Why do I do this? (Angry Fantasies)

Miscellaneous and Personal Stuff I Must Share
1

This is something that I have done for all of my adult life: it’s not crippling, but it makes me unhappy and I want to know WTH is going on.

I often, in the course of thinking about things and wondering about things, will suddenly and quickly engage in an imaginary scenario which quickly turns emotionally and sometimes physically violent. Mind you these are completely imaginary scenarios. I get all wound up emotionally and have nowhere to go with my feelings. And for what?

More specific examples: Years ago I read a story about college students from housing projects/bad neighborhoods coming to college here and bringing their younger siblings here, to get them out of the housing project. Because the older sibling is busy with classes, work, and a social life, the younger sibling often gets into trouble, does poorly in school, etc. I imagine a scenario in which I am the older sibling, shouting and screaming at the younger sibling about what a useless blankety-blank he is, while an alarmed counselor-type tries to get me to calm down.

Something I read in an advice column years ago from a mom who is concerned about her silly teenaged daughter, who is dating some poorly-raised idiot, and how the two of them reinforce each other’s stupid behavior. Specifically (this was in the column) they had the young man over for a simple spaghetti dinner, and the couple were kissing at the table with mouths full of spaghetti, and exchanging spaghetti between each other’s mouths (yeah, gross, I know). I imagine a scenario in which I am the mom and I go completely berzerk, screaming obscenities to the clueless couple, throwing the young man out of the house, forbidding my daughter from ever seeing him again, her reacting with hysterics, etc., etc.

We had a thread here not long ago about a YouTube video showing a very young child walking behind a horse that clearly did not want to play with her and how it very gently pushed her away. I imagine a scenario in which I am responsible for the child and I call to the child who is oblivious to the danger she is in; my calls become more insistent and angrier as I become enraged that she won’t just OBEY ME and COME HERE already.

These are all parent/child scenarios, obviously, but there are many others; two from my own real life include a fast food restaurant full of cheerleaders who decide to practice their cheers while waiting for their food, just because they are young and silly and full of themselves, meanwhile of course making it impossible for the restaurant employees to take anyone’s orders without shouting or for anyone to hear themselves think. I imagine a scenario in which I start screaming at the girls to bleep off and shut up, until the room is full of crying, sniffling cheerleaders, and the mood of noisy silliness is completely ruined. Another was a scruffy young man on a bus who was arguing with the driver about paying a 75c fare when he got caught trying to use his expired student pass. Dude, just pay the effing 75c and sit down and SHUT UP. Again: adrenaline rage with nowhere to go.

I am not a parent, but I did have a “difficult,” angry mother who was later diagnosed as being manic-depressive and who later became an alcoholic. Her behavior started to get really weird and out-of-control when I was 11 and she died when I was 16. Often having a dysfunctional, out-of-control parent teaches the child that anger and other strong emotions are… dangerous, and one learns to keep them bottled up in an unhealthy way. When I went off to college, I had difficulty dealing with my own anger, and somehow attracted friends and roommates who were expert at pushing my buttons (that’s another thread). I went to the campus therapist for a long while and learned to deal with my own anger issues pretty well and I don’t have problems with people taking advantage of me any more, at least as far as I can control how anybody treats me in general.

My question is: will I be dealing with this garbage for the rest of my life? Why do I get so… ANGRY, and with stuff that isn’t even real, fer crine out loud? Can I make it stop? Advice appreciated.

2

I don’t have any real answers for you except to say that you are not alone. Although some of ‘angry fantasies’ involve real life stuff that happened to me years, decades, ago. I can get extremely angry over a bullying incident that happened in grade school or a bad boss I had over 15 years ago.

My purely fantasy stuff is more depressing than angry although I do get angry or should be angry about the stuff I imagine.

I use to imagine my (now ex) wife getting pregnant and losing the baby (we never wanted kids) or that my wife would die in childbirth. Then her younger sister would think I was unfit to be a single dad and would either steal the child, have the child taken from by the courts, sometimes by accusing me of sexually abusing the child and me ending up in prision.

This is not a pleasant way to spend the afternoon.

All I can tell you for certain is that I’m sometimes able to stop the fantasy. When I start thinking those thoughts I force myself to think happy thoughts or I turn on the iPod and I have a playlist with no sad songs or songs that have a sad association with them. (for me)

I saw one of those Mystery Diagnosis shows (on Discovery Channel) about a person with a small tumor on their adrenal gland. This caused the mood swings and the intense thoughts as the tumor caused the adrenal gland to pump adrenalin into the person. It caused a lot of other symptoms the only other one I heard was excessive sweating. (which I have) but I couldn’t find the show online anywhere to see the other symptoms.

3

I’m kind of in the middle of dealing with my own anger issues. I had an angry mother too, so my whole view is that anger is a completely destructive, totally useless emotion and that I should do everything I can to avoid feeling angry.

But I do feel anger, because I’m human. Lately in therapy I’ve been working on accepting that anger is a natural and necessary part of being human, and that it’s healthy in that it can point out important truths, show us what we value, help us recognize when we need to establish boundaries, and help us protect ourselves and other people.

The problem is we who have been exposed to unhealthy expressions of anger confuse the unhealthy expression with anger itself. The anger itself is not the problem. The problem is when we choose to interpret anger as an excuse to be violent or mean or whatever rather than to engage in some constructive problem-solving.

If you’re anything like me, what you want to do is blame anger for your Mom’s problems, when the problem was how she chose to express it. You can’t blame anger. It’s here to stay. It’s always going to be here. It’s a part of the human experience. We can choose to embrace it for the ways it helps us rather than reject it. We can learn to express it constructively rather than destructively. We can take control and responsibility for it without penalizing ourselves for feeling it.

I don’t know if that makes sense, but I get the impression that you feel guilty for experiencing anger, and having dealt with that myself, I just wanted to provide another perspective.

As a little homework exercise I would like you to think about clear examples you have seen or experienced where anger was a healthy thing and led to something good. It sounds dubious, but you’ll be surprised how many examples you can find. I have a hunch once you begin to view anger as a more constructive emotion, your concerns about your angry fantasies will diminish.

4

I’m pretty sure everybody does this. It’s the internal darkness that makes us humans capable of doing very horrible things.

Some people deal with it via religion or meditation. Some use drugs or alcohol. Some lose themselves in a good book.

I tend to deal with it by exercising (which may just be a healthier way to use drugs, considering the calming effect stems from the chemicals released during exertion.)

5

A few years ago, I worked with a lady who made life an absolute Hell for her colleagues, and me in particular. She was a very bitter woman with a history of mental illness in her family. She was very probably bipolar, but I don’t know if she had actually been diagnosed and was being treated for it. She was the proverbial “piece of work”.

I put up with her abuse for about 2 years. This was a Christian organization, and I went out of my way to try to allow her to have her space, extend her grace, and whatever I needed to do to minimize the tension. I even tried my old standby of thinking, “What type of wounding has she had to go through to become this awful? How would I act if I had been wounded in the same way?”

Nothing worked.

One day, she was standing at the entrance to my office and had started haranguing me about something, when I had a vision. I imagined myself beating her with a baseball bat. I saw myself in the center of the room, swinging the bat at her head and watching the blood fly. I saw the castoff blood spraying the walls of my office. I even saw myself twisting my body and changing my stance so my swing wouldn’t be impeded by the bookshelf.

Scared me to thing what might have happened if I had actually had a blunt object in my office.

I started looking for a new job within the week.

6

Great username/post combo!

7

I think this kind of thing happens to everyone. You know how you will occasionally just fall into a fantasy about what life would be like if you came home and found that your couch had been replaced with a couch-shaped pile of bills totalling $1,000,000? (That’s just me? Okay then.) Your brain also does the opposite. You have fantasies about joy, sadness, anger, and pretty much anything else you could feel. If I get to into it and start feeling too much anger I have to stop myself and remind my brain that the odds of that horrible thing happening are next to nothing so I shouldn’t think about it any more.

8

I was going to put down a long post outlining about the times I do this, but the more I think about it, the longer and more disturbing it would get.

So as an alternative, I’ll just say I know exactly what the OP means and yes, it is quite disturbing.

9

I used to do this all the time. I spent way too much of my life angry. About 10 years ago I started a campaign to break this bad habit. Whenever I caught myself doing it, I would just repeat a little nonsense phrase over and over. (Mine was “Joy, health, wealth”) No matter how many times I found myself doing it, I would repeat my “mantra”. It mostly worked and I rarely do this anymore.

Have a look at the book that I review here. The author spent about a 1/4 of the book talking about Automatic Negative Thoughts (ANTs). I wish I had read the book years ago.

I am not sure, but I was *told *that one of his earlier books does a better job of addressing this, but I cannot say which.

Good luck!

10

If you’re not still seeing a therapist, it sounds like you should schedule a visit. Fantasies like this are common, yes, but only you know if they are a real problem affecting your daily life – and it sounds like they are (rather than providing a little bit of relief). I don’t think it even takes an amateur online therapist to guess that they are about control, and perhaps your need to get things off your chest to someone who is no longer there.

11

I do this stuff too - usually imaginary arguments with loved ones about the sort of things they might do, but haven’t actually done. Sometimes, when I’m in a stressful situation, or just a situation that reminds me of something, I’ll start of with scenarios of the type “If X was here, he/she would do Y and make everything worse, and then I would blow up and say this…” and I’m off.

It sucks, and I’d like to stop, because all that anger sometimes spills out at random times (not often, thankfully.)

I had a very functional and loving childhood, for what it’s worth.

12

Rage at past feelings of powerlessness to change the situation.
Invented situations where you can display rage/power.
Release of pent up anger.

I spent a lot of years doing this stuff too, and occasionally still do it.

The trick to reducing it, because it is a learned and reinforced internal behavior, is to stop yourself the moment you realize that you are doing it, and move on to something else. No inward anger at catching yourself, or that too becomes a destructive habit. Nope, just stop, calm, release, move on. Or better, reward yourself with good thoughts or a small treat for being good enough to stop the thought and move on, just like you would reward a child or pet for good behavior in training them.

13

Variations on this theme happen to me to. I think they hit more when I am tired and stressed, however, so I usually take them as a sign to get some sleep and then get my shit together (I am only stressed when I am letting work slip).

14

I’ve also had this issue.

More than just a waste of time, it also leaves me feeling upset making it difficult to deal with real problems. It really came back in force the last 2 years or so while dealing with depression and anxiety.

My $0.02: this is an unhappy way to live. Seek professional help if you can’t get it under control. The worst that will happen is it will cost some money and they will tell you you are OK. Since getting treatment and my life back on track, these disturbing, angry fantasies have decreased considerably. (I didn’t seek treatment based on this issue, it was more the depression and inability to concentrate.)

Walt

15

Just curious - for those of you who do have angry fantasies - do you drink a lot of caffeine? I’ve noticed that whenever I drink a lot of coffee, I just plain get irritated at everything. And that includes having these angry fantasies more often. Cutting back seems to calm me down and reduce my number of angry fantasies a lot.

Recently I read the book Sperm Wars. One of the central points in that book is that a woman is far more likely to have an orgasm, and to conceive a child, through an affair rather than with her boyfriend or husband. Ever since reading that, I’ve had angry fantasies about my girlfriend of two years running off with some play-by-your-own rules, outlaw, bad-boy biker and having multiple orgasms with him - and then getting pregnant with his kid and leading me to believe it’s my own. My logical brain tells me that that’s not going to happen, especially with how clingy she is, how much she loves having sex with me, and how much she talks about marriage. All I can say is, if you have angry fantasies, you might want to avoid the book Sperm Wars. :smack:

16

That cracked me up.

It’s a great book, and there’s some fascinating stuff in it, but I had to stop reading it because I found it depressing.

I sometimes get angry fantasies. It’s not hard to change tracks in my mind, but sometimes I don’t want to. Sometimes holding onto it feels good, in a weird way.

17

What actually happens during treatment? Is there talk therapy, or are you just given a prescription and told to come back in a few months to see how you are?

18

If it’s anything like what I’ve been going through, there is very little overlap between the chemical and psychological management of mental illness. I see a psychiatrist for the former, and a therapist for the latter. The psychiatrist doesn’t do any therapy, and as far as I know, that is true in general.

As for the OPs question, well, I’m probably not the best person to give advice, but I would just accept that part of yourself and not feel ashamed. You don’t do any of this fantasy stuff, right? Then you’re okay. Actions are what counts, not thoughts. If violent thoughts were someday made a crime, most everyone would be imprisoned. Nature is violent, and humankind is only an evolutionary blink-of-the-eye away from fight or flight.

The fact that you seem to identify with the actions of people, I think, is a strength; you can understand the emotions that would give rise to a particular action–that means you’re thinking and making the conscious choice to not engage in violent behavior. It’s those individuals who cannot imagine doing this or that that I worry about; I think they’re the ones most likely to snap and wonder what the hell came over them.

Right now–just now, in fact–I got an email that, were I not operating with a good frontal lobe, might cause me to hit someone with a shovel.

Of course, since I’m currently in therapy, take all of this with a grain of salt.

19

I did not talk to anyone about these involuntary violent fantasies until I mentioned them to my psychiatrist a couple of months ago. I thought I was the only one who had them and something was seriously wrong with me. Thanks for this thread, because people need to know they’re not alone in this.

20

Thanks to everybody for your responses. The ones that are most valuable to me are the ones that say, “You’re not alone,” and “Me too!”.

No, I never act out any of this stuff. I am the most mild-mannered person you could meet. In fact, I think people tend to lean on me a bit because I’m not someone who is always flying off the handle. I regret using the word “often” in the second paragraph; it’s not as if I do this every other day. I wrote the OP precisely because I wondered why I do it at all. I am the Byronic sort who tends to get “dark” about the state of the world; sometimes when it feels like nothing is getting any better, I can become oh-so-slightly overwhelmed.

For someone who had a bipolar parent, if this is as bad as it gets, then I will count my blessings! I think our society tends to push the idea that one ought to be happy all the time or something. Anyway, thanks again to everybody.