Anger management?

Fol­low­ing this post and that post, and the com­ments that have fol­lowed them, I’m feel­ing the need to turn up on my site — my site, remem­ber — and jus­tify myself. That’s some­thing I’ve hardly ever done in over two and a half years of writ­ing here. I’m not going to jus­tify myself to you. This is not an object­ive, fac­tual present­a­tion. This is my per­sonal, one-sided view. I don’t have to jus­tify what I say. No jus­ti­fic­a­tion here.

Well, OK, maybe just a little.

Since those two entries, par­tic­u­larly the lat­ter one, I’ve received some com­ments — emailed and even spoken, and almost all of them well-meant — express­ing con­cern about my tem­per. That’s some short fuse you’ve got there, they appear to say. And all I’m think­ing in response is, “Me? Little old me?” (even though I’m neither little nor par­tic­u­larly old). Then I won­der if people read my words thor­oughly enough.

I said: “I don’t like anger. I don’t like feel­ing angry”. Maybe I didn’t make it abund­antly clear: anger scares me. The main reason for this — and here the psy­cho­lo­gists would prob­ably have a field day — is that anger reminds me of my father’s tem­per, which was fierce and unpre­dict­able. That already qual­i­fies as far more per­sonal inform­a­tion than I usu­ally reveal on these pages, so I’m not going to say any more about it.

More psychology-speak com­ing up. I’m about to use the word ‘inter­n­al­ise’ in a sen­tence, for which I am very, very sorry. I can feel the pre­ten­sion quota rising already.

When I get angry, I try my hard­est — my damnd­est — to inter­n­al­ise it. Much of that involves writ­ing, which means that my anger can be glimpsed here. Close friends may exper­i­ence it via email. But they — and you — should then real­ise that what I’m writ­ing doesn’t neces­sar­ily reflect what I’m show­ing extern­ally, the per­son I’m dis­play­ing to the world around me at that moment. It rarely does, in fact.

This, how­ever, still doesn’t sat­isfy some people. There are those who argue that unless you release that anger, it bottles up inside and even­tu­ally explodes in an even uglier way. Maybe. But I don’t think that’s applic­able to me. I get that vital release of anger by writ­ing things down, think­ing things through and, yes, hav­ing the kind of ima­gin­ary rant that I have detailed rather graph­ic­ally on these pages before. Dis­sip­a­tion of bad tem­per is thus achieved, ninety-nine per cent of the time, and the birds can go back to singing in the trees.

Of course, even with all these ‘secur­ity meas­ures’ that I employ, there are rare occa­sions — very rare, thank­fully — when the only thing that will rid me of a feel­ing of intense anger is to exter­n­al­ise it. (Since I’ve already used the word ‘inter­n­al­ise’, I thought I might as well embrace com­plete ridicule by employ­ing its polar oppos­ite too). Example follows.

Events — per­sonal, work, social, even men­tal — caught up with me one even­ing a couple of weeks ago. Writ­ing had dried up, my think­ing was com­pletely blurred and illo­gical and — because this is the anger that I’m scared of reveal­ing, remem­ber? — I cer­tainly couldn’t talk to any­one. I had no escape route for my feel­ings. So, stand­ing in my tiny kit­chen while cook­ing myself a meal, I grabbed a din­ner plate from the cup­board and threw it at the floor. It smashed.

Now, I know what you’re think­ing. I’ve related this story to a couple of people over the past few days, and their wide-eyed look of alarm didn’t need any explan­a­tion. They weren’t even con­vinced when I informed them of a couple of import­ant points — but I’ll try them out on you anyway.

First, it’s abso­lutely imper­at­ive for you to real­ise that my chosen mis­sile (crock­ery can be a very good mis­sile, as my par­ents’ mar­riage often demon­strated) was not one of my best plates. It was part of a depleted din­ner ser­vice that I’ve had since uni­ver­sity, and which has seen bet­ter days. I’m not wast­ing good crock­ery on a bad mood, thank you very much. I’m not that stu­pid. Indeed, I find it rather impress­ive that even in the midst of black clouds des­cend­ing upon me, I can judi­ciously select only second-rate items for the pur­poses of destruc­tion. It proves that I’m not com­pletely unhinged, doesn’t it?

Second, after the plate-smashing moment, I felt so much bet­ter. I can’t claim that it was an instant sense of relief. It wasn’t. But within five minutes, I was calm. The anger had sub­sided. I swept up the broken pieces of crock­ery, threw them in the bin, and spent the rest of the even­ing read­ing and listen­ing to music.

That’s my secret; if you wish, you may take it and use it wisely, with my eternal blessing.

I’ve come to real­ise that if all else fails and I need to put my anger into some external form so that I can finally be rid of it, I must do it in private. I out­wardly dis­play many dif­fer­ent emo­tions and feel­ings to the people I love and value — I’m that kind of per­son, after all — but real anger is not one of them. The last time I was vis­ibly angry in a face-to-face situ­ation was a couple of years ago; it was nasty, unpleas­ant, scary. I hated myself for weeks after­wards. But that incid­ent finally helped me to for­mu­late how I should deal with anger in the future. And it’s worked.

In the two posts referred to at the start of this long-winded entry, it’s plainly obvi­ous that I was angry. In this sud­den and prob­ably entirely para­noid need to jus­tify myself, I hope it’s also obvi­ous that I know what my anger is like and I have ways of deal­ing with it. It may sound com­plex to you, but it’s all as clear as crys­tal in my head — where it matters.

This entry is ded­ic­ated to and inspired by the per­son who, earlier today, emailed me anonym­ously. In no uncer­tain terms, but in glor­i­ously incor­rect gram­mar, he or she informed me: “your nuts”. Thanks, but rest assured that if I was really nuts, I would know where you live and would already be plan­ning to visit you at the dead of night with the inten­tion of mur­der­ing your cat.