Reframing Anger

A lot of personal injury clients are angry.

The most convenient response for lawyers and paralegals is to empathize and reinforce. That communicates to the client that we’re on their “side” and we are going to “fight” for them.

That’s the easy way out. It’s not a good long-term strategy. How come? Because jurors don't respond positively to angry plaintiffs.

It's not enough just to tell clients not to appear angry.

It's a recurring challenge for trial lawyers: What to do with a client whose anger eclipses everything else?

I think the most productive approach is to figure out how to express the emotions that are causing the anger rather than focusing on the anger itself.

It’s like a great joke where you say everything but ________________ and let the audience find their answer to that last question. That process is what makes it funny. It hits because the audience reached their own conclusion rather than being told what to think (or feel).

The same thing is true in personal injury cases. We can’t jump straight to “anger.” We need to describe everything leading up to anger and let jurors find anger on their own (if it’s there to find). More on that below.

It's always seemed to me that there's a lot more happening underneath the display of anger. That the anger is a product of something deeper like fear, disappointment, etc.

Interestingly, psychologists seem to see it the same way. They explain that frequently anger is a “defensive” emotion. Something that surfaces when a more vulnerable emotion is underneath and either isn't understood or can't be expressed.

The circumstances surrounding most personal injury cases lead to anger being substituted for other emotions in a pretty predictable way.

• Anger is used as a substitute for expressing sadness, shame, and loneliness.

• Anger protects the self from feeling exposed or weak and pushes others away before they can hurt us more.

• Anger restores a sense of power when circumstances make us feel impotent or threatened; anger provides a sense of control when goals are blocked.

• Anger mobilizes the body for action (fight) when fear would require tolerating uncertainty or loss of control.

• Shame attacks the self; anger redirects blame outward.

• Anger is easier to sustain than the passivity and pain of grief.

Layered on top are a couple of additional factors.

Cultural, familial, or gender norms may discourage vulnerable emotional expression of fear or sadness.

Emotional awareness may be limited. Sometimes it’s referred to as alexithymia. That’s a word I didn’t know and had to look it up.

Alexithymia is from the Greek for "no words for emotions.” It’s a personality trait where individuals struggle to identify, understand, describe, and express their own feelings.

It’s easy for many people—not just people with alexithymia—to default to anger because it’s frequently front and center and much easier to identify than other subtler emotions.

How often have you heard someone say they’re just angry when it’s apparent that there are a lot of emotions swirling around that are harder to identify and describe?

In our society anger has become a catch-all label for emotional arousal. But it’s rarely the full story—it’s often the emotion we use when something more complicated and potentially vulnerable is at stake.

So when a client appears really angry, it’s super-important to take a step back and figure out what’s making them angry.

I tried this thought-experiment myself. My wife hit a deer. The deer shattered the windshield. (And then trotted away unscathed.) I received an email from the repair facility. It explained the OEM windshield was $2,000, and the insurance company wanted to replace it with a $400 substitute.

Modern windshields do all sorts of things. They’re tech hubs for driver assistance systems and house the sensors and cameras that enable automatic wipers, adaptive headlights, lane departure warnings, collision avoidance, etc.

So my initial reaction was anger. Not for the first time I swore at Liberty Mutual and resolved to switch to Chubb, Pure or some other carrier that didn’t nickel and dime us to death.

My response was fertile ground for this thought experiment. Stepping back I realized that my “anger” was really a catch-all for a bunch of different responses:

• I was worried that the non-OEM windshield wouldn’t work. That would compromise safety and/or require repeat returns to the repair facility and time wasted dealing with Liberty Mutual.

• I was worried that if I didn’t “fight it” I would look like a chump.

• I was worried that getting the OEM windshield would be a waste of $1,600 and basically demonstrate that I was too lazy or inept to really compare the OEM and non-OEM options.

It turned out that anger wasn’t the primary response. It was an easy name to give all of the other emotions I felt. My primary emotion was fear, not anger.

That doesn’t mean I’m not going to switch carriers. But working through this helped me understand the importance of the exercise.

Expressing the primary emotions rather than secondary emotions (like anger) makes it so much easier for a jury to help a personal injury plaintiff.

• I’m afraid that I’m not going to be able to work again.

• I’m scared I won’t be able to support myself.

• I’m ashamed of relying on family or friends.

• It would be humiliating to move in with my kids.

Jurors want to help that person. But they don’t want to help people who are consumed by anger. It’s easy for jurors to say that those people are assholes and probably deserved what happened to them.

Jurors are just like the rest of us. Their brains are pulled toward easy answers. Thinking fast is an adaptive shortcut that usually works. But in personal injury cases that can shortchange the plaintiff if he comes across as angry rather than vulnerable.