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Is anger your ally or your enemy?
Is it your little friend or foe?
What makes you angry?
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How do you deal with your anger?
Are you in control of it or does it control you?
Are these questions making you angry?
Why am I asking?
Well…
It started last night, but it didn’t really start there.
I had one of those dreams which highlighted things that make me angry in waking life.
I got a boob job, and I didn’t know why I was getting one, which went wrong, and when I returned to get it fixed the plastic surgeon blamed me for his error and refused to fix it.
I had to have dinner with my partner’s ex-girlfriend, who was lovely and cooked a delicious meal, but I really didn’t know why this dinner was happening, and my partner fell asleep at the table, leaving me to make small talk with his ex who had to make small talk with me too, neither of us wanted to do that – she wanted time alone with my partner, I just wanted time alone.
The dream went on along these lines, it was similar to one of those movies made up of vignettes… of life’s frustrations. Not actually reflecting real life scenarios – I like my tits as they are and a boob job has never been on my radar, that bit was more about those times when you put your welfare into the hands of someone else because you need their expertise. My partner’s ex, wasn’t about the ex of my partner, but more about how other people’s pasts affect your present.
To be fair to my subconscious, it was only trying to work through the fact that I’d gone to sleep in a state of irritation while wondering what was the cause of the annoyance. We can be very elusive to ourselves.
This morning I decided to check my daily astro, as this often helps to elucidate what’s puzzling me.
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Mars sextile Chiron transit via Astrodienst
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I tend to use astrology as a means of getting a conversation going with myself. Whether I agree or not with an interpretation is irrelevant, what I’m after is the discussion which evolves from reading whatever is stated. This particular interpretation hit the nail on the head, and didn’t need further chit chat between me, myself and I, and all the other bits of psyche rattling around inside.
Chiron is the wounded healer. In your astrological natal chart it suggests where you have issues, and where exploring those issues can lead to resolution. My natal Chiron (which transiting Mars, the planet of war and such, is chafing and strafing) is in the 7th house of partnerships/relationships – which loosely interpreted means that other people are a pain in my ass.
How other people affect you is mostly due to how YOU perceive THEM, not necessarily due to how they actually are, or how they perceive themselves, or how they are in relation to you, or how they view you and how you affect them… et cetera.
Other people are just being themselves… and I’m the one who sometimes finds that to be a nuisance – ergo the real pain in my ass is me. My natal chart backs that up – I have Pluto and Uranus in my 1st house (a part of the chart which represents the self), which in easy speak basically means I’m a mess and rather ‘impatient and belligerent’ and in your face (and mine) about it.
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I do warn people about my mess all the time, but they never listen because it’s not what they’re interested in hearing. They tend to only hear me when I’m being sensitive towards them, but they don’t usually understand from where that sensitivity comes. It comes from the same place as your stuff, from how I deal with it. My wound helps me to see your wound, understanding mine is how I understand yours, being sensitive towards myself is why I can be sensitive towards you, others…
… and sometimes my stuff needs my attention, which means I can’t give yours the attention which you want from me. That’s your cue to give your own wound your attention. If I seem insensitive towards you… perhaps it is because I am being sensitive towards myself. If I appear to be ignoring you, it’s because I’m focusing on me (and attempting not to dump my stuff onto you but to own it as mine).
If I’m angry… I’m going to ignore you, which may seem rude and insensitive to you. To me it’s being considerate and sensitive – you really don’t need this, you have your own stuff and don’t want to add mine to yours. I’m comfortable with my own darkness (years of practice and Pluto Rx in 1st), I doubt if you’d find it comfortable, especially if your own darkness is uncomfortable to you.
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If you push me to pay attention to you at that time… are you willing to be responsible for the consequences of your push when I’m pulling away?
It’s not about you, it’s about me taking care of my own business and not making it yours. Still want to make it yours?
Please take good care of yourself – don’t make that my responsibility.
If you have empathy, use it.
Empathy means understanding that others are human just as you are – and that sometimes they are just as wrapped up in themselves as you are, and can’t see your wood for their trees. If you can be tired, hurt, fed up – so can they, and sometimes your mutual tiredness, hurt, fed upness meets. Slack cutting on both sides of the equation is required… if you want to get along.
Do you want to get along?
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As I was contemplating this, that and the other, and considering writing a post about what’s on my mind… and figuring out a title for the post – What’s your anger quotient? – presented itself and I wondered if there was an online test for that. I guessed there would be as everything is a quotient now, and there’s always an online test for it.
The first result in my search yielded something better that I expected – BYU: About Anger + Anger Quotient Test.
Here’s a screenshot of their test plus my answers (please note – my answers were given while I was in an altruistic frame of mind, variations of mood apply, and also had to stick to the options offered, which missed on several occasions what I would have preferred as an answer):
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Not so long ago I’d have given a different set of answers. I used to deny myself the right to be angry, because I was taught that my anger was never okay, but everyone else’s anger was okay – I didn’t think that was okay, and it made me very angry, it took me some time, a lifetime, to find out why. Complications apply.
These days I see my anger as a friend rather than a foe, an ally rather than an enemy, which informs me of things I need to know, understand, explore and of which I need to be aware. It’s a useful tool for focusing.
Being human is a learning experience.
Being yourself… takes time as there are a lot of separate parts which need to come together and they don’t all get along with each other. Kind of like people with other people.
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It’s always a journey…
An Upturned Soul 
When I get angry, it’s usually either from frustration at not being heard. Curse of the introvert, probably: I don’t talk much, but when I do, it would be nice if people listened. Other times it’s from a sense of being taken advantage of, both directly (someone trying to swindle me or take me for granted) or in a broad sense (politics, class warfare, etc.). I don’t mind being angry. Channel it right and it can make you very productive. A friend of mine summed it up very well when she said, “Angry people get sh*t done.”
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Thank you for sharing 🙂
I can relate to the frustration of not being heard. I had a situation recently where I ended up feeling like mythical Cassandra, warning people of disaster but no one was listening, I knew they weren’t listening and why they weren’t, even though I was paying them to listen – they did hear me once the problem I warned them about happened. Sigh!
Introverts tend to be good listeners, which I think increases the frustration about others not listening, not to you or themselves. If you’re speaking to someone who doesn’t listen to themselves then there is very little chance of them hearing you. That tends to happen quite a bit in the broader social landscape – lots of people talking, very few listening.
Anger is definitely a useful impetus for action, although it does need guidance from other parts for that action to be productive rather than destructive.
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I used to love the Mr series of books, Mr Angry, Mr Sad, (the faces above reminded me of them) My ex used to remind me of the Mr books. This is his “angry look”, his “sad look”, he had a whole repertoire of looks. Anyway, back to my anger problem, I don’t have one apparently, I scored 34. But I haven’t always been that way. I used to have a really hot temper. slow simmer but when I blew, I blew big and hot. Now I remove myself from the situation to give myself time to assess what I am really feeling and if the person may have a good point. Once I have decided whether I really have a right to be angry I will say something and calmly and rationally as I can. I don’t get really angry often but when I do I get over it quickly also. I don’t hold grudges which can work against me sometimes like with my ex.
What I really hate is when I get really angry I tend to cry. That makes me angry with myself.
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Really relate to that crying when angry. Was talking to my therapist today about anger and sadness as both seem connected to each other.
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Thank you for sharing 🙂
I remember the Mr. Men. They are similar to emoticons.
Crying is often a response to frustration just as anger is, if you cry when you’re angry, it’s pretty much expressing the same thing, and is sometimes informative about the source of the anger. Sometimes tears of anger douse the anger, acting like an internal sprinkler system.
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Anger used to be a big mystery to me. Like yourself, I wasn’t allowed to be angry when I was growing up, and I got used to stuffing it. Then the bag would break or develop a leak and I frequently wouldn’t know why I was angry or why it was so intense. It took me forever to figure out that I wasn’t necessarily wrong to get angry.
I enjoyed the U.S./England cartoon. 🙂
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It’s intriguing to look at the emotional language of our early environment, which is often more powerful than verbal language as it is an intrinsic element of the spoken word, and see its effect on our style of communication.
Not being allowed to express anger, made anger mysterious, perhaps even dangerous. It became a foreign tongue which you weren’t allowed to learn but were taught to fear, and thus suppress.
Being taught that affects communication with others. Those who freely express anger are seen as people speaking in a foreign, mysterious, and potentially dangerous language.
Anger was the main tongue spoken in my family. My mother was a field full of land mines, suppressed anger which exploded if a feather landed on it. My father was just a constantly active volcano. But I had to hold my tongue while everyone else lashed out with theirs. I was not allowed to speak the language of anger, while it was all that was spoken.
If your parents create a double standard in communication, then it’s going to create a disconnection between you and them. They don’t allow you to speak their language, so communication is not possible. Being unable to communicate in the familiar language creates a disconnect within and without.
What language do you use to speak with yourself?
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Perceptive question! I used to have a very negative internal voice – hypercritical, really. I much kinder to myself now but this voice will still arise on occasion. When it does, it’s very difficult to control. I have to take some time to calm down and look for the source of the eruption. The description you give of your mother could have been a description of mine. She was exactly that. My dad wasn’t. He was very passive around her anger – likely stuffing it as well, I think – and actually I would otherwise describe him as very even-tempered.
This discussion around listening and anger that you have generated here is very interesting to me. Blogging really works for me because I can take the time to “listen” carefully. I sometimes find that “real” listening is difficult. Everything goes too fast and the next thing I know, I’ve lost the thread. It’s exhausting and it’s also one of the reasons why l don’t like large groups. I know that this is part of my introversion and makes me wonder whether it’s biological or created. You’ve said that you tend to be quiet around others – do you find a similar thing happening?
I also find that many people don’t listen to themselves or others; they just talk. It’s interesting. I’ve gone through periods where I haven’t been a good listener and have sometimes talked too much, too (in small groups or one-on-one). But the talking just to talk is a process that I don’t understand.
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That’s one of those puzzles in life, what is nature and what is nurture, what is biological and what is created. How much is what we’ve absorbed from others, from our social surroundings, and how much is who we are, what we bring with us. Who would we be if we had been brought up in a different environment, by different people. What if we had been raised by wolves? Would we still be who we are, or would we be different? Would all of us be different or just certain parts of us. Is there a core which is exactly as it is regardless of everything else.
It’s quite interesting to explore experiences which you had as a child where the experience led to a personal decision. Where you made a decision for yourself about your self. You just knew something about yourself, and it was true, and it was not something which others could influence or touch. One of those moments when your self defined itself, and you knew this was you.
Those moments often get lost under heaps of other stuff, especially as you get older and are expected to join the rest of the world, and play along with others and all the stories about what it is to be a social animal, but if you listen to yourself they are still there, still defined.
I recall once having this epiphany about feelings, where there was this clarity between felt feeling and thought feeling. Something had happened and I was trying to figure out how I should feel about it, so I could react. My mind was offering me a choice between anger, sadness, and other possible emotions, whatever I chose had a way to react which went with it, and it suddenly occurred to me that what I really felt was nothing. I just didn’t care about the thing which had happened, but I thought that I should because whatever had occurred was the sort of scenario about which you’re supposed to feel something. I was trying to fill the void with an appropriate reaction because somehow feeling nothing was wrong. But why if that is how I actually felt? I realised that if I chose an emotion, I would then have to stick with it and play it out for however long that particular feeling was supposed to last.
I think I was either reading Castaneda at that time or messing around with Eugene Gendlin’s Focusing.
Large groups, social gatherings, tend to have this play-acting theme going on. Everyone is playing a role, thinking their feelings and acting accordingly. No one is really listening to anyone else, the conversation moves quickly from thing to thing because no one is pausing to think, they’ve set their thinking to automatic, picking up on social cues and clues and reacting accordingly. For extroverts this is fun, energising, for introverts this is dull, draining, because introverts like to listen, pause and think.
Because introverts listen, they tend to notice that there is a schism between what people are saying out of their mouths and what the rest of them is saying. Someone being socially jolly may have body language which says they’re unhappy. Someone who is being confident, maybe even aggressive with it, is giving off vibes of fear. Someone who is animatedly relating a story about some event has eyes which are glazed over and elsewhere, they’ve told this story before and don’t need to listen, they’re just doing what is expected of them because they’re the storyteller of the group. Introverts notice and sense all the grasping, and grabbing, the reaching out to have a need fulfilled, the stories beneath the stories, the felt feelings which hide under the thought feelings being shown, what is going on underneath the veneer of the gathering. It overloads the system.
Sometimes being in a large group is when you feel yourself intensely, are most conscious of yourself, and yet in some ways you aren’t allowed to feel yourself, and being conscious of yourself becomes awkward. It can be like being a child again in the land of adults, trying to figure out what is going on outside and what is inside, and how the two affect each other.
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That’s so interesting! Just this weekend I for the most part stopped listening to what someone was saying and “listened” much more intently to what she was doing with her hands and feet and the expressions that rose and fell on her face. This told me much more than anything she said. She later commented that I am a “sweetie.” I think what she really meant was that she was heard. Words can be so clumsy sometimes.
I was so often told what to feel (or told that what I was feeling was silly or foolish) when I was a child that I went through a period in my late teens and early 20s where I actually sometimes questioned what I was feeling. I eventually realized that it was all okay, including feeling ambivalent.
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People talk with every atom of their being, and if we listen with every atom of our being, we hear them clearly. Words… are just a small portion of communication.
How did you feel about being a ‘sweetie’?
Questioning what we are feeling is a natural thing to do if you’re seeking to know yourself more deeply. It comes with a price, but one which is usually worth paying as you become more autonomous. 🙂
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Hahaha. 🙂 I don’t really consider myself to be a “sweetie” – but I’m not sure that I know what it actually means! It was meant to be a compliment and as I said, I think she liked being heard, as we all do. But “sweet” isn’t really how I would describe myself. It’s interesting how others see us as opposed to how we see ourselves. 🙂
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You brought sweetness into her life, and therefore you became chocolate and ice cream 🙂
People see us most often in the way that we make them see themselves, our identity to them is enmeshed with their identity to us and to themselves.
I do think there is a ‘sweetness’ about you, but I wouldn’t use ‘sweet’ as a descriptive. I’d probably use something more like (*pulls out thesaurus. Gives up on thesaurus due to getting distracted by other words. Goes to goodreads for a quote.)
“here is the deepest secret nobody knows
(here is the root of the root and the bud of the bud and the sky of the sky of a tree called life; which grows
higher than the soul can hope or mind can hide)
and this is the wonder that’s keeping the stars apart
I carry your heart (I carry it in my heart)”
― E.E. Cummings
You carry the hearts of others in your heart.
What do you think and feel about that? 🙂
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Oh my. I can’t believe that you chose that poem – I stopped breathing for a second or two. It’s my absolute and total favourite and also very special between my husband and me.
Oh my, again. Thank you. 💛 I’m speechless.
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A beautiful coincidence 🙂
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Yes! 🙂
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Ive had a long journey with understanding my own anger. Where it comes from. Why. What happened in the past that made me feel I had to stuff it. Learning to unstuff it and then unleashing it inappropriately on others (all part of the learning experience). I really understand and relate to everything you wrote. Sometimes people seem insensitive but really they are just on their own journey. But it helps when we are learning about this stuff to have someone you can vent with to learn about your own anger. At least that is my experience. In the end its a sign to me of what is important to me. I need to take that on board and deal with it. That isn’t other people’s job. Great post. I noticed Mars just moved into Gemini. May be why this post is exactly on time as it moves towards opposition with Saturn. 🙂
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Thank you for sharing 🙂
That’s a very good point – being able to share your genuine feelings with others and have that accepted for what it is – your feelings, not theirs, about you, not about them (conditions apply), and therefore allowing you to feel safe with expressing yourself. It’s a healing experience and can turn what is scary into something not scary but releasing.
Parents are in theory supposed to provide that teaching and learning. But if our parents haven’t had that from their parents, or from others, before they have us, they’re going to pass on their own problems to us. If they can’t express anger safely, then neither can we. If our natural anger as a child becomes a threat to their safety, if our anger triggers theirs and creates a chain reaction, then they and we come to see our anger as a threat to their and our safety – so we stuff it.
Anger is normal and natural. But humans often turn it into something abnormal and unnatural. And then pass that on as a fear of the normal and natural. Stuffed anger is far more of a threat as it accumulates and becomes a ticking time bomb.
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So true. We get our cues from the way parents and teachers deal or dont deal with their own feelings and needs. It can be a gordian knot to unravel…Anger to me seems related to need ans frusration of that need…even knowing we have needs can be a big journey if we had parents who were too busy of switched off to notice. Luckily we can learn and grow if we gain awareness. Relationships are a trigger for this awareness. Harder if our own awareness is negated.
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When our own awareness is negated, it can cause a setback, as we may have to reassess which can be good or bad, depending, usually it’s a bit of both. Then again it can also be a spur for us to be even stronger about what matters to us. It’s the devil’s advocate testing us in a way. 🙂
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I love this post! I’ve always had a sneaky feeling that I do not deal with anger in a healthy way… I internalize, and most times those who have caused me anger never get to know about it because I don’t let on… How sad is that?
The funny thing about it is, I occasionally have bouts of what others have described as a royal temper. The episodes are few and far between and don’t last too long, but when on display they’re spectacular (or so I’ve been told).
I once saw a therapist who suggested that the reason I internalize my anger is because I’m afraid of it. So I bottle it up until one day there’s no more room left and I explode…
Usually over some seemingly minor issue.
Then I feel terrible about it. I’m trying to work on making my anger my friend so this post really speaks to me.
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Thank you very much 🙂
Anger has as many faces and facets as we do, which is why it’s important to get to know it as it fleshes out who we are for ourselves, and what is really going on within us. Takes a while though, partly because we’re so conditioned to see it as an enemy – this is emphasised even more for women. It’s as though women are expected to not show real anger, and to be afraid of it in themselves and in others.
It’s a fascinating subject to explore.
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