The Lost Art of the Unsent Angry Letter

 "When Lincoln was upset with somebody, 

he would write what he called a 'hot letter,' 

where he would write it all down. 

He would put it aside until his emotions cooled down 

and then write 

'never sent, never signed.'"

Doris Kearns Goodwin

WHENEVER Abraham Lincoln felt the urge to tell someone off, he would compose what he called a “hot letter.” He’d pile all of his anger into a note, “put it aside until his emotions cooled down,” Doris Kearns Goodwin once explained on NPR, “and then write: ‘Never sent. Never signed.’ ” Which meant that Gen. George G. Meade, for one, would never hear from his commander in chief that Lincoln blamed him for letting Robert E. Lee escape after Gettysburg.

Lincoln was hardly unique. Among public figures who need to think twice about their choice of words, the unsent angry letter has a venerable tradition. Its purpose is twofold. It serves as a type of emotional catharsis, a way to let it all out without the repercussions of true engagement. And it acts as a strategic catharsis, an exercise in saying what you really think, which Mark Twain (himself a notable non-sender of correspondence) believed provided “unallowable frankness & freedom.”

(...)

In some ways, little has changed in the art of the unsent letter since Lincoln thought better of excoriating Meade. We may have switched the format from paper to screen, but the process is largely the same. You feel angry. And you construct a retort — only to find yourself thinking better of taking it any further. Emotions cooled, you proceed in a more reasonable, and reasoned, fashion. It’s the opposite of the glib rejoinder that you think of just a bit too late and never quite get to say.

(...)

Though we create a safety net, we may end up tangled all the same. We have more avenues to express immediate displeasure than ever before, and may thus find ourselves more likely to hit send or tweet when we would have done better to hit save or delete. The ease of venting drowns out the possibility of recanting, and the speed of it all prevents a deeper consideration of what exactly we should say and why, precisely, we should say it.

When Lincoln wanted to voice his displeasure, he had to find a secretary or, at the very least, a pen. That process alone was a way of exercising self-control — twice over. It allowed him not only to express his thoughts in private (so as not to express them by mistake in public), but also to determine which was which: the anger that should be voiced versus the anger that should be kept quiet.

Now we need only click a reply button to rattle off our displeasures. And in the heat of the moment, we find the line between an appropriate response and one that needs a cooling-off period blurring. We toss our reflexive anger out there, but we do it publicly, without the private buffer that once would have let us separate what needed to be said from what needed only to be felt. It’s especially true when we see similarly angry commentary coming from others. Our own fury begins to feel more socially appropriate.

We may also find ourselves feeling less satisfied. Because the angry email (or tweet or text or whatnot) takes so much less effort to compose than a pen-and-paper letter, it may in the end offer us a less cathartic experience, in just the same way that pressing the end call button on your cellphone will never be quite the same as slamming down an old-fashioned receiver.

Perhaps that’s why we see so much vitriol online, so many anonymous, bitter comments, so many imprudent tweets and messy posts. Because creating them is less cathartic, you feel the need to do it more often. When your emotions never quite cool, they keep coming out in other ways.

Maria Konnikova

150 Years Before Twitter, Abe Lincoln Discovered How to Avoid Getting Angry on Social Media. Historian Doris Kearns Goodwin explains Abraham Lincoln's strategy to keep his cool.

"I couldn't help myself. I was just venting." This excuse has led to countless examples of business professionals who have seen their reputations damaged or careers destroyed after venting their anger with an ill-timed social media post.

According to one survey in Psychology Today, 46 percent of Twitter users say they often tweet as a way to deal with anger or to vent--for political or professional reasons. They say it makes them feel better.

They're partly right. Social psychologists say anger is the most contagious emotion and the most likely to go viral. "Humans are social creatures who are easily influenced by the anger and rage that are everywhere these days,"  psychiatrist Richard Friedman recently wrote in the New York Times.

Anger engages the amygdala and produces a rush of stress hormones that makes it hard for all of us to dial down on our emotions. But just because you have an emotion doesn't mean you have to tweet about it.

Abraham Lincoln had a brilliant tactic to dial down his anger during the Civil War, a time when the country wasn't just divided--the house was "on fire," according to historian Doris Kearns Goodwin's new book, Leadership in Turbulent Times.

Lincoln spent a lifetime on self-improvement. He realized that transformational leaders had more emotional self-control than other people. Yes, Lincoln got very angry very frequently. But while everyone around him was losing their cool, Lincoln kept his--at least outwardly--with a tactic he called "Never signed and never delivered."

He stood out by appearing calm, cool, and collected. Here's how it worked.

Never signed and never delivered

According to Goodwin, when Lincoln was angry at a cabinet member, a colleague or one of his generals in the Union army, he would write a letter venting all of his pent-up rage. Then--and this is the key--he put it aside.

Hours later or the next day, he would look at the letter again so he could "attend to the matter with a clearer eye." More often than not, he didn't send the letter. We know this was Lincoln's tactic because years after his death historians discovered a trove of letters with the notation: never sent and never signed.

Lincoln practiced this habit for three reasons: 

First, he didn't want to inflame already heated passions. 

Second, he realized that words said in haste aren't always clear-headed and well-considered. 

Third, he did it as a signal--a learning opportunity--for others on his now famous "team of rivals."

In one example, Goodwin recounts the story of Lincoln patiently listening to his secretary of war, Edwin Stanton, who had worked himself into a fury against one of the generals. Once Stanton was done venting, Lincoln suggested that he vent on paper, and write a letter to the general. It must have been quite a letter because it took Stanton two days to write. He brought it to Lincoln who said, "Now that you feel better, throw it in the basket. That is all that is necessary." Stanton wasn't pleased, but he took Lincoln's advice.

Stanton didn't like Lincoln at the start of their relationship. By the end, Stanton was one Lincoln's biggest cheerleaders, closest friends and most loyal advisors.

Nobel prize-winning psychologist Daniel Kahneman once said anger is such a primitive emotion that just reading words can set off your threat response. Social media platforms make it very easy to fire off a response.

The best response might be to write it down and come back to it later. That's what Lincoln would do. You'll probably feel differently when you do. 

Your employees, partners, and customers are watching your actions offline and online. If they see someone whose social media posts are impulsive, angry, and ill-informed they'll form an impression of you as a leader. And it's unlikely to be a positive one.

Carmine Gallo

The next time something sets you off -- please don't fire up your e-mail; don't go on Twitter. Think of Lincoln. Take at least a few seconds to judge whether the thing that has you so angry is more awful than a missed chance to end the bloodbath of the Civil War. If it's worse, Twitter away, by all means. But if it isn't as bad, try to summon Lincoln's paradoxical restraint -- this restraint that frees you from the need to exercise any restraint at all. Grab some paper and write the nastiest message you can think of. Let it all out. Don't mess around with the 140-character maximum on Twitter. Let it all out.

What you do with the letter once you cool down is up to you. 

Lincoln notwithstanding, shred the letter. 

BURN IT!!!!

Benefits of the Unsent Letter

• Opportunity to reframe: putting your feelings into words already means that you’re processing them through different neural pathways than if you leave them swirling around as unexpressed emotion.

• Safety: of course, expressing your thoughts out loud to the person you are upset with would also put them into words. But writing them in a letter that you don’t send avoids the very real possibility – probability even – that your angry words would inflame defensiveness and anger in turn in the recipient, leading to an escalation of the conflict. This is also why you don’t send the letter. Compared to talking to someone in person, the recipient is more likely to regard the written word with suspicion because it lacks the accompanying voice tone, body language, and facial expression that gives context and provides additional information about how the speaker really feels about what they are saying, and about the relationship.

• Perspective: writing the words on paper gives you more distance than saying them out loud. Once they are on the page, outside of you, you can gain some distance and perspective on them – and you can re-read them and reflect on them as many times as you want.

• Recognising the possibility of change: there’s a reason Lincoln didn’t sign his letter before putting it in a drawer. As long as he didn’t sign it, the letter remained a work in progress, open to change.

Some therapists recommend throwing the letter in the bin or the fire as soon as you’ve written it – but if you did that, you’d be missing out on what you’d learn from re-reading it later when you’ve calmed down.

Here’s What Could Go Wrong

1. Just expressing a feeling doesn’t necessarily get rid of it. The whole notion of ‘venting’ and ‘catharsis’ is based on the ‘hydraulic theory of emotion’ – the idea that anger builds up inside you and the pressure needs to be released by venting.

Unfortunately, this theory doesn’t hold up. Psychology experiments have found that acting out the anger (e.g. by pounding nails with a hammer) actually increases aggression. Even if people report feeling better after venting, on objective measures they are still more aggressive. Whether you express an emotion or repress it, the emotion may still be there. 

2. You could talk yourself into feeling worse. The more you talk or write about episodes in your past, the more you associate into those memories and the emotions you felt at the time, and you might lose whatever insights and perspectives you’ve gained over time (admittedly this is less likely when writing than when talking about things, especially if the other people in the conversation were agreeing with and encouraging all the complaints expressed).

3. You don’t get feedback. Since you’re writing a letter that no-one but you will see, there’s no-one to offer alternative perspectives or ask questions that might give you a reality check. So if your emotions are a response to the worst possible interpretation of events, your belief in the story that you’re telling yourself might be strengthened.

These are all fairly minor points if writing an unsent letter saves you from expressing rage and making a bad situation even worse, but it’s still worth thinking about how we can mitigate these potential downsides.

How to Write an Unsent Letter That Avoids These Potential Downsides

Ideally, you could write the letter in a way that recognises our own fallibility, and has the recognition that the stories we tell ourselves to make sense of what’s happened to us are just that – stories based on one possible interpretation out of many, rather than objective truth.

Fortunately, there is an easy-to-follow model for making sense of our experience and communicating what we think and feel about it that does just that. It’s called the ‘Experience Cube’, first outlined in Gervase Bushe’s excellent book Clear Leadership.

The Experience Cube has four components: 

 

1. Observations – this is what we can see and hear, as a video camera might record it, 

 

2. Thoughts – this is what we believe and what we tell ourselves

3. Emotions – what we are feeling

4. Wants – what we want to happen, what we want to do, goals etc.

Here’s how using the Experience Cube to describe what you’re feeling and why in an unsent letter helps you avoid any potential pitfalls:

1. As we all experience the world through our own mental filters, it’s not easy for us to be aware of our own blind spots and cognitive biases – especially if we suffer from ‘Naïve Realism’. The ‘Observations’ quadrant invites us to stick to the facts and suspend judgement when describing a situation or incident.

2. We still get to describe our best guess at what we think is going on in that situation, in the ‘Thoughts’ quadrant. The difference is that we’re invited to remember that these are just our own thoughts, beliefs, and judgements about what’s going on, and not objective truth. We recognize that alternative explanations and evaluations are possible, and as we write, we may even consider some of those alternative explanations and admit their possibility.

3. In the Emotions quadrant we can describe what we’re feeling. But we’re not leading with emotions. By the time we are talking about what we feel, we’ve already been through a factual description of the situation or event, plus outlining our ‘story’ about what’s going on in way that explicitly requires us not to confuse the story with objective reality, so we are more able to distance ourselves from our emotions and not have our judgement clouded.

4. Finally, the ‘Wants’ quadrant invites us to consider how we want things to develop, what we should do next, and maybe what we would like the other person to do. It invites us to find a way out of the upsetting situation, rather than just leaving it there as if we could do nothing about it. It makes us think about the future and how to move on, rather than endlessly rehashing the past.

Andy Smith