Anger Management

In the last 24 hours I've had two incidents of my anger getting the better of me.  One of those led to actions that could have been dangerous and left me shaking with adrenaline.  This has left me reflective of what the root cause is and how I can control my anger rather than the other way around.

I've had anger issues since I was in high school.  They led me to put a hole in the door of my bedroom with a 10 lb. dumbbell one day when my internet went out in the middle of playing an online game.  I think I might have been in the middle of a PvP duel at the time so I'm guessing the root cause there was embarrassment.

The first incident in the latest 24 hours was a form of road rage.  I tend to have a bit of anger/frustration on a normal day of driving, leading me to verbally expound on the poor driving of others on the road.  Generally that's where it ends but earlier when a driver was honking their horn at me when I was waiting to turn into a specific lane while driving in unfamiliar territory it sent me over the edge. 

I know part of the frustration was having to drive in an unfamiliar area and not being able to find what I was looking for.  I would much rather have waited to get back home and then find what we were looking for.  Farrah had her heart set on getting it there though, so I went through the ordeal in spite of my misgivings, which ultimately led to the dangerous road rage incident.

The other incident involved Farrah complaining that a fruit fly had landed on a piece of her lunch meat.  This is a common complaint from her and usually ends with large quantities of food being wasted.  I think there are a couple of causes here - financial strain combined with the fact that I was wanting to get something to eat myself.  I had skipped lunch without realizing it and was more hungry than usual.  Of the two I think the second factor might actually have been the real catalyst.

I have been thinking a lot lately about how my perceptions of other people and event are filtered through a negative filter.  I tend to assume that other people are thinking/planning something negative when I have no evidence at all that is the case.  Worse, I tend to build the negative assumption up in my mind if it doesn't get quickly dispelled.  It becomes a sort of negative loop that puts me in a negative emotional state, like anger, which reinforces the negative filter.  I have been trying to replace the negative filter with a positive one but have discovered that it is a deeply engrained part of who I am. 

It's sneaky too.  Usually it disguises itself as something positive or as an opinion that I already take for granted.  Or as an opinion which many others share, such as the idea that "People are stupid" (Actually, this one's pretty hard to dispel.  Ok, ok, it's probably not objective to categorize people this way). 

I've been thinking I need to have the correct philosophy/belief system to help combat this but as usual I'm at a bit of a stalemate here.  I have a general idea of what I want my life to be like but that image is constantly put under pressure by the vicissitudes of life and other outside pressures.  In the end, all I can do is try to be aware of the anger before it gets built up and learn how to diffuse it.  I guess that's a start.