I was tooling around on the blog here, looking over the layout and the links (I removed the links – they were way at the bottom of the page and making the page too long – I’ll have to fix that later on somehow), and I came across a post I made in December of 2007. I had titled it “Self Discovery” back then, because I had made a discovery about myself that was startling and .. troubling.
Simply put, my anger was usually as a direct result of the impression of being “dissed” … disrespected, ignored, bullied into silence, manhandled … imagined or real, they all resulted in me “yelling and throwing things”. And I realized also that:
…I am hurting the most when I am at my nastiest. It’s when I don’t want to break down and cry with humiliation and despair that I shout and break things and call people ugly, dark names. And it’s when I need the comfort and love the most, that I turn people away with the worst disdain and hate that I can summon.
Examples of situations such as these blaze through my mind. I am reminded of many a painful scene in which my imagined wrongs resulted in an alienation of people close to me. One man, in particular, could never understand this trait of mine and his response was just as destructive and we would end up fighting for days, no end in sight, many nasty words traded and me eventually breaking into tears because something hateful eventually gets said. There were far more issues at work in that situation that made it fail, of course, but the anger is what I remember the most.
If it is one thing I have learned from my now-husband, it is that no matter how angry you may get because of some wrongdoing – imagined or real – it is of the utmost importance to ensure that the anger is expressed within a secure environment. You can tolerate a great deal of yelling and storming and scowls once you are secure in knowing the person who is yelling at you loves you, cares for you and would do absolutely nothing to hurt you.
Anger in and of itself is not destructive, it is the expression of that anger that kills. It kills love, it kills interest … slowly, over time, it erodes everything positive and you are left wondering why you lingered in the first place.
Honestly, one of the most difficult things to do in life is to be able to tell someone “I love you, but I am SO angry with you right now” without yelling it. Even having recognized this, I still have difficulty expressing my anger in positive ways. I still employ the “I can’t talk right now. I’ll talk about it later when I’m not so angry” ploy frequently. And I also still have to reinforce the positive on occasion: “I know I sound like I don’t like you when I yell, and I am sorry. I am trying to control that.”
It certainly isn’t a lesson learned or put into practice overnight, but the effort to do so makes a world of difference. Relationships are fragile things – it doesn’t take much negative emotion to shatter them. Pour enough positive to dilute the negative or obscure it completely helps keep them flourishing.
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