Archives for posts with tag: emotions

Anger Management

April 11, 2024 //
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We become what we practice.

We become what we practice. Think about that for a minute in the context of anger, and how you express your anger, handle feeling angry, and how your anger affects others around you. We become what we practice. Practice “venting” your anger, releasing it into the environment, directing it toward other people… over time? You become more skillful at being angry. To be clear, you don’t become more skillful at managing your anger constructively, or harnessing the potential in your anger to communicate violated boundaries, or to seek change. You just become more skillful at (and more easily provoked into) escalating quickly and becoming a monster built of rage capable of doing great damage to those around you without anything much in the way of a positive outcome. I’m just saying, maybe give some thought to what you practice with regard to how you express and deal with your anger.

…I know I could do better, myself…

I’ve been noticing some more recent research being published about the relative value in “venting” one’s anger. Apparently, it’s not such a good practice. Gratifying for the angry person, perhaps, but not “helpful” for managing conflict, or reducing stress, or resolving whatever circumstance triggered the emotion in the first place – but reliably also incredibly damaging for the relationship with whatever hapless other primate is receiving the emotional blast of an angry outburst. Justified or not, delivering that angry blast of emotion to another human being is unpleasant, damaging, and not especially helpful for anyone involved. It’s unfortunate that we’re not taught sooner by knowledgeable practitioners how best to understand, endure, process, and express our emotions.

…Maybe don’t look to me for guidance on this one; I’m still learning…

I sip my coffee thinking about anger. I’ve gotten a lot better at managing my anger over recent years, but it still “gets me” now and then – most commonly when I’m driving. Thinking about that in the abstract, that seems pretty fucking dangerous. I keep working at it, because 1. we become what we practice, 2. disgorging explosively angry energy isn’t useful for anything in that situation 3. it wrecks my experience in the moment, and 4. it’s seriously unlikely that anything any other driver does or doesn’t do is at all personal or “about me” in the first place. This morning, I commuted calmly into the office, with the exception of one brief moment of frustration with a driver ahead of me going less than the posted speed limit. My angry reaction caught me a bit by surprise, but I recognized the inappropriate escalation of temper in the moment, and managed to take a breathe, and dial that shit back. Way back. I was going to get to my destination regardless, and this rather unimportant – and very brief – impediment to my forward momentum wasn’t going to change my arrival time in any notable way (even if it did, there’s no time pressure on my start time each day). I took a breath. Took my foot off the gas. Took another breath. Exhaled slowly and got a fucking grip on myself. I was being, frankly, ridiculous. So… I let that shit go.

Managing anger isn’t easy. It’s worthwhile, though. It does take practice. My results do vary. Still… incremental change over time is a thing. We really do become what we practice. When we practice calm, we become calmer. When we practice kindness, we become kinder people. When we practice listening attentively, we become better listeners.

…When we practice expressing our anger aggressively, we become angrier…

I’ve got choices to make. Practices to practice. Every time I feel my anger rise up, I’ve got another opportunity to practice managing my anger with wisdom, consideration, compassion, and understanding, and without explosively escalating it. Sure, my results are going to vary… but each time I practice being the person I most want to be, I get a little closer to that goal. Like anything else, when I fall short of my expectations of my best self, I can begin again. There will definitely be another opportunity to do better.

I’m grateful that I’m no longer the seething ball of taking-everything-personally rage that I was in my 20s. That rage didn’t get me anywhere with the underlying traumas that caused it, it just did more damage. I’m grateful that I’m no longer the pensive, frustrated, still-seething-in-the-background resentfully angry mess that I was in my 30s and 40s. There was an impotence and fugue of futility to that which undermined my ability to feel any joy in life at all ruining some otherwise pretty good years. By the time I entered my 50s, I at least recognized I needed to do something quite entirely different… so I began again. It’s been a strange journey of growth, change, and transformation. Worthy. The journey is, after all, the destination.

I sip my coffee, and reflect on the past decade of growth and change. It seems such a short time…

…and already, still, time to begin again. Again.

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Categories Allegories, anger, anhedonia, Anxiety, Brain Injury, breathe, forgiveness, Free Will, Frustration, gratitude, Healthy Living, meditation, Mindfulness, Moments, Perspective, Post Traumatic Stress, Practices, Relationships, Spring, The Art of Being, The Big 5

Super Grumpy (Just Because)

April 30, 2020 //
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Sometimes it is a thing; we are creatures of emotion and reason. Just like that sentence, emotion generally arrives to the party first. Reason shows up later. I’m super grumpy today. I don’t have any sort of reason for that, it’s simply how I am feeling, at this moment (and for several hours worth of moments since shortly after my work day began). There is nothing specifically “wrong”. I’m just… grumpy. Correction. I feel grumpy. I feel cross. I feel irritable. I feel prone to taking things personally. I feel “out of sorts” and generally aggravated. I feel impatient. These are how I am feeling.

…Still, they’re just feelings…

Emotions are funny things. We can argue the factual basis of a subject. We can disagree with each other regarding our understanding of circumstances, and our recollections of details; we are each having our own experience. We’re not seeing the world from identical perspectives. We can’t actually argue against an emotion, though. Those are our own. Not subject to disagreement. Period. I feel grumpy. No one actually gets to tell me that’s “incorrect” as an emotional experience. (People may try, but as arguments go, an argument against someone’s emotional experience is rife with thought-errors, fallacies, and a peculiar assumption of entitlement, inasmuch as it presupposes that other person’s emotional experience is somehow superior or has more substance or value.) I’m mostly not even letting my grumpiness “be a thing”, generally, but it is still there in the background.

…I would have been camping next week. All week. Out under the trees. No other people. Only my own agenda. Quietly sitting. Hiking. Cooking out under the sky. Sipping coffee in the morning chill. Watching the leaves unfold, and the spring flowers bobbing and swaying in the spring breezes. Content, relaxed, and face-to-face with the woman in the mirror for a few days of solitude. Pandemic life being what it is, the location where I would have been camping closed, and canceled all pending reservations, some weeks ago. So, not going is not a surprise. Hell, I’m not unhappy to have the opportunity to still enjoy a couple of those days off, in the good company of my Traveling Partner…but…

Today, right now, for no obvious reason, I feel exceedingly put out by every tiny inconvenience. I feel prone toward anger, over shit I’m not generally angry about. I really “want to rest” – but I’m not talking about physically resting this meat puppet. I need cognitive rest. I need time with myself.

It may be awhile, for all of us, before we get some needs easily met. For some folks, solitude is hard to come by right now. For others, what’s hard to come by is community. Whether we call time spent alone “solitude” or “loneliness” is largely a matter of perspective. The emotions involved belong to each of us as individuals. I sigh and alternate between sips of cold coffee left from this morning, and fizzy water that has gone flat. I don’t care for – or about – either one. It’s almost reflexive, as if I am seeking to satisfy a craving, but doing so quite incorrectly for the craving that it is. So… now what?

Eventually the emotional weather will shift, and “this too shall pass”. I could take the mood, and the moment, very personally, blowing it way out of proportion, catastrophizing it, creating monsters out of miniatures. Or… I could let this shit go. Again.

…And then again, if necessary. And again after that. Yep, again once more if I have to. Maybe another time after that. Just keeping putting it down, letting it go, and beginning again. No reason to vilify the emotions themselves; they are not the bad guy here. Far more valuable to look them over tenderly, honestly, and with as much self-compassion as I know how to practice. Then try again if I miss that mark. There is no limit on the new beginnings I can offer myself.

So… I do.

My Traveling Partner comes in for a moment, and glances at the page in front of me. “I’m sorry you’re grumpy.” He says it tenderly. Kindly. Honestly. This, too, is a moment. A pretty nice one, actually. He gets back to what he was doing. I get back to what I am doing, while taking some time for me – to savor this moment. Far too easy to become mired in my less pleasant ones, even though the lovely ones are so much more worthy of my attention. Human primates and their negativity bias. I shake my head, smiling at myself. So human.

…It helps to take a moment, for myself. Some quiet. Some solitude. A moment to begin again.

 

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Categories anger, anhedonia, Anxiety, Brain Injury, Free Will, Frustration, gratitude, Healthy Living, Mindfulness, Moments, more than a little bit of bitching, Perspective, Post Traumatic Stress, Practices, Relationships, Spring, The Art of Being, The Big 5

This Is Entirely Different

December 21, 2013 //
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Well, or maybe it isn’t.

Actually, it is.  I’ve written ‘this post’ six times, now. Each very different, written on a different theme, a different emotional voice, a different perspective, expressing very different needs, or understandings of the world around me, or my own life. It’s an odd morning that way. I’ve been up since 6 am, and after some meditation and a bit of yoga, I have been sipping my coffee and writing.  This post is entirely different from the previous versions.  It’s a strange morning and while I feel moved to communicate…I’m not sure what I want, or need, to say.

There’s a meme trapped in my thoughts. It drifts around Facebook regularly, it comes from somewhere…unknown to me in the moment. Words over a picture, the usual thing…the 3 questions meme – quote? “Does this need to be said? Does this need to be said by me?  Does this need to be said by me, now?”  I do love some good questions. I woke with these words in my head, but juxtaposed over a troubling dream that seemed very unrelated to the words.

I dreamt I was dangling from the Burnside Bridge, holding on by my hands, everything slick from a drenching rain that was falling. I pleaded with a man on the bridge to pull me up – I felt fear and desperation, and a panicked certainty that falling would be the end.

The Burnside Bridge

The Burnside Bridge

The man in my dream was a lover, or husband, or  father…someone dear to me, someone I could count on, someone I expected to assist and support me.  My pleading went nowhere helpful.  My potential rescuer seemed unaware of the urgency of my situation, looking vaguely thoughtful and caught up in his own thoughts, his own moment.  I repeated my plea, my hands were wet with both rain and sweat, and it was so hard to hold on.  The man above me looked down on me and politely said he would be happy to help, of course, but first he wanted to give me some feedback…

I woke to that ‘feeling of falling’ that dreams sometimes end with, feeling quite terrified, heart pounding, short of breath to the point of panting – and very very happy to be quite alive and not actually falling to my death in the icy December waters of the Willamette River.

I meditated. I let the dream go. I wrote. It came back. I wrote different words and dispelled my demons. They returned moments later. I wrote more different words, changed my thoughts (alright, Brain, nothing to see here, move along…), and continued to write, erase, rewrite – again the dream returned. I decided, finally, fuck it. Write about the weird dream and see where it goes. It doesn’t go anywhere, really, why would it? It was a dream. One of those intense, not-quite-a-nightmare sort of dreams that I generally accept as my sleeping mind attempting to communicate something to my waking mind – it is an endeavor of limited successfulness, and largely due to the difficulties with words.  This particular attempt seems to be pointing me toward considering emotions, words, and what matters most in the present moment. Differences between ‘urgent’ and ‘important’, perhaps, or a reminder that we each have our own needs in the moment, in life, in love… or… perhaps something entirely different.

Now it is morning, the household begins to wake. The day is all potential from this vantage point, and dreams are behind me, lost in the night. Today is a good day to love gently. Today is a good day to be compassionate with myself, and with others. Today is a good day to experience joy, and contentment, and to accept struggle with compassion. Today is a good day to change the world.

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Categories Anxiety, Brain Injury, Free Will, Healthy Living, Logic & Reason, Love, Metaphors, Mindfulness, pain, Perspective, Post Traumatic Stress, Relationships, Sleepless Nights, Turning 50, winter, women, Words