I think I am lucky because I only have flashes of anger usually. A moment, and then it’s gone. The problem is when I get anger and it is more than just a flash I don’t always realize I am still angry. I get all grumpy and harrumphy and my head gets tight and it’s not until I stop and sit and look inside that I figure out why I am feeling this way.
The next step is figuring out what to do about it. I really have to do a deep dive into what is causing the bad feelings. Let’s do a hypothetical. COMPLETELY hypothetical because I don’t want anyone to read this and think…wait…is she talking about me?
First I kind of gently focus on the anger and see where my mind takes me. When I think of tension and feeling mean what pops into my mind. In our hypothetical scenario I am going to make it my neighbor Joe. Hmm, so why is picturing Joe’s face making me feel anxious? Stop, breathe, picture again, breathe, and let the feeling come to fruition. That’s when I realize it’s not anxiety it’s anger. What is anger? For me it usually stems from frustration. From someone not respecting my wishes, or not being considerate of how their actions may affect me. Or not being cognizant of how much time and effort I put into something that they have now completely fucked up. Oooo….wait…did we find the sore spot there?
Let’s say in our hypothetical situation I spent the last 36 months working on a flower bed. Planting perrenials from seed, growing them, caring for them. Building a beautiful bed with an intricate pattern. From one angle the colors looks like a beautiful mosaic. From another angle the textures turn it into a quilt. Every weekend I go out and spend time picking up small weeds and hand tilling the dirt to keep things exactly even. Then one spring I am late working in my bed because things are a little crazy in the world and the weather makes things grow at a different pace. I look out my window one day and see Joe standing in front of the bed smiling. It’s a warm sunny day so I wander out to say hello and noticed my bed is filled with tulips and hyacinth. They’re beautiful. Joe opens his arms and says “look what I did for you! I planted all these in the fall so they would come up and you would have beautiful color this spring.” Now, Joe thinks he’s done a wonderful thing and had good intentions, but because he didn’t talk to me he has ruined my work. All those flowers will push all of my beautiful perrenials out of the pattern. All of my work is in effect mangled. The basics are still there but it will not be the same, and I will have to redo most of it.Now having to work around a bunch of beautiful spring flowers.
What to do? Being angry at Joe does me no good. It doesn’t make my hard work suddenly reappear. Yelling at Joe for attempting to do a nice thing will not make things revert back to normal. Telling myself, that’s it. I am never touching this bed again doesn’t do anything productive. The only person who loses is me. So I breathe. I breathe again. Breathe out the anger and frustration. Joe didn’t do it to anger me, he simply isn’t capable of thinking beyond what he sees. Breathe some more. Don’t make any decisions. Wait. Wait and wait. See what happens. Watch the ebb and flow of the flower bed and see if I want to start over, fix the original pattern, or just throw some seeds and let it become a crazy collection of wildflowers for the summer.
Anger is draining, sickening and ineffective. It is also unfortunately a part of human nature.
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