, women are like that too. It’s not just us. So, yeah, I think, and it opens up your mind to considering other perspectives, which is a key part of the process, too.

Casey McGuire Davidson  22:48

Yeah, that reminds me of sobriety, because obviously, you know, I do private coaching, and some people just really want that one on one attention, and also don’t want to share in a bigger group. They’re private. They don’t want to talk about it. Whereas other people love meeting other women, in my case, who are struggling with the same thing, who are going through the same triggers and finding that you know that like me too. It’s not just me area. So, I can imagine it’s, it’s sort of your personal style in terms of what you need.

Gillian Tietz  23:23

Yeah, exactly. Everybody’s different.

Casey McGuire Davidson  23:27

So, you said, you were reframing and offering yourself more self-compassion when you feel that anger, and that’s helped you move through it. Can you give us any examples of what that looks like?

Gillian Tietz  23:40

This was recent. I have a walking path behind my house. I wake up, I it’s fall, I throw on my favorite sweatshirt, I’m still wearing my pajamas, and I go on a walk and get a Starbucks and like, look at nature and get the fresh air, and it’s good for my mental health. I had this freaking guy come up to me last week, and I took my headphones out, and he’s like, you’re either wearing the same sweatshirt every day or you have 12 of those. And it’s like, what? What, dude, yeah, and I’m one of the people that doesn’t react in the moment, and I don’t say what I wish I said, and then I stew on it, and I fantasize about what I would have said. And I started doing a little of that, and I was like, who says that? Like, you know, he’s ruining my walk for me. Why is he the sweatshirt police? And I started doing that kind of behavior. And anger awareness. I noticed it was building, and it wasn’t going to build into a full outrage, not everything.

Yeah, but I was able to find some humor, and I thought, at least I’m not wearing the same pants, too. And that made me laugh. And it didn’t fix the problem, but it stopped the escalation. So simple, very, very simple shifts that you believe are helpful to stop the loop, and eventually you can find empathy for other people. Like, why might someone say that? Why might they behave that way? So, then it depersonalizes it.

Casey McGuire Davidson  25:40

Yeah, yeah. And you said that in reference to something else too. We had briefly talked about something that had happened that I thought would have gotten you very angry, because I think it would have made most people angry, and you said it didn’t, because you were able to have empathy for the person. And, I mean, that was amazing to me, yeah.

Gillian Tietz  26:04

And, to provide a small amount of context, somebody recently talked a lot of trash about me somewhere and drew my husband. He was so mad. Yeah, so mad. He’s like, give me this person’s name.

Casey McGuire Davidson  26:25

Oh my God, I played it for Mike. And I was like, WTF? I was like, I would be so rageful. What the hell this is bullshit? So, like, I was angry on your behalf. Thank you for being angry for me. You’re welcome, and I’m not even an angry person, right?

Gillian Tietz  26:39

Yeah, and I was really proud of the fact that I did not get angry in that moment.

At first, I was like, Oh, my god, is this real? And then, as I listened to more of it, I was just like, first, I was impressed at how two people can interpret one situation so differently, then it was a really good lesson for me in myself and in the past, where I would take things really personally and make them this huge thing and get all triggered and blow up my life over it, and the other person is interpreting it a completely different way. So, I thought it was a really nice life lesson for me. And then I just saw what was behind it. I saw the struggles that they must have, and I was able to dismiss it. I mean, did it cause a lot of stress? Did it float my week trying to manage it?

Casey McGuire Davidson  27:39

Yeah, but, but, like, even though they were completely trash talking, you, you didn’t get angry. No, that’s, that’s a mic drop moment. I mean, that’s incredible to me, because I would not have been able, as a people pleaser, who it is very important to me that people like me, because it makes me feel, what, uncomfortable, unsafe, whatever people don’t that would have been hard for me. And like, anger is a defense mechanism, right? It’s easier to be angry than to be scared or to be hurt, right?

Gillian Tietz  28:13

Yeah, and I have always taken it I’m working on this right now, really hard. Like, this idea that everybody has to like me, if I don’t think that someone likes me, I take it as like, I’m bad, I’m a loser. Like, all these bad qualities about me, not just that we don’t vibe or we don’t get along. Yeah, and I’ve been really working on not doing that, and I was very proud of the way that I handled that situation emotionally.

Casey McGuire Davidson  28:48

Yeah, yeah. I feel like I’ve grown a little bit in terms of that. I call myself a recovering people pleaser, because I try to remember like, three things.

The first is like, however someone reacts to you is really 90% about them, what they’re going through in that specific moment, what’s being triggered in them, and only 10% about whatever you did or didn’t do like that’s helped me.

The other thing is, if people don’t approve of me, this was like my former boss who wanted me to, like, travel and work weekends and do all this stuff. I had to be like, Okay, do I want their life? Do I want their values, their schedule, their life? And if I don’t, by definition, they need to disapprove of me, because I don’t want to live the way by their values.

And the third is just something I have up on my vision boards for a while.

One was like,

you may be too much for some people. Those aren’t your people.

and that, like, kind of helped me too.

Gillian Tietz  29:53

I like that a lot. And not everybody has the same values as us, and we accept that like we. We think there’s a right way and there’s a wrong way, and our way is the right way. And if everybody isn’t doing that, they’re wrong. But people have different values for all sorts of reasons, and it doesn’t make them bad.

Casey McGuire Davidson  30:14

Yeah, they’re doing different histories and different traumas and priorities.

Gillian Tietz  30:20

Yeah. And you’re so right about somebody bringing in their whole life story into one little thing that you did and reacting to it like that. And you don’t know how much work other people have done, the less work that they’ve done, the more reactive they’re going to be.

Casey McGuire Davidson  30:38

And when you say work, I’m assuming you mean sort of like therapy, self-awareness, coping tools, all that kind of stuff.

Gillian Tietz  30:46

Yeah, I think awareness work is has been the most important for me, because once I understand myself, it’s the same reason I like all the science stuff. Once I understand it, it depersonalizes it, and I can kind of step outside and be that curious observer that everybody you know, they always tell you to, like, get curious. And I never knew what that meant. It’s like, get curious about what I’m pissed.

Yeah, there’s nothing to be curious about. But now I do understand and the fact that I have so much, I hope, awareness, that I can be the curious observer, has changed everything and how I deal with situations.

Casey McGuire Davidson  31:26

Yeah, yeah. I mean, I think it is really important, because so many of us see the world as black and white, right, like I’m right, you’re wrong, and just having more compassion for yourself, but also for other people, realizing that they’re coming from a different place too. It can de-escalate a lot of things, but that’s hard to do in the moment.

Gillian Tietz  31:50

It’s very difficult. Empathy is a super challenging skill. It’s something that drinkers are not good at. It’s one of the very last things that recovers in the brain, is the ability to feel empathy for others and like, recognize emotions on other people’s faces. So, we’re bad at it, and then if you’re also an angry person, now you’re extra bad at it. But when I did my crisis intervention training, that’s the first step to de-escalating a person is having empathy for them. It’s so important.

Casey McGuire Davidson  32:32

So, tell me about that I was, I was going to ask about the crisis intervention like, what did you learn in that and how is that applied?

Gillian Tietz  32:41

Yeah, I loved that training. I had to de-escalate actors that were pretending to be in crisis, and it was really scary. And the last one that I did, the instructor wasn’t going to step in and help me if, like, we couldn’t pause the scene. So, I felt really alone and scared, even though I was being observed in a whole room of instructors and other people doing the certification, and I just had to keep de-escalating this person. So, it was super valuable.

But 2 things I think that I applied to my life from that training is the importance of validating other people. Nobody wants to feel dismissed or like their feelings are wrong or bad or too much or too little, so validating people’s experiences and then also bringing in global statements. For example, if you’re trying to de-escalate somebody who lives on the street and is really triggered, you might say something like, everyone deserves a safe place to sleep, not you, everybody. So, you make it global, and that’s what I found, helps me with my anger as well. Everybody gets reactive. Sometimes, nobody’s perfect. These global statements are very beneficial because they broaden your view, and it calms you down, so you’re not focused on your target, which is whatever idiot you’re you have a problem with.

Casey McGuire Davidson  34:28

Yeah, when you said that, it was interesting because I remembered 2 things. And you can tell me if this is, like, totally insulting, and I don’t mean it this way, but when so one is something I learned, and then one is how I saw it applied to me.

So, when my kids were toddlers, they would like, get so frustrated, their like, bodies would be overwhelmed. They would be so angry. And you know, as a parent, I started trying to be like, distract them, deflect, minim. Eyes, etc. And then I read some book, and it was like, talk to them about, like, No, you have to, like, match their frustration and be like, you’re angry. And they’re like, and be like, you don’t want to. They’re like, anyway, it worked like a charm. Like they were just like, yes. And so I went into work, and something happened at this startup that I was just like, this is total bullshit. Blah, blah, blah. Like, I’d done all this work, and they changed it, and someone was like, You’re pissed. And I was like, I’m so pissed. And they were like, This is not fair. And I was like, it isn’t fair. And they were like, that was total crap. I was like, it was such crap. And I was like, oh my god, they did it to me, and it totally worked. I just wanted someone to like, mirror how pissed I was and be like, Okay, you get it. I can let it go now.

Gillian Tietz  35:49

Yeah, it calms you down, right? And does that for me all the time, all the time, exactly like you just described. And it works so well.

Casey McGuire Davidson  36:01

And I like to be like, Why don’t you go for a walk and get an ice cream? And you’re like, Fuck you, yeah.

Gillian Tietz  36:05

Or, or let’s play devil’s advocate. Or at least, you know you have this problem, and not this worst problem that just makes you more angry and hyped up. But matching energies is really important for validation. I love that you said it that way, and I do want to add too, because women have a lot of shame about their anger.

I get a ton of angry moms whose anger is directed towards their kids and maybe their spouse or partner, yeah, and that causes so much shame on top of the shame of just being angry, but it’s really, really common, and moms will get into the back and forth with their kiddos, and they’ll hype each other up, and they’ll keep escalating until it becomes a blowout, and what you want to do in that situation. And actually, the most important part of the crisis intervention training is somebody has to be calm and self-regulated.

Anyone who’s doing crisis intervention, 50% of the training is self-regulation, because I can’t deescalate you if I’m panicking. My calmness is going to rub off on you. So, that’s what I see, too, with anybody. It doesn’t have to be a mom and her kids. It could be partners getting into fights and they keep hyping each other up and escalating it more and more and more until it’s a blowout, and one person, ideally both, has to learn to just take a step back, self-regulate, take a breath and then communicate. Otherwise, you can’t break the pattern.

Casey McGuire Davidson  37:59

Yeah, yeah. And that’s hard, right? How does that work? With the matching of the energy? It’s the matching of the energy works if only one person, yeah, is angry, right? If you’re both angry, that doesn’t work, yeah?

Gillian Tietz  38:13

So, if you’re if you’re angry, and you feel like something’s unfair, and I am hyped up like your colleague was to validate you. That’s really effective. If you and I are having an issue, like the one that I had with the other person, and you’re really triggered, yeah, and you’re escalating it, I don’t have to participate in that no matter how I feel. I can feel pissed at you, I can hate your guts. I can feel like this is so unfair and you’re wrong, but I don’t have to participate in the escalation. If I can stay regulated, I’m going to rub off on you. There’s only so long that somebody can be triggered at like a wall, yeah? If I’m not participating in the emotion, you can’t keep doing it. Yeah, yeah.

Casey McGuire Davidson  39:13

That makes a lot of sense. Yeah, yeah.

For me, the times that I do get angry and frustrated, what I usually do if it is directed at my husband and marriage, like, if something is really, like, just bothering me. I call my best friend and, like, vent it all out, and I do it because she’s safe, like, I know she won’t say anything, but also she knows him and knows our marriage, and is friends with him, so she’s not going to be like, Oh my God, You got to get a divorce. Like, she’s just like, yeah, that is total bullshit. Blah, blah, blah. Like, where she, like, completely validates me. And then I’m like, okay, I’m okay, now I can go back to it.

Gillian Tietz  39:54

Yeah, validation. So many people skip it, and it’s one of the most important things.

Casey McGuire Davidson  40:00

Like, you move straight to the to the Resolution Phase, like, I’m going to problem solve this before I recognize that your emotions are valid and are real and you’re experiencing them, regardless of whether there is a next step right that that will make you move forward and not just stay in this place.

Gillian Tietz  40:25

Sometimes all a person wants is to be validated. They don’t need your advice, your expert advice. Maybe they don’t need it. They don’t need your problem solving. They don’t need to consider another perspective. They don’t have to look on the bright side. They just want you to validate them, and then they’ll calm down and move on with their day. It’s so important, and you’re right.

We do skip it, and we try to fix everybody’s problem. And you don’t have to agree with the way that the person is responding to validate. It’s just you feel that way. All feelings are valid. I appreciate that you feel that way.

Casey McGuire Davidson  41:06

That’s it, yeah, yeah. And I can imagine it is like the harder thing, as if 2 people are angry at the same time. I can imagine that is way more tricky, especially, I mean, I feel you with women with their kids, especially as the kids are getting you know, I hear it all the time for my friends who have 13, 14, 15 year old girls like that, it’s hard, right? I was not that nice to buy Bob when I was same, 14. So I can imagine now being a mom, how hard that would be to deal with based on everything you’ve done for someone their entire life.

Gillian Tietz  41:47

Yeah? And a lot of moms will take it too as like, this means I am a bad mom, yeah? And that’s what they’re reacting to, yeah? Or this means my kids don’t respect me, and that feels horrible.

Casey McGuire Davidson  42:00

Yeah, but that’s where you know, for me, it’s like, Okay, going to therapy, right?

When I’m frustrated with other things, like, the only person you can really control is yourself.

So, if you’re a mom and you’re feeling that way towards your kids, your spouse, whatever learning anger management techniques or how to regulate yourself, or how to interpret it in a way that de-escalates.

You can only control yourself.

You can’t necessarily control right? Your spouse, your daughter, your mother, whatever it is.

Gillian Tietz  42:31

Exactly. And this is where a lot of us, angry people get stuck. We want to change other people’s behavior and control them. And you can’t, you just can’t. And we feel like, Oh, if only they would do this, then I wouldn’t be mad.

You can only control yourself.

So, a lot of it is, is bringing it back to what is in your control? What can you give yourself right now?

Casey McGuire Davidson  42:56

Yeah, it’s not about this person doing that for you.

Gillian Tietz  42:57

What can you give yourself?

Casey McGuire Davidson  43:01

Yeah, and that’s hard. It’s hard to learn, especially if you’re like, I’m mad at you. So why should I have to do XYZ? But it’s true, the other way just doesn’t work. So, it’s almost like you’re doing the work for yourself, for your peace of mind, not because the other person deserves it or whatever it is.

Gillian Tietz  43:22

Yeah, exactly. That person can be the biggest jerk on the planet, but we get to control who disrespects us and makes us feel bad. We don’t have to give that power away to idiots. Yeah, and learn how to keep it.

Casey McGuire Davidson  43:36

And part of the issue is that anger just doesn’t feel good in your body, right? And so, finding ways to manage it, regardless of whether the trigger or the behavior of someone else is good or bad, is doing something for yourself. Because staying in that like what escalated place isn’t just it’s just not a very fun place to live.

Gillian Tietz  44:00

Yeah, it makes you sick. It makes you feel sick. It’s bad for your health. It’s exhausting. People don’t really want to be around you, yeah? And it’s just bad in every way. So, it’s important to learn these skills, whether you’re right and everybody is wrong or not.

Casey McGuire Davidson  44:16

Yeah. So, I know you’ve done a bunch of episodes sort of related to anger management. I’m going to link to all of these in the show notes.

They look really interesting, like how the brain regulates emotions and impulses, frustration tolerance, which sounds like something that would be helpful to anyone, but you also talk about five ways anger management has changed your life, and I thought touching on how this work has helped you might be a really great place to end this episode. Yeah.

Gillian Tietz  44:49

So, I think the biggest way that has changed my life is I am actually calm. I’m like new. CEO, if you’ve seen The Matrix, yeah, when he’s that scene where he’s, like, dodging the bullets that Deanna Reeves character.

Yeah, that’s me with, like, all these triggers, like you just can’t get me. I’m dodging it with my self-regulation. I’m also very proud of the way that I behave, yeah, and that’s a good feeling. I have very positive communication with other people. Oh, and the other one that I’ll add too is self-esteem, because when you’re in a shame, anger cycle all the time, and you feel embarrassed of your angry words or your angry behavior. It’s just really hard to exist that way.

So, I have a lot more self-esteem now that I have learned how to be calm like I trust myself to handle situations, and I’m impressed with the way that I behave and my ability to stay calm. Like when I was younger, I was overwhelmed. 24/7 like I just couldn’t deal. And my life, like, My life wasn’t great, but there are worse lives, and I just could not deal. I had no resilience at all. And now I think I have pretty good resilience, I would say. And I think the fact that that situation that we were talking about with the trash talking, that that didn’t piss me off, shows that I’ve come a really long way.

Casey McGuire Davidson  46:36

Yeah, you’ve come a long way, even in the four years we’ve been friends, the fact that that one did not set you off, like, yep, does that seem pretty blatant?

Gillian Tietz  46:44

You knew me to get set off by people, and because that was when I started doing the work. I used to have enemies. I think you know, one of my enemies that I had, that was my very last enemy. And I said, like a nemesis, like, like they’re my mortal enemy, like my life is defined by this enemy. And I used to do that process over and over and over, and I haven’t had an enemy in years, and I’ve had so many opportunities to make one, and that was what I meant earlier, when seeing the way that this person reacted to me was beneficial, because I felt like they made me their enemy. And I was like, Oh, that’s interesting. That’s really interesting. I’ve never seen someone else do that.

Casey McGuire Davidson  47:34

Yeah, yeah, no, I can see all the work you’ve done and all the changes.

Thank you.

One last question. A lot of women listening to this are doing so because they’re sober curious, but possibly like me, because they were drinking, you know, a bottle of wine at night and waking up hanging over and I know that when I was drinking that way and had so much my life centered around thoughts of drinking, not drinking, regret, hangovers, whatever, it was really hard for me to make any progress in, for example, therapy or working on my anxiety or whatever, there was just very little bandwidth or self-reflection.

Do you feel like someone needs to stop drinking before they work on their anger. Can they do them in tandem? Do they work on their anger first? Like, I know you’ve coached a lot of people at that, you know intersecting point. So, what’s your What are your thoughts on that?

Gillian Tietz  48:33

Yeah, I don’t work with an angry person unless they’re sober. Okay, I agree with you that there’s very limited progress you can make in any area of the work if you’re still drinking, because your brain just doesn’t work very well. It’s very emotional, and it makes it hard to even apply skills, let alone learn them.

Casey McGuire Davidson  48:59

So yeah, because you’re messing with your nervous system, right? And you’re out of it, and you’re not interpreting the way people are reacting. There’s, it’s just so, yes, it’s hard to disentangle. What is, what exactly?

Gillian Tietz  49:11

Yeah, I think some people like, if your anger is, you know you’re being violent, or you, you know you’re scaring your kids. It’s pressing, and you’ll want to work on it right away. But I would just focus on getting sober, and then the work is gonna show up when you need to do it. Yeah, I didn’t start working on my anger right away. It took a bit for me to detect that. I even had to

Casey McGuire Davidson  49:44

Yeah, and I would assume that if you are living with or in a relationship with someone who has anger management issues that make you feel unsafe, that’s a separate story than matching their energy or right.

Gillian Tietz  50:01

I mean, yeah. I’m glad that you bring that up.

Nobody has to stay with an angry person hoping that they’re going to do the work and change, because, like you said, we can only control ourselves. I think safety is the main priority.

Yeah, and you can’t, unfortunately, force your partner, your spouse, or whoever, to do their work. You can’t accelerate their timeline or make them want to, so you just have to take care of yourself.

Casey McGuire Davidson  50:28

Yeah, and there are tools available for them to help themselves when they’re ready, but you, like we said, you can’t do it for them. So, if you’re in a really difficult place, living with someone or in a relationship with someone who is angry and it’s impacting your quality of life, mental health, physical safety in any way, take care of yourself first.

Gillian Tietz  50:52

Exactly. Yes. Same advice, even for just living with a drinker.

Absolutely, if their drinking is negatively impacting your life, take care of you and don’t wait for them to change and tolerate it.

Casey McGuire Davidson  51:08

Yeah, yeah. But these are fantastic tools and information and resources if you are struggling with anger, or you’re in a situation with someone where it hasn’t escalated to a point where you feel unsafe, but you want to learn more about what they’re going through and how you can support them.

Gillian Tietz  51:28

Yeah, yeah. Like thankfully, Drew was willing to go on the anger journey with me and learn that if he just hypes me up and validates me, that it completely neutralizes me. Actually, that’s the best thing to do for me. So yeah, he, he was willing to go on the journey and learn with me, which was awesome.

Casey McGuire Davidson  51:51

Yeah, that’s great. I love Drew. So where can people learn more? Thank you for sharing this information. If someone’s interested, how can they get in touch with you? Or what should they do next? Yeah,

Gillian Tietz  52:04

you can just visit my website, soberpowered.com and you’ll see an anger section. Or, like you said earlier, I have anger episodes on my podcast that can be listened to, too.

Casey McGuire Davidson  52:17

But the anger management section on your website has information on your self-study course or coaching and all that good stuff.

Yep, both of those things.

All right. Thank you so much for coming on. It was so great to be able to talk about this.

Gillian Tietz  52:31

Yeah, thank you. This was fun.

Thank you for listening to this episode of The Hello Someday podcast.

If you’re interested in learning more about me, the work I do, and access free resources and guides to help you build a life you love without alcohol. Please visit hellosomedaycoaching.com. And I would be so grateful if you would take a few minutes to rate and review this podcast so that more women can find it. And join the conversation about drinking less and living more.