I’ve got a bit of an issue at the moment that I’ve had for some time.
I am spending large amounts of time dwelling on things that have happened to me in the past that angered me. Whether I’m at work, or with friends, or just on my own, I will think about the time that x person said something mean to me, or y person refused to admit they had wronged me, or a time when z person acted patronising towards me, etc.
I dwell on these things, replaying the scenarios in my head, and it makes me very internally frustrated.
I say “internally” because I don’t outwardly show it, other than to perhaps be a little more quieter or withdrawn than normal.
I am not an angry person, I do not have a temper, I rarely if ever raise my voice and I rarely if ever say things out of anger. Most self-help sites on the net seem to focus only on that sort of anger, but that’s not what I have.
How can I stop myself from dwelling on these things, is there a reason I am doing it, and why am I getting so internally angry about little disputes I had with my friends and family, that sometimes happened years ago?
When those sorts of things pop up, I remind myself that it’s stupid to let someone else live rent-free in my head, and if that doesn’t do it, I talk about it with someone I trust. Not so they can fix it, but just so I’ve vented about it.
That pretty much gets that stuff out of my system.
Sometimes, venting can be very cathartic. In fact, there’s an entire message board here dedicated to such ranting… Go ahead and rant about things to your friends as well – though be tactful, and don’t do it so much that you become That Angry Guy.
Does your anger serve a purpose? I was very angry at a group of people. Unfortunately, at the outset, I had many people telling me I wasn’t entitled to my anger. It took a lot of time to forgive myself for being angry and accept that I most certainly had a right to anger. It took even longer to realise that the anger had served it’s purpose - in my case, it carried me through six years of lawsuit. So this is my long-winded way of saying, anger has it’s uses - to protect you, to help you learn etc - but you can also make an active decision about wether it’s still useful to you, and if not, take an enormous gulp and let it go.
I’ve never been a ranter. At least not with these particular issues.
Ranting might treat the symptom but it won’t help the cause.
I think ranting will just make me more angry. Some of these things happened years ago, so I can acknowledge that it’s somewhat irrational for me to constantly be getting angry about them. And it’s not always a fixed set of things, sometimes I remember the time that so-and-so person wronged me, and I think “Oh yeah, forgot about that” and get angry about it.
Ranting might be good if it was just one particular thing that was bothering me - but that’s not what is happening here.
As someone with a lot of experience at this who has been learning ‘better ways’…
Anger is based on fear, pain and a feeling of powerlessness. You’re angry about this stuff because you didn’t have any power over the situation and you fear that sort of thing happening again.
One of the keys is to realize that people say stupid shit all the time. We all hurt people around us indiscriminately and very often, without meaning to do so. Unless you’re willing to spend your entire life punishing yourself for every minor transgression (my former path), then you need to let go and forgive both yourself and others for minor little painful slips, slights and insults. They do it, you do it. Let it go. The vast majority of it is not intended to cause the sort of pain you are inflicting on yourself over it. Yes, that’s what I said. You’re doing it to yourself. They’ve moved on.
So recognize that fact - that the more you dwell on it and get angry about it, the more you’re magnifying the harm it caused.
Then there’s the power of Patterns of Thought. When you spend all your life engaging in the same self-destructive patterns of self-injury, anger, fear and negative thinking, it builds upon itself and overpowers everything else in you. It takes over, remakes you in it’s own image, then starts recreating your external world in it’s own image. A self-fulfilling feedback loop of negativity. And take it from me, it can be one helluva thing to get yourself out of this cycle and start creating good things in your life, IF you manage to stop yourself at some point and decide you don’t want to live that way anymore, rather than spiralling down into mental illness and/or suicide.
It’s not “magic”, it’s not mystery. It’s that you’re using the same neurons, the same parts of your brain in the same pattern, over and over. You’re constantly reinforcing that negative pattern and causing other mental patterns to deteriorate through lack of use.
One helpful thing is; When someone says something mean or negative to you, stop and consider WHY they said it. Not from your point of view, but from theirs. Are they in a pissy mood? Are they expecting better of you? Are they just a raging asshole? Very often these things have almost nothing to do with you at all. They’re about the person who said them. You just happen to be there. So the idea of taking it personally and being injured by it becomes almost comical, because it isn’t about YOU at all!
Example; You walk into a cafe, order a coffee and go sit at an empty booth. A few minutes after you sit down, another person appears, tells you they were sitting there and calls you an asshole. Do you take it personally? Hell, they didn’t leave anything behind, there was no indication that anyone was sitting there, hence there’s no reason for you NOT to have sat there. There are plenty of other tables open, so why did this person attack you? The answer is that you are not to blame, you did nothing wrong, and the person went off for reasons that have little to nothing to do with YOU. So let it roll off your back. Don’t accept the energy - it isn’t yours. Let that person keep it. Go back to your coffee and your thoughts of better things and like QtP said, don’t let that person live rent-free in your head.
Your above quote was what most struck a chord with me. I’ll have to think about that one.
This bit was interesting too, as it made me realise something:
What this made me realise is the sorts of indiscretions I am dwelling on are the ones that I feel I am least likely to commit against others.
For example, one of my failings is that I am very poor sometimes at keeping up contact with my friends, whether it’s giving them a call, or shooting an email, etc. And I have noticed that when others complain about this happening to them, I always think “Heh. Weird. I’d never get angry at someone for that, because I do it all the time”.
Whereas the sorts of things I am dwelling on are the sorts of things I feel as though I am least likely ever to do against someone else.
Thanks once again for your post - this has helped me identify a few more things.
I can’t say this works miracles, but it helps some and it’s free and easy. I try to enforce a “six month rule” on myself. If I’m dwelling on something negative, and it’s over six months ago (which it usually is. It’s amazing how often it’s like 9 years ago, or 20 …) I tell myself-six months rule, gotta let it go. I usually get a little amusement over how much longer than 6 months it’s been, and how trivial the event is in the big picture (unless it was a murder, nothing that happened in a parking lot is worth more than 6 months of angst …). Good luck. Don’t hesitate to seek professional help if this is something really getting you down.
For myself, whenever there is something that my mind keeps dwelling on, an encounter, a conversation, an altercation, an argument, that I can’t seem to let go of. My mind wants to keep replaying it over again, and again.
When that happens to me I find it’s almost always because there is something that I, myself, am not taking ownership of. I know, it’s totally contrary to some other advice in this thread, I’m just saying that’s how I am.
There is a blind spot for all of us, in seeing ourselves and, sometimes, our own motivations and actions. I am a strong believer that I have some ownership in everything that happens to me, everything.
The circumstances you’ve described would lead me to look more closely at what I am blind to in these cases, and what, no matter how minor I need to take ownership of.
One of these days I’m going to be at a garage sale or something and find a body bag for cheap. You know, the kind that boxers use for training? I’m going to hang it in my garage and beat the shit out of it when I get in that mode.
Or if you don’t have one, you could scream your pillow.
I don’t want to project my own experiences onto you. Keep it mind that this may or may not be true for you.
I carried a lot of rage and negativity with me for many years. I was just filled with anger at ever perceived slight. Then, through counselling and a very wise shrink, I was able to acknowledge the source of most of the rage in my life and to cut the emotional strings that this person used to control me.
I still try to avoid negative people who set my teeth on edge, but I can put up with most human foibles and I am quick to forgive. If I’m still holding a grudge, I isolate myself and get plenty of sleep. (Everyone should have a room of one’s own.)
And I also try meditation which is very soothing. I was about ready to sue someone once and meditation completely took away my anger.
A brisk walk is so good for anger. It gives me a natural high.
I have a feeling this is going to sound dumb or overly simplistic, but it is something that has worked (along with Paxil and more counseling, heh) for me: a therapist told me to ask myself “Is this thought my friend?” every time I started thinking about things that would either make me sad or mad or were generally unhelpful. If no, just let it go. Discard it. Think about something else. Every time. It was hard at first, because I felt like I needed to continue analyzing the thought and somehow resolve it (which of course never happened). But when I did it and kept forcing myself to do it, slowly I let go of the negative thought patterns, formed a new habit NOT to ponder thoughts that were not my friends, and now I hardly ever do it at all.
I meant of course that they have weight, like a torso, instead of those little ones they use for developing rhythm.
But come to think of it, you could off the person offending you, put them in a body bag, hang that in your garage, and the weight would be perfect “I killed him…but I’m not done beating on him yet!”
It is a habit, and like any habit can be broken - but only with much diligence and practice.
I used to do a similar thing: only I would think about possible confrontations. Play out each scenario that *might *happen. Imagine this unkind word or that angry phrase and imagine who I would respond. It was not healthy.
Whenever you find yourself thinking these things break the patter. I use a simple phrase. I think at the time it was “wealth, health, success.” A little mantra if you will. Whenever I found I was thinking about a confrontation, I would start repeating “wealth, health, success” over and over.
Use whatever you want. It could be: captain crunch cereal. It won’t make a difference.
Another thing I do, for things past that weigh on my mind; I ask myself: Did this *really *change the quality of my life? You know how few things *really *change the quality of life?
Realise that this won’t go away in a day or two. Even now, years after I started breaking the habit, I still sometimes fall into the pattern. I still have to remind myself to practice.
I’m going to offer a suggestion that might not be too popular on the SDMB, but which was the only thing that worked for me: religion. A good religious approach to the issue of anger would incorporate some of the ideas that other people have already suggested here, but it would improve on them by joining them all together into a single vision for your life.
To start off with, thinking about anger as a disease or symptom is already heading in the wrong direction. Cures for diseases come from the outside. A solution to the problem of anger has to come from the within. For me, my turning point was realizing that anger is a sin because it’s a form of self-righteousness. In other words, I was becoming angry in order to tell myself that I was better than everybody else.
The key to stopping the cycle of anger was to stop viewing confrontations in terms of right and wrong. Obviously there were some cases where I was right and some where I was wrong. But even when I was right, seeing the situation from the other person’s perspective still helped cool my anger. For instance if someone made an absent-minded insult, it helped to remember that I’d made absent-minded insults of my own on other occasions.
Of course the most important thing to note is that working to eliminate anger is only half the battle. While you get rid of unworthy thoughts, you also have to substitute worthy and uplifting thoughts. If you want to discuss any of these issues privately, feel free to send me a private message or an e-mail.
(Also let me be clear that I’m not arguing against counseling, exercise, or anything else that anyone has suggested. I just believe that those things would need to be accompanied by a deliberate change in perspective.)
“I killed him…but I’m not done beating on him yet!”