Anger: Punishing Yourself for Another’s Error
Anger is a complex emotion we all are affected by. When things do not happen according to our wishes anger can result. The things we easily control are our activities. This means anger is more likely to result from the actions of someone other than ourselves.
Anger is pretty much like shutting the stable doors right after the horse has bolted. We feel damaged to have let the unhappy experience occur.
I once was interviewed for role engaging stakeholders to deliver many services. The first interview was scheduled with a female contact for the interview. To my surprise, I got called in to two male interviewers without the presence of the HR representatives.
At question time from me about the three stage interview process I was told this was going to be my only interview. I did my very best to be composed in my further interaction.
Rather than be despondent or allow any negative emotion I wrote to the interviewer (I had a photographic memory that period) expressing my hope that where I felt was a weak point in my interview did not put me at a disadvantage. I also provided a much better considered response. As a result I got unexpected feedback on my performance.
Anger often leads to unplanned actions. It becomes a driving force behind an avalanche of activities once action has been triggered by anger.
When manipulative people wish to bring about change to benefit from one pressure point that’s often us is the anger trigger.
We may not be in a position to control events that impact us but we certainly can control our responses to them. Training ourselves to respond rather than react helps us to deal with automatic anger response. The first training is with the tongue. Anger often makes us say things we may never have said had we not been led by the emotion.
Even when we have suppressed the initial anger reaction we need to have a means to timing out to arrive at the appropriate response. Anger often keeps our focus on the event that caused the emotion to the exclusion of everything else. Being able to establish and maintain priorities in these situations are essential for maturity in dealing with events triggering our anger response.
Where our priority is to limit damage we are on our way to responding as opposed to reacting. Control is more likely to remain in our hands rather than be external to us.
Where our focus is on blame, events quickly snowball into even more destructive activities. This is even more so where the parties all seek to blame. This is the quickest trigger to violence.
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