What I Learned About The Cost of Anger
The cost may be bigger than you think
Getting angry and losing a temper feels easy to follow. It is easy to get lost with it with less effort. It feels easy to amplify the rage than to diminish it. On the other hand, bringing back myself to calmness seems to require a lot of energy.
When I feel angry, I cannot think analytically. After I cool down, I wrote down my feelings and thought in my journal, and these are the patterns I found.
- I position myself as the center of everything. I am the one who was hurt. I am the one who was mistreated.
- I want the world to know that I am enraged and disappointed. I showed it by talking emotionally — with a high voice or intentionally dropping something on the table hard.
- I expect to do nothing and wait for the other person to come with their apology.
Letting anger controls me, instead of me controlling it, has a real physical and mental effect.
Anger exhausts me physically and mentally
I might feel “good” to release the tension but afterward is all tiredness and shame.
I shut my ears
There is no auditory sensory functioning. That implies no communication; I would only throw all the tantrums. It applies in the other direction; when someone sounds angry, I learn that no matter how I am carefully arranging the words to convince them, they won’t listen.
My brain is cloudy
I do not think about solving a problem at all. It is all about me, me, and me.
I carry the shame all along to the future
This is the most adverse outcome of it. If the event was so bad, it is hard to recover and get back the peace.
If I force myself from the beginning to stay quiet, hold all the words inside, I might feel suffocated for a while, but I won’t jeopardize anything. I also learned to focus on listening to the person in rage, and sometimes it helps me understand the situation better and think of a solution. I will express the answer later on a different occasion because people in rage have lost listening ability. (green line on the graph)
If I let the anger take control of me, there will be two possibilities.
- I accept the responsibility to reconcile. In this case, the outcome is uncertain. I have to accept if the other person rejects my apology. Or probably, they accepted the apology, but there is no relationship resumed. (red line on the graph)
- The most painful outcome would be if the fight destroyed the relationship on the spot. There will be a small part in my memory carrying this unclosed case. It is small, but it feels heavy. (purple line on the graph)
One principle I learned along the way seems to be true in every situation: If someone gets angry, they have a problem within themselves. That includes me. If I was drawn into an emotional crisis, something must be bothering me and leading me to have an unclear mind.
I believe getting older also helps me to put things in perspective. When I was younger, I had more energy to go towards confrontation without thinking ahead. Now, I ask myself several times before I do that if this is worth the energy and soul: due to the most critical lesson I learned that I don’t always have control to fix the relationship afterward.
There is a quote from Marcus Aurelius from his journal Meditation about rage. I keep this available on my laptop, my journal book, also my phone. Every time the trigger comes, I read this before I think of anything else:
“Keep this thought handy when you feel a fit of rage coming on — it isn’t manly to be enraged. Rather, gentleness and civility are more human,
and therefore manlier.
A real man doesn’t give way to anger and discontent, and such a person has strength, courage, and endurance — unlike the angry and complaining.
The nearer a man comes to a calm mind, the closer he is to strength.”Marcus Aurelius: Meditation 11.18.5b
