Skip to main content

Resolving Anger

My therapist asked me recently if I thought that I had any unresolved anger.  Apparently, he suspected that I might.  I do have anger, but it's not unresolved.

I used to be very angry.  I was angry because I didn't understand the world as others presented it.  Others' descriptions of the world didn't comport with my experiences of it.  I saw a world full of unnecessary limits and rules.  Others insisted those rules and limits were eminently necessary even though they couldn't explain why and, in many cases, hadn't even considered why.  This was disorienting and it made me suspect that people were lying to me.

But they weren't, for the most part.  Once I stopped imagining malice, it became easier to let go of anger.  I learned that being angry without being considerate was conducive to objectification, and I was objectifying the people I felt anger toward.

Some of the people who should have protected me acted to hurt me instead.  I had a lot of complex anger about that for a long time.  I didn't want to let go of that anger because that seemed like forgiving people who didn't deserve forgiveness.  After many years, and with much difficulty, I learned that I didn't need to forgive someone, or even to stop being angry at them, to move on.  Anger is a motivation.  If there's no productive way to act on it, then I don't.  I let the anger be what it is and then I look to better things - motivations that will promise real benefit.  Holding grudges is a symbolic act, and I reject symbolism.  There's no practical reason to decide that I will seethe with impotent anger forever.  Forgiveness is symbolic, too.  I haven't forgiven the people who did terrible things.  I've just decided that it doesn't matter whether I forgive them or not.  I have other things to do.

People misunderstand things.  There are certainly malicious people, but even they have motivations.  No one is an unmotivated evil force.  Everyone is a person.  So I decided to put anger down.  It wasn't useful, and that was frustrating.  Some of it is still there in some capacity, I just don't use it to inform my assessments of people or situations.

If I can try to understand, that's better.  If I can't, then I walk away.  Anger takes time and energy that I want for other things.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Man Is Not Great: The Evolution of Anthropocentrism

Why do humans care whether their species is special? Why are they so invested in their specialness that they're uncomfortable with the idea that they aren't? Why is it a bitter pill to swallow that humans aren't uniquely important in the universe, that they aren't the intended end of evolution, and that their wondrous and diverse subjective experiences emerge from the same physical processes observable in "lower" animals? I think that the maladaptive human tendency to insist upon their specialness in the universe is an extension of an adaptive tendency to self-advocate in their tribes. Consider fear. The predisposition to turn around when you feel like something might be behind you is likely to save you when there really is something there. Most of the time, when you can't help but turn around on the dark basement steps, there's no threat. From an evolutionary perspective, it’s better to turn unnecessarily than to do nothing in a moment of danger. That...
Post a Comment
Read more

Threat and Opportunity

Humans see everything as either a threat or an opportunity. These are the only classifications they have. A threat could be a corporal threat, like a violent person, or it could be a threat to their attention, like a boring person or a waste of time.   You're not in control of whether something looks like a threat or an opportunity. You can certainly apply control to turn one into the other, but your first impressions of anything are unconscious. I'm a waste of time. There's nothing to be gained from socializing with me because I'm profoundly socially impaired. I have no status and no way to earn status, so I'm a threat to attention. People who choose to pay attention to me find the endeavor prohibitively expensive of their energy. Attending to me is necessarily a struggle against the Darwinian impulse to conserve energy.  We can call this a rejection response.   I've said that humans naturally have a psychological allergy to me, but that's not a good...
Post a Comment
Read more

The Human Protocol

Humanity is a spectrum. Some people move through human society without ever belonging in it. I'm such a person. Every thought, every emotion, every sensation, everything your internal organs do, your balance, your muscle tone, your proprioception, every experience you have, from the big ones to the little ones, corresponds to something that happens in your brain: a neural event. Most neural events are beyond our direct control. Every neural event has a trigger. Someone says your name and you turn. You like a song, so you turn it up. What triggers neural events is determined by things like your genes, your upbringing, your culture, and your values. Many neural events are reserved for human-to-human interactions. If you encountered a mosquito that spoke English, you'd recategorize it, and you might change the way you went about trying to keep it from biting you. It would qualify for a kind of consideration that we don't usually offer mosquitoes. It would be more than just an ...
Post a Comment
Read more