Why does anger feel good? Most of my undesirable emotions are painful in addution to themselves, so I actively want them to stop. Anger is the one I hesitate to soothe. When I’m angry, it makes me angrier to try to talk myself down instead of letting the rage play out. I can still do it, but it takes a very different kind of effort compared to sadness, or anxiety, fear, or irritation.
Sadness is something I impulsively indulge in, sometimes, but my natural tendency is to do so by seeking comfort, so it’s self-regulating.
When I’m anxious or afraid, I want to get out of that state immediately. This doesn’t always generate *effective* behavior but I’m not resisting the attempt to feel better out of an active desire to stay that way.
Irritation isn’t the same thing as anger. It’s excessive sensitivity. It can turn into anger, but I never want to remain irritable.
Anger moves me to take action. It’s satisfying to direct anger at a target. It feels *good* to rail against some real or imagined wrong. Some of the clearest thinking I’ve ever experienced has been at the peak of justified anger. The risk of indulgence here is pretty obvious. Given how much satisfaction I get from anger, I think I do a pretty good job of staying away from rage-bait. I’m also lucky in that I’m not easily driven to anger in the first place. Most of my anger-management is preventative. I’m not sure what I’d do if that got, say, 40% harder.
I’m curious about other people. Answer all or just some of these, if you want:
Do you work yourself up over things, intentionally or otherwise?
Do you seek out material that triggers anger but does little else for you?
When you are angry, do you ever want to stay angry?
Does that ever change depending on why you’re angry?
Do you find it difficult to notice that being angry is making you less effective?
*Does* anger make you less effective, and how do you tell either way?
Do you ever want to stay angry even after acknowledging that it would be better (for whatever reason) to stop being angry?
>>It’s satisfying to direct anger at a target.<<
Personally, I find anger the *exact opposite* of satisfying.
Anger, for me, is very much about violence. Anger is a desire to hurt the entity that wronged me; if the entity that wronged me is not capable of experiencing pain (like if a rock fell on my foot) or I don’t expect I will be able to successfully hurt them (so, always; violence is far too risky for me to seriously attempt it), this will often spread out into a more generalised longing to cause pain. Getting angry tends to wind up as a period of feeling intensely unfulfilled regarding the utter lack of beating-people-up in my life.
When angry, I tend to feel conflicted about ceasing to be angry in much the same way that I feel conflicted about any other attempt to deal with unfulfilled desires by ceasing to want the thing.
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>>Do you seek out material that triggers anger but does little else for you?<<
Only under orders. Eventually I learned to treat “pressures you to experience anger” as a major red flag.
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I can also be conflicted about ceasing to be afraid: yes, I want to be unafraid, but I specifically want to be unafraid *because the scary thing is gone*. Deep-breathing exercises and other such techniques, things about trying to trick your brain into feeling safe independently of whether it actually *is* safe, are repulsive. The closest I get is fear also increasing my desire to defend against *other* bad things than the one I’m actively being menaced with: to use the most recent example, I tend to be more interested in making my smartphone resilient against loss of Internet if I’m experiencing a lot of financial anxiety, even though my level of Internet access is effectively unrelated to how much money I have (I don’t expect to ever be poor enough to lack home Internet (it’s profitable on net!), nor rich enough to be comfortable buying [a personal mobile data connection with plenty of buffer]).
However, I usually *do* endorse ceasing to be sad even if nothing about the thing that was making me sad improves.
The bit about fear is really interesting! I tend to believe that I’ll be better able to handle whatever I’m afraid of if I’m not experiencing the physical symptoms of fear.
Tags:
#(September 2018) #conversational aglets #not sure why I didn’t get this one during the first pass #is the blue I see the same as the blue you see #violence cw #anger management
