Count to ten, then swear (how to angry)

That is a good point. Anger can motivate me to act when i otherwise wouldn't. That's one of the ways it is genuinely useful. I just have to be careful not to let it inflluence my decisions beyond the level of "this shit will not stand, it is time to act"

I learned a few years ago that anger also helps to quell nausea. I read the article shortly after discovering it by accident. (my girlfriend at the time would refuse to get ginger ale from the fridge when i was feeling sick, despite the fact she would constantly ask me to go get drinks for her and i rarely every asked for such favors; in fact i generally would only ask her to get me something if i wasn't feeling up to it, but for some reason she had this thing against going with that [i infer that people had used that to manipulate her in the past and she hadn't figured out how to seperate her past and present stuff yet] so ANYWAY i would get so angry about the fact that the only time i actually asked her to do somethign for me she would refuse, and that anger would override all the sick feelings long enough to do something about it.

And then i stumbled onto an article about the biology behind that. Whcih i don't remember but there was SCIENCE.

 

That is my best advice with dealing with feelings. Ocean.

-looks at the sea and the Fog Sovereign-

i wish to fuck i had any idea how to trnaslate your advice

 

it's sometimes but not always turbulent, it has constant waves, it is beautiful and powerful, it's natural, you can drown in it, it's full of creatures...

any of that close to what you're getting at?

 

I laugh when people around me are angry. It's a nervous tick (much like a dog I smile when I panic) but apparently it's good at de-escalating situations? But I also don't get frightened by yelling anger as much as I do quiet anger, so it's not as much of an issue. (My dad was a yeller, and so am I. My dad was also a marshmallow with legs, so whenever he yelled he gave me ice cream as an apology so babby PR began to associate yelling with.... ice cream.........)

Screaming about things, either irl or more typically in a chat/vent thread, helps. It pulls the pressure off enough for me to sit back and look at what's happening in my head. I don't get angry at people very often though, so it's not something I have to worry about in interactions. I think a lot of that gets auto-channeled into other things-- video games, for me, but also just movement and noise. It's how my dad handled anger (stomping, yelling, cooling down pretty quickly once the energy was out) and it pulls a little from how my mom handle's anger (keeping it down and then releasing it when she smokes and can rant about things there without hurting feelings) and how my stepdad handles anger (yelling while smoking.) Something to pull off the pressure. Something to let out the steam. Yelling at goddamn motherfucking Mario Party is that for me, but I know that's not always easy for people to handle.

Once in high school, I threw a table during a card game, so that was... not ideal.

But pacing is the other thing. I can vent when I pace by using my body to work out the anger. I can go as fast or slow as I want, I can stomp or storm or prowl, I can walk with clenched fists or swinging my arms. That freedom of movement helps with a lot of the impotency of rage and it helps burn off the nervous energy rage gives me.

edit: I was an incredibly violent highschooler, despite not wanting to get hurt or hurt people. I kept my violence to the verbal and the written, but it was pretty brutal until I figured out better ways of venting.

 

Yes. If the ocean is so moody, but so perfectly beautiful even when moody they why can't you be the same? Must the waves and currents really be bad? Even the painful or scary ones.

 

that sounds nice. I wish i lived closer to the ocean so I could go stare at it when i'm upset.

fucking magic.

this is stupid, but whenever I'm really angry about something/someone I always want someone else to just take over the yelling and let me hide behind thm and ocassionally pop back into the fight, but then back out.
but that's not how arguments work so i can only argue for a little while before i start crying.

 

My responses to anger back in high school and middle school were very, very unhealthy. It's what got me into therapy - twice. I could easily have had charges pressed against me on a couple of occasions but the school really wanted to give me a chance to get better. (i was inordinately privileged in that regard.)

In college i finally worked out a useful thing. In the middle of one large, loud fight with my roommates I stormed to the door and turned back and said in a rather more child voice "I'm too angry to be able to have this conversation right now. I'm going out for a while to calm down. When I get back we can continue and I can actually be productive." Which on my end worked, i went for a walk, chilled out, got into a much better mood, and actually felt proud of myself for taking control of myself.

Apparently my roommates perceived teh whole thing rather differently though, bc when i got back they weren't around, and I didn't see them until the next day, after one of our friends came by to check on me in the morning and told me they had spent the night on her floor. I was kinda wtf at this, but like... one of them was my ex and she knew me in high school and she knew that my anger could be unpredictable.

Still, even since then I've kind of known in the back of my head that I am capable of noping out, and even explaining my need to nope out, and i can come back later to address real issues.

 

Example of unhealthy anger responses:

When my parents were moving a few years ago, they noticed a little round dent in the wardrobe. They thought it was something the movers had done, although they couldn't figure out what could have caused that particular damage, and I suggested that maybe a fire poker would have done it. They didn't think so and I told them I was pretty sure.

Back in high school or maybe middle school, I got angry, maybe not at my brother but he was the one i was screaming at. Our parents had been trying to get a lot of our old clothes collected for donation, so the hall was full of brown paper bags stuffed with years worth of clothes we'd outgrown. I tore all those bags apart in my frenzy. And at some point i accidentally threw a fire poker at his head.

When I say accidentally, i mean it quite literally. I had picked up the poker and he was across the room, and i swung the poker in what was meant to be an emphatic gesture, but the iron went flying out of the wooden handle, soared across the room, and thunked into the wardrobe right beside his head.

That shocked us both enough that we went straight into cleanup mode. Got some new bags, repacked all the donations, and disposed of the shreds. Reassembled the poker and put it into place, and never said a word about the dent in the wardrobe. Our parents didn't notice for ten, maybe fifteen years.

 

when I was a kid, back in middle school, I'd have like, rage blackouts. the things I remember best from those are the time I went after a guy with a racket and the time i chased someone across a gym to smash a dodgeball in his face.
like, both people had bullied me for years at that point, but still.

 

i dont get angry a lot, i mainly get upset? and even when i do get really angry a lot of the feelings tornado is some variation of "please leave me alone" + me sobbing.

speaking of, i cant handle conflict at all without having a panic attack. i worked at this summer camp last year and was trying to bring up a concern i had, but i ended up hyperventilating in the bathroom. super embarassing :/

 

::paps for raybot:: it can be so hard to feel confident that a conflict can be resolved without awfulness, especially when you haven't been taught the skills for it and are muddling through on your own.

 

thank. and it's kind of a bad positive feedback loop? im bad at handling conflict so i avoid it at all costs, which makes me worse at handling conflict

 

Oh! That was the other thing. Not a sports person, but once the weather shifted, we'd play lacrosse a lot in gym. And I was fucking brutal in lacrosse. I never broke anyone's bones or anything, but me and the professional sports girl were always put on opposite teams, because otherwise we'd scare the team against us too much to play. We broke the sticks once.

Lacrosse in gym started being less "try to make a goal" and "get the fuck out of the way of the two bulls in the china shop."

 

sounds like soccer at my high school

 

i really like play aggression. the physicality (?) of it. the thrill of competition. i would have definitely done wrestling in school if i didn't have dysphoria. lap tag is one of my favorite group games these days

i used to roughhouse with these kids at my after school program but i always got way too enthusiastic. they we were having fun and then suddenly they were no longer having fun. this happened another time when i was chasing this kid and swinging like, a deflated bicycle tire? but it was the same thing -- he was having fun and then suddenly he was not having fun and i didn't realize it until he brought in the supervising adult. this happened a lot now that i think of it. there's a line between "having fun" and "holy shit stop now" that i do not have a good track record with so nowadays i usually overcompensate the other way. hugging people freaks me out because shit what if i hurt them.

 

I am quite poor at being angry. I tell people I have a naturally calm disposition, which is true; things that will ruffle people, annoy them, or upset them generally go right over my head. "They're upset because they've been waiting awhile?" says a mouse, baffled. "But you wait in lines, that's what happens." Or, "you're upset because you're being treated like a child? People are condescending, it happens." I'll be shocked when something I consider just a minor inconvenience or a temporary setback gets someone. That's not something I'm always particularly proud of, because it leads to a lot of me not noticing things (messy rooms, loud noises, inconveniences in general) that are actually bothering other people. Or, well, I am proud of it, because I feel like Queen Most Stoic, but I shouldn't be, because that's mean.

But I'm also beginning to suspect a lot of the calm disposition, aside from the natural unflappableness and cheery attitude, is some prime bottling up. I've begun to pride myself on not looking angry more than not being angry, so now that I'm dealing with adult life and I am annoyed or set back or frustrated more often, I feel like I'm slipping, morally, when I'm angry. "I would be less angry if I just understood the wider perspective going on. I know no one's at fault. Other people are having difficult times too, or else they wouldn't be acting in a way I find annoying. I'm the least inconvenienced here. Surely I of all people am not feeling angry." I was shocked when Lilly correctly parsed some of my feelings as anger, since I had not realized they were until she told me so. I thought it was some sort of... miserable, boiling sadness that made me feel a way toward myself and others, which was a little like being let down, but CERTAINLY not ANGER, I'm hardly ever angry.

Not acting angry usually leads to me acting apathetic, because I'm trying not to be emotional. It's not really much better? I'm still glad I'm avoiding lashing out often, but I'm not glad that I freeze people out and don't communicate when angry. But it doesn't seem to me that there's a middle ground. You act angry, which scares people and makes them emotional, or you wait for it to boil down, in which case... if you're not angry, what's the problem? I would rather be able to just handle it; I wouldn't be able to bear freaking someone I love out and making them alter how they live for my sake.

If it isn't just infuriating me, I don't see why I'd bring it up instead of handling it. And if it is just infuriating me, I probably shouldn't bring it up, because I'm not in a good place to talk about it?

Where is my math wrong, genuine question. I keep hearing about the concept of healthy anger, some sort of middle-ground feeling that gets things done without hurting people, and I'm not sure that really exists. When I try to do it, address something after the emotional high has died down, it feels like I'm complaining about nothing, and people still tend to get upset, refuse to alter their actions, and it's all pointless in some way. So what the hell.

How the hell do most people feel when they express anger? Not like an idiot or a whining baby or an abusive monster?

 

Like I'm surfing on an explosive wave of emotion and need to fight. Sometimes it's fun. Sometimes it's not. Depends. It's warm and hot.

 

when I bottle it up, it's like there's a tornado in my head, and when I express it? I feel, idk, blank? like, I'll rage to a friend (who actually lets me) and once I'm expressing it it's like all the anger just rushes out and there's just a nice stillness for a little while.