Anger’s what they call a secondary emotion. It’s almost always bred from fear, uncertainty, helplessness, or sadness. Fr
So for me, if it’s something that’s longer-term or slower unfolding, I can usually self-analyze and figure out what it is that is causing it and cease being angry. Like Midgely; I’m not angry about it, I’m just sad that someone’s life work was coming up with Freon and Tetraethyl lead.
But in the moment especially with fear, I can be pretty angry. Like when some intensely self-centered and stupid driver pulls a wild-ass turn across 3 lanes of traffic to exit, rather than having planned ahead, or just accepted the consequences of their stupidity in a safe fashion. That really steams me before I have much of a chance to think about it, and I’ve had some pretty dark fantasies about what I’d do if I was telekinetic to those people. Not even lethal or injurious ones, just extremely terrifying to the people involved.
I grew up with a mother who had an anger management problem to put it mildly. She came close to killing me a few times.
The thing is, I have one of the genetic conditions that helped drive her rage: Premenstrual Dysphoric Disorder, or PMDD. It’s a psychiatric condition characterized by extreme mood swings and severe psychological disturbance related to hormonal fluctuations. If you’re wondering “how severe?” my great grandmother was forcibly sterilized and permanently institutionalized because of it.
For most of my life I’ve been controlling this condition with medication (birth control), but every once in a while I have to deal with the symptoms. I become paranoid, irrationally enraged with my partner and full of violent impulses, like smashing up my house with a baseball bat and worse. PTSD symptoms become much worse and every slight feels like a physical attack. The self-loathing is indescribable.
It’s times like these I’m afraid to admit I know where my mother is coming from. But because of my experience growing up I try to keep a tight lid on it and just come off as kinda bitchy.
When I’m not full-out crazy, I’m usually pretty mild mannered, and slow to anger compared to the average person. But I used to have problems coping with normal levels of anger because I was so afraid of losing control. And I had trouble coping with my anger toward my mother. Fortunately since I started meditating regularly I’ve stopped trying to suppress my anger and I can just let it pass through me without the mental drama. I spent so many years afraid of my anger and trying not to look directly at it. Then when I finally looked, I saw it was nothing special.
The only hint to the average person of how deep my rage can go is in my fiction writing, which tends to be extremely violent. Extra surprising perhaps because I write romance. Extremely violent romance.
Which is why I desperately try to be as even handed as possible in arguments, debates, and otherwise embrace rationality as much as possible. And another reason I lean Lawful Neutral. I do not trust my own judgement fully when angered, either vengefully or righteously.
To be clear, I do not act on the hate, and if the person or thing that triggered it does so from ignorance or by accident, it’s pretty easy to get past, especially given a bit of time. And I’m good at pointing that anger at other things - nothing like loading up a violent video game and blasting zombies / feral ghouls or the like into ballistic chunks!
But OMFG, thank god I’m not religious, especially one of the ones where intent was enough to damn you, or the endless actions by large sections of our political and economic elite, not to mention Religious Nutjobs, would have me in Hell / working off Karma until shortly before the heat-death of the Universe.
I am angry at my mother for certain things, but she had a lot more than just PMDD going on, including Borderline Personality Disorder, which I do not have. So I am not saying we are exactly the same.
But I know that I work extremely hard at maintaining an even keel no matter what’s going on in my head. It’s very difficult because you become actually delusional and you have to not get caught up in it somehow. It’s extremely difficult. But I do it. Because I know what the impact can be on my loved ones if I don’t control it.
The last time I had these symptoms I made it to the bedroom closet and just screamed and cried into a pillow. Don’t think my son even noticed. I felt much better afterward. I would prefer to not scream and cry at all but it’s still better than how my Mom dealt with it. My OBGYN fortunately takes it extremely seriously. And I don’t experience it that severely too often because I’m medicated. This was the first time in years I had symptoms that severe. The problem is eventually the birth control stops working and you have to keep trying other kinds until you find something that works again. And things will likely be very bad when I hit menopause. My aunt has it too and she went through hell during menopause before they finally approved a hysterectomy.
There’s a swampy area at the delta of the Ganges called the Sundarbans. Although a protected environmental area, people still venture into it seeking a livelihood. A hazard is the especial ferocity of the tigers, so lethal that a fund is open to help the women widowed by the tigers. This is caused by the tigers being unable to mark their territories with their scent, and so become hyper-defensive by being stripped of their boundaries.
People can be this way too (to make this a Marlin Perkins segue), when they’ve grown up with their boundaries constantly violated. Every perceived threat is met with a reaction totally out of measure, and fully on immediate impulse.
That was certainly me, and it took a long time to learn it away. Growing up I saw a lot of savage fits and one murder. I was completely conditioned to be the same myself, if only the person who offended me was an easy win (by some coincidence that dynamic is always an essential element in violence). Along the way I saw what happens to people who act on angry impulse. Or even to those who resist impulse but instead fall back and plan long-term revenge (in the workplace: their superiors usually catch on). Years later I read how, whenever the adrenal gland is squirting out the rage hormone, it’s also squirting out the fear hormone, at a one-to-seven ratio. That figured with my experience.
With revenge, you basically have three options: 1. Use the system; criminal, legal, workplace admin, etc. But IMHE, that’s iffy at best. Some people can call cops and lawyers like room service, but not most. 2. Get your own revenge. But everyone who does that screws up and comes out worse the overwhelming majority of the time. 3. Just let it go. If you have the ability to put a bad experience completely behind you, what’s the wisest course of action? Bingo: put it completely behind you. Better a live dog than a dead lion. Living well is the best revenge. Rotten fruit always falls all on its own.
To elaborate on my responses here, as I told you it’s complicated, the PMDD is one thing.
But generally speaking I don’t hold grudges. I don’t fantasize about revenge, though I would have liked to have seen more accountability for people who harmed me in the past. I don’t really get that worked up about conflicts with other people. I’d prefer to get along with everyone.
Now that my Mom is no longer in my life I don’t have anyone to be angry with, except maybe my Father in Law, but I look at my anger as a “me” problem, caused by the way I think about things. I was listening to a good podcast, Clearer Thinking With Spencer Greenberg, and they were discussing a sort of thought experiment where you’re dealing with a robot designed to punch you in the face. You can be mad at the robot or you can just acknowledge it was designed to punch you in the face. You can take steps to protect yourself from the robot, no harm in doing that, but if you’re spending a great deal of time angry at someone/thing you are essentially railing at a robot doing what it was designed to do.
Another metaphor I’ve heard is the empty boat. If you are out on the river in a boat and someone crashes into you, your first instinct is to yell at that person for being so thoughtless. But how would you respond if the boat were empty? You’d feel pretty silly for yelling and being angry at an empty boat. Well, we are all functionally being struck by empty boats, imagining that someone is to blame when really there’s nobody there. People do things because they are conditioned to do them.
This is a good philosophy but it doesn’t always work. I’ve been bent out of shape about a coworker who always gets the things I need to me late. I lost a lot of sleep last night freaking out about this. But it’s not so much anger as anxiety feeding anger. Once she gets me the thing, my anger vanishes (I would describe this is a normative level of anger.)
You wrote an extremely interesting post. I think there’s a fourth (unhealthy) option with revenge, possibly, and that’s fantasize about revenge, but never carry it out. Perhaps I’m wrong about my own instincts, but I’ve never “violently snapped” I don’t even feel like I’ve really come all that close, but it still felt “good” to kind of, “direct” the scenarios of revenge in my own head. Could it have been primal fear? Sure. Sometimes in direct, not-so-subtle ways.
Ever write a letter to someone you felt you NEEDED to tell something to, and then discard it because it’d only be a source of more problems? I think it sort of felt like that.
I hate that “letter writing” stuff (both actively and passively) … and whenever I have to write a “this will make the $hit hit the fan” mail in my job, I normally write it in the afternoon and let it sit overnight - if in the morning I still feel its a good idea to send it, off it goes, otherwise I tone it up or down, or don’t send it at all. I also make sure those mails are extremely watertight …
FWIW, I am very critical of what I write, and often think about those (stupid or not) suckers who had to follow the urge to tell the world how they feel about matter xyz via twitter, just to catch some heat and lose their job over a written comunication that had no real meaning (in the sense of it wouldn’t change how the world functions)
I’m having this thing where a coworker of mine is terminally incapable of getting me the things I need by the deadline. This last time she was nine days late. I was super pissed off yesterday as my grant deadline is approaching, I’m losing sleep and all kinds of shit because I don’t have the things I need when I need them. And after writing an email to my CEO I included things like, “I feel like nobody else actually cares that jobs are on the line” and “I’ve written thirty pages of narrative in the last two weeks, I am asking for a trivial amount of support relative to the amount of work I’m doing” I wrote it down and then I just edited that shit right out.
The only thing I said is that I think someone else should contact my coworker about the issue because I’d already sent her four emails and I was pretty upset.
I got the stuff today.
(And a damned good thing I edited it out, too, because the CEO unwittingly forwarded that email to another coworker… fortunately the other coworker is one of my good friends.)
Not, really.
I’m too chicken to be anything but a weeper.
I get hurt, I get upset, I get nervous and anxious, I make myself ill. I cry.
I can’t even bring myself to shake my fist at the clouds. I like clouds too much.
Until you mess with one of my loved ones. It’s not happened often. I can lose my stutter in seconds. I don’t curse. But I can get someone told off with brevity.
From a very early age, I was “conditioned” to repress my anger — just swallow it all right up. I had no right to be angry at anyone else and if I publicly demonstrated anger, word would get back to my parents and woe would befall me. You can probably imagine what 30-some years of internalized anger can do to your peace of mind. I can get very angry at myself for the slightest, most banal screwup, to the point of having to go close myself up in a room and just stew until it passes — might be 8 hours, might be three days. At those times, it’s a good thing there are no guns in the house or you would not be reading this. It doesn’t help that one of the therapists I saw as a teen was a staunch believer in, “you choose to be angry,” with no real solution as to how to turn it off. At least I have one release valve: eventually I will cloud up and rain until the anger is gone (for the moment) and no, I am not proud of it. It’s amazing I made it to my sixties.
Anger is an inevitable and universal part of human experience. And I’m sure everyone at one point has had a desire for revenge. There’s nothing wrong with being angry.
I had to learn that recently, because when I got angry with my kid I thought it meant I was a terrible person, you know, like my Mom. Every time I got angry I would relive my childhood. I was seeing a therapist at the time for PTSD but I got a second therapist just to work on parenting. Turns out most parents get angry at their kids, actually? Who knew? Once I realized that, and understood that I was dealing with a healthy amount of anger, I got a lot more comfortable as a parent, and, incidentally, less prone to getting angry. I also learned that you can course correct in the moment.
My Aunt said to me, “The difference between you and your mother is you have empathy for your child.” And she is right. Whenever we engage, I try to think about it from his point of view. I don’t think my mother could ever do that.
I just want to say what I learned, is that there is a difference between being angry and acting on that anger in an unskillful way. I had to get comfortable with feeling anger before I could get to that second part. If you’re trying to push away the feeling it will just magnify the effects.
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