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Today I want to talk about anger, as it is something that I have dealt with quite a lot, and something that I have suffered from for a pretty substantial amount of my life. (ok, to be fair, I'm still a teen)
Let me give you some backstory to this. Quick note: What I am referring to as anger, includes everything around it, even the "pre-anger phase"
I was a very aggressive kid, I probably got that from my dad, who tends to scream at his computer in anger after debugging for half an hour and then goes outside to smoke a cigarette. Anyway, as a kid other kids used to annoy me just so I would get aggressive for their entertainment, it worked every time. I was unable to ignore it. The opposite happened in middle school ("weiterfuehrende Schule" in german) where I was very aggressive from the start and a few kids in my class started to fear me. 2 years ago I switched to a different school, in this school I had a teacher I got along with really well, not like "was good in class" but rather that we would talk hours upon hours after school. Talking about the school system, ideals, the past, future plans, and eventually, about anger. She recommended me to look at some presentations of "Vera Birkenbhil" (I hope I spelled her name correctly), so, after I got home from school, I started watching some of those, and I was fascinated by her logic, and agreed with her, and I tried to apply some things she recommended in my life.
She recommends to imagine people would die in 2 weeks, therefore you wouldn't wanna start an argument with them. I like this in principle, but from my experience it doesn't really help and overall isn't doable. Your experience might differ tho.
The day I remember as being the day I succeeded at fighting anger was when I got really fed up about my sister not cleaning up her dishes after she left the table. So, I was about to storm up to her room, and tell her (very aggressively) that she should clean her shit up, but in that moment a certain clarity overcame me, I remembered that I wanted to stop being angry all the time, and I said to myself "stop.". Which was surprisingly effective and basically "wiped" the anger off of me. I was just standing there, wondering why I should be angry about it. Eventually I started doing this more and more and I started understanding that anger usually doesn't help anybody, aside from comedic purposes :P The thing about this method is that you don't end up getting more and more fed up because you just "gulp your anger down" but instead you get rid of it. You can imagine it like removing the 'cause', instead of the usual approach, which would be removing the 'symptoms' (anger itself). And by removing the 'cause' I don't mean that you should remove "WHAT" enraged you. But rather by removing that it enraged you in the first place. Because after all, there is nothing physical that makes you angry, 99% of the time, it is you, you yourself make yourself angry. Therefore you are the only person who can do something about it.
I think the method here is not necessarily the "stop" part but rather realising what you are doing, becoming self-aware in the moment. In fact, a lot of what we do daily is routine, being angry is part of that, what I mean by that is, when you are angry you always go through the same process, (I can't describe the process because I haven't looked into that too deeply), you don't necessarily make an active decision to get angry, it is a reaction that happens due to "preprogrammed" behavior, if you manage to get hold of your mind during that phase, you can stop yourself from going any further.
One thing that also helped me a lot is asking yourself "Why do you have to be angry, who forces you to be angry and if nobody forces you, why would you want to be angry?". Asking myself this usually gave me enough time to "calm down" and process the question.
Again, I don't know if this was helpful or not, but I definitely wanted to share this.
If you are reading this, and you made it to the end, thx, and have a nice day :)
If you want to comment or give your opinion on this feel free to contact me
XMPP: me@metalune.xyz
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