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In today’s post, I will discuss another intervention that has been successful for a subset of road rage cases. By juxtaposing two very different approaches to the same presenting concern, I hope to underscore my essential argument that practicing with flexibility and range is often critical to achieving positive outcomes in therapy.
In my most recent post, I noted that the driving cause of road rage may vary in interesting ways. Anxiety or helplessness can be the root cause for some individuals. For another set of patients, road rage comes from frustration due to “being stuck” or “impeded” by other drivers. The classic type A personality, which is characterized by chronic time urgency and hostility in the face of perceived impediments, may contribute to such cases of road rage. In the last blog, I discussed a case that initially appeared to fit this profile, but was not intrinsically type A. The case I’m going to describe now fits with the type A profile.
To make the intervention most readable, I have created a fictional patient (hereafter dubbed “Gustavo”), an amalgam of several patients I have seen across various clinical settings. As always, although the patient may be fictional, the core of the effective intervention strategy is presented as it was for patients whose presentation aligns with Gustavo.
Gustavo is a 40-year-old stuntman. From a young age, he had been an intense individual, under-stimulated relative to those around him, thrill-seeking, and hostile in interactions with other people as a theme. He was hired specifically for elaborate, coordinated driving stunts for movies like Too Fast, Too Furious (although he was not cast in that particular movie). And he had a gnarly case of road rage. This is the treatment that helped release him from toxic levels of hostility.
The intervention strategy I pursued had three essential elements.
First, I needed to recognize his understandable sense of inherent superiority on the road.
(As in, “I can see how you would be frustrated and given to rage on the road. The truth is that your situational awareness and reflexes are finely honed in relation to most drivers.” I said this with no trace of jesting because it was entirely true and appropriate for us to recognize this as fact).
Psychologically speaking, Gustavo had formed an unconscious in-group of elites by which he judged everyone else be inferior (justifiably so). The plain truth of it was that he actually was far superior in this domain. We are all doofuses on the road compared to someone who can execute a Tokyo drift. In recognizing this, in the narrative therapy tradition, I gave him the opportunity to step outside this frame and consider a different way of negotiating the open road.
Second, given that he was not in fact the underdog in these situations, I needed to reframe the exercise of power.
Here is where I drew from a powerful insight that I took in while watching the movie, Schindler’s List. In the movie, the character of Amon Goeth embodies Nazi hatred towards Jews. He kills randomly to instill fear and terror in the Jews confined to a concentration camp. There is one particular scene in the movie that I will never forget. It starts out somewhat playfully. In the scene Goeth, who is quite drunk, says to Schindler, “You’re never drunk. That’s real control. Control is power.” (And this is when a lightning bolt of insight hit for me). Schindler replies in a gentle, compelling way, “No, Amon, that’s not power. Power is when we have every justification to kill and don’t. That is power.”
In a later scene in the movie, Goeth, who respects Schindler, experiments with his new understanding of power. Goeth questions a young Jewish boy about why he did not perform a minor chore to his specification. The boy apologizes, shaking with fear, and Goeth says, “Go ahead. Go on. Leave. I pardon you.” After the boy exits, Goeth looks at himself in the mirror and says again in a whisper, “I pardon you.” So he is trying on this new understanding of power. Of course, in the movie, he then reverts to his brutal sadistic pattern and shoots the boy in the back. But the fundamental concept of what real power is has always stayed with me.
The reason that Goeth could not integrate this concept of power is because of his extreme sociopathy, not solely because he felt superior to people of Jewish heritage. Clearly, the severity of the situation depicted in Schindler's List is exponentially darker and more destructive than that of a driver with road rage issues. The point is not to draw any direct comparisons between the two, but to identify a similar tinge in the feelings of superiority present in both.
To come back to the case at hand, Gustavo certainly felt superior to other drivers, but there was no sociopathic dimension in his personality. In fact, as someone who had coordinated highly skilled driving maneuvers with other stuntmen and women, he showed a promising ability to connect and cooperate with other people.
The narrative therapy tradition involves looking at the scripts we author in our lives. And here, again, I borrowed from the narrative therapy tradition when I told him a true story that conveyed the core principle that Schindler communicated to Goeth. Here is that story.
When I was growing up I had a Rottweiler. He was born big—the biggest in his litter. He looked like a little grizzly cub, and he grew to be a grizzly bear among other dogs. So we named him “Wahb” after a favorite childhood story called “Wahb, King of the Grizzlies.” And the thing about Wahb is that he was so big and so powerful that in the face of threatening behavior from other dogs, he was remarkably nonchalant. He didn’t need to get his back up because he was never the small dog. I had seen him with small dogs attached by their teeth to his ears and he was still….nonchalant. So, if we agree that, by virtue of your highly refined reflexes and driving skills, you are not the small dog, maybe there is room for you to stop acting like a small dog. Relative to other drivers, you are less likely to be involved in an accident because you have evasive reflexes. So maybe there is potential to rest in your relatively secure position and pardon the other drivers around you for their relative deficiencies. (One really cool thing about being a psychologist is that we get to witness that moment when a game-changing insight strikes a patient).
Finally, to really lock in this new understanding, I needed to give him an opportunity to put a human face on the anonymous “crappy drivers” who were spiking his blood pressure. And all the better if the human face was one of someone he liked and respected: me. As an occasional bad driver, I was a good target for this.
So I told him a couple more brief stories. While these stories involved some self-disclosure, the nature of the self-disclosure related to such human universals that there was nothing particularly unique or personally revealing in what I shared—it is the plight of so many working parents to have experiences like these. I told him how in the final months of my pregnancy, I would repeatedly come to work nauseous with exhaustion but was unwilling to take any leave because that would take time away from my precious and limited time to support my baby. There are studies that show that drowsy driving is as bad as drunk driving. I was beyond drowsy—I was bleary-eyed with fatigue.
And I made this choice to drive to work every day with the awareness that I probably should not have been driving. I recall days when I may have driven faster or more aggressively than I should have, exhausted, stressed, and running late to work.
I am quite sure that during these months and in the months following my return to work, when my husband and I were awakened every two to three hours throughout the night, I was a potential menace on the road. And I apologized to Gustavo on behalf of all the other bad drivers. He firmly rejected my apology and told me he appreciated what I shared, admitting that it would help him be way more understanding of other drivers.
As time unfolded, he was able to do this. If I had to break down what made this intervention effective, it was that I empathized with his frustration, recognized that the cause of his frustration was understandable, challenged his implicit understanding of power, and then put my own face onto the bad drivers he was so frustrated with. What this amounted to was an attributional overhaul of his transactions with others on the road. He was able to downshift to a more gracious attitude and was thereafter able to exercise the power of someone who is secure in his abilities and willing to grant others the benefit of the doubt.
