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I appease while attempting to flee usually
Make daily vigorous exhausting physical exercise part of your life. Thank me later.
In person or online?
If it can’t physically affect you, you can safely ignore it. If it can, best to stay out of its way.
What if I have the aggression?
Learn to recognize it and step away. Taking a walk really does help. Decisions made in anger cannot be undone. Most mature people will hear “hey I’m feeling pretty emotional about this topic, I’m going to go clear my head and think on it for a half hour or so” and understand and let you go with little to no judgment. As you get into that habit you’re likely to find yourself less and less aggressive. You instinctively do what you practice doing, right now that may be lashing out, but hard work can change that.
Having parents who were really bad at emotional regulation resulted in me not really being taught it well. But I found myself embarrassing myself and hurting those around me. I got big on walking my feelings out, and started using the CBT techniques I learned for anxiety, and they worked. Eventually it really became second nature. Big feelings are now followed by introspection. In the rare cases I snap at someone it’s immediately followed by an apology, stepping away, and introspection with an appropriate for the situation explanation.
Thanks. I can relate to that. I’ve been thinking about the “I am feeling heated about this, I suggest we both take a break” idea and this kind of confirms it.
I am not sure really what to do during that break, but there are a lot of ideas that everyone has shared. What that introspection can look like. I have to reflect a bit on it.
Yeah I’ll begin by saying anger issues are one of the areas CBT and DBT shine. This is because anger is a very misunderstood emotion. Its job is to protect you, and in a person with good emotional regulation, a healthy understanding of danger, and a healthy perception of the self it’s a very useful emotion. It’s just that we’re often wired to jump at shadows and those three caveats play an important role.
So what do you actually do about it though? You start by figuring out how you process emotions. Some people like my wife are internal processors. They need alone time just thinking about their feelings to understand them. Some like me are external processors who need to talk about it to understand it.
For anger I’ve moved to basically having an internal dialog with an imaginary therapist who just asks me questions like “and how did you feel” or “and why do you feel that way”. They’re all questions cbt told me to ask myself. The goal is to first determine if my anger is an appropriate response. If it is, then I start trying to determine what the best way to act on it is. But far more likely, I’m moving towards asking what threat I percieved, and what cognitive distortions lead to that. Maybe I’m defending my ego, and in reality the ego is actually what’s hurting me. Maybe I’m seeing people who hurt me before in the actions of people who deserve grace, and failing to understand that everybody fucks up sometimes.
Whatever the distortion is you acknowledge it, but refute it. “I feel unfairly attacked, but I know that that person’s point was legitimate criticism that they felt I needed to hear.” Or “I feel like my partner is nitpicking and never gives me a break, but I know that words like always and never are cognitive distortions, what I need is to calm down and figure out if this criticism is valid or if it’s fair for me to request more grace and to attempt to change behavior where it is valid.”
But yeah, take a walk, the movement is good for getting the emotions out and thinking. And look for where your brain is lying to you. CBT and DBT are best administered by professionals, and if it feels like it’s just talk therapy it probably is. This is the sort of therapy a lot of therapists assign workbooks for. If therapy isn’t an option there are books on the topic and you can just buy the workbooks. But self administered therapy is a lot like any other form of self administered medical care, sure you may save a lot of money and get great results, but you’re also at risk of fucking up and now needing to hire a professional to fix your mistakes.
Much harder question to answer. If the aggression comes from external stimuli, learning to mitigate it is just part of growing up (and, I don’t mean reaching the age of majority; I mean growing as a person… there are people in their 50s and 60s trying to figure some things out — that’s why older folks say youth is wasted on the young, because after figuring a lot of these things out, they haven’t got that much time and certainly aren’t in their teens or 20s). Like for example if it’s road rage — people making you mad on the road — leave earlier, first of all, as that reduces the stress of reaching your destination on time; second, try listening to more soothing music. This is subjective — if metal calms you down, by all means, horns up. In fact, it isn’t even metal music I’m thinking of driving aggression behind the wheel — it’s political news and political podcasts. Especially the ones telling us who to fear or who to hate. For most of us, the most harm we will do is actually to ourselves and our loved ones rather than the people our political masters tell us to hurt or hate. Focus on something else. If you prefer talking to music, audiobooks are awesome. While the bestsellers tend to feature a lot of tense situations (drama), there are some that are lighter. For me, I go for Japanese light novels (equivalent to young adult fiction). So, like adventures and stuff. The ones made into audiobooks have also been made into anime, and they usually get the actual anime voice actors to read you the book, so, it’s like anime in audio/spoken format. If that’s not your jam, well, there are loads of other options. As for music, I can point to a handful of songs I just cannot get mad if I’m hearing, but they wouldn’t work for others.
You’ll basically be doing self therapy. Worth doing some writing or deep thinking on where this aggression is coming from. Reading or hearing podcasts or watching media on the subject tends to help. I would say this needs thinking about in the “cold state” (i.e. when not in heightened emotion and while completely calm and relaxed, but remembering the last undesirable event). Then you can work incrementally on what you can change next time.
Here’s an episode from a podcast I like, to get you started:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L9WZgqcu3QE
Or actual audio podcast of you prefer:
https://podcastindex.org/podcast/453567?episode=33418257763
Hulking Out! Why You Change When You’re Angry
When mild-mannered David Banner gets mad he transforms into the raging Incredible Hulk. Dr Laurie Santos loves this comic book tale - because it reflects real life. Intense things like anger, pain, even hunger, can cause us to act in extreme ways that we might not predict beforehand or forgive after.
(She must have gotten so so so many messages for calling him “David Banner”.)
Thank you for sharing that podcast. I think it will help to revisit past experiences from the cold state.
What you said reminds me of the Snickers commercial, “you’re not yourself when you’re hungry.” I’ve been using HALT a lot to recognize when to take a break from whatever activity I’m in.
Hungry
Angry/Anxious
Lonely
Tired.
Like being aggressive towards others irl, find yourself rage spiraling, or something else?
Like I feel mad at someone specific at work, in an inward way, but it is not really about them, it is about how we are both in an imperfect system that influences our behavior, kind of like in the Wire, and puts us at odds.
I feel like maybe if I had an outlet where it was OK to get aggressive that might be healthy, but I don’t like to feel aggressive normally.
Like maybe I can play Catan online with someone and try to dominate. In the past I might have played League of Legends, but I didn’t like how that made me feel either.
Just have main character syndrome and ignore the NPCs
-Sincerely, your friendly neighborhood NPC
:P
Thanks, Elon <3
Meditation. I have anger issues, and I find first you must recognize it in yourself, then you can choose how to act. I walk away rather than get all riled up. I love a good argument, but sometimes you just shoot yourself in the foot when you start seeing red. Being able to find a meditative state will help you step back from the aggression when it arises in you
Try to figure out if there’s a pattern. Maybe all the aggression-inducing events have something in common. Maybe that’s an emotion you haven’t processed or even noticed.
Could be a moment where you feel hurt, ashamed, vulnerable, helpless, hopeless, or whatever. Start by naming that emotion.
Once you figure that out, you can start processing that emotion and what causes it. Eventually, anger and aggression won’t control you anymore.
Thanks. That sounds like a good way to break it into chunks.
Guns and profanity
This was the kind of answer I wanted.
I just channeled my innermerican
From within yourself or from others?
More aggression!
/s
If you can leave quickly and quietly, do it.
You don’t.
Hit it head on.
