anger management

~ Brin ~ 1 Comment

@sinesalvatorem, about the r/k thing that I’m not going to reblog under my no-guilt-trips policy:

I suspect we’re both projecting our own selves onto the rest of society and ending up skewed. (Intellectually I’m willing to believe you’re closer to the truth than I am, although I’m really not sure how we could *tell*.)

I deliberately cultivate cowardice as a way of coping with my violent urges. It’s true that fear holds me back, but there are some things I very much *should* be held back from, and I feel like the price of being also held back from some things I *shouldn’t* hold back from is worth it given the stakes.

(and no, it’s *not* just intrusive thoughts)

I try to avoid anything that might piss people off because that would make it harder for *them* to hold back, and I know how hard that can be sometimes. I try to make it as easy as possible for them to keep their violent urges reined in, and (I hope) they’ll do the same for me, and this fragile truce between a whole lot of murder-monkeys that we call “society” will keep functioning.

—

(Each approach has its disadvantages, and one of the disadvantages of cowardice is that people who *would* advocate cowardice are, of course, less willing to speak out against the people advocating bravery. As such, bravery advocates tend to stand unopposed. I’ve seen other posts like this in the past, some of them shading *much* further than yours does into “you should exploit situations where people’s fear makes them unwilling to fight back against assholes”.)

Tags:

#you want me to be brave? fine. I’ll post this. #(this is the third version of this post I’ve written) #(I tried to balance ”not being more hostile than necessary” with ”the hostility is kind of the point”) #(there’s only so much I can defang a post about how sharp teeth can be) #((I’m not *exactly* angry but writing this post still makes me very aware of how unfulfilling the lack of violence in my life is)) #((but I’d rather have a life whether I neither give nor receive violence to one where I do both)) #((and I’ve made my choices accordingly)) #this post technically qualifies as: #oh look an original post #but is closer to the spirit of: #reply via reblog #is the blue I see the same as the blue you see #discourse cw #violence cw #posts I am almost certainly going to regret

{{next post in sequence}}

~ Brin ~ 1 Comment

gasmaskaesthetic:

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.

—

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.

Tags:

#in related news if you have smartphone self-sufficiency tips I’m interested in hearing them #(there’s a reason the prepping tag is:) #101 Uses for Infrastructureless Computers #is the blue I see the same as the blue you see #reply via reblog #violence cw #and more tangentially related: #adventures in human capitalism #Brin owns *two* 2010’s computers now

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~ Brin ~ Leave a comment

Saw an ask meme where one of the questions was “How well do you think you’d do in a zombie apocalypse scenario?”, and wondered how I would answer it.

I would probably do fairly badly, actually, despite what you might think given some of the stuff I’ve been talking about lately. Most of my apocalypse-proofing efforts assume few to no hostiles. I don’t think I even actually want to change this: the best forms of apocalypse-proofing are the ones that make regular life better too (even if there are never food shortages, keeping a supply of your favourite nonperishables on hand means you can buy during one 20%-off sale and live off of it until the next 20%-off sale, so that it’s effectively 20% off all the time), the next best are the kind that start being useful when even a minor, common disaster strikes (let’s gather round the solar-powered computer and listen to some locally-stored music while we wait for them to fix the downed power line), followed by the ones that have never done anything concretely beneficial but at least you feel safer having them around (I sometimes look at the cases of water sitting in the parental bedroom and smile). But being good at violence would just make me more tempted to use it where it isn’t warranted, and that would make regular life *harder* and *more* likely to go disastrously.

The best-case scenario is probably the one where I become the pet librarian/techie of some group, coaxing as much function and comfort as possible out of off-grid computers. Wikipedia is handy in almost any situation, and I bet there are times as a post-zombie nomad when a video game is *exactly* what you need for morale, a reminder that not *everything* about the old world is gone.

Tags:

#can’t shoot and I suck at running but I’m damn good at   #101 Uses for Infrastructureless Computers   #(<– when I thought of that tag something in my brain went ”that. that’s the prepping tag.”)   #(which is the main reason I’m posting this)   #((will use it on non-computer-related prepping too though))   #mind you skill at running is probably in the Makes Regular Life Better Too category   #perhaps I’ll try and acquire some   #oh look an original post   #food mention   #apocalypse cw   #zombie apocalypse   #adventures in human capitalism

~ Brin ~ Leave a comment

myprettynightmare:

Anyone else terrified that they are toxic and manipulative and just can’t see it? Or is that just me?

Tags:

#tag rambles #TMI #abuse cw #…sort of but not in the way this seems to mean #lately it’s been bothering me a lot that…look #if I had the option of being toxic and manipulative and *chose* not to take it #that would be one thing #but I don’t #because I’m *not smart enough* to successfully manipulate people #it takes a certain kind of cleverness to hurt people and get away with it #that I don’t possess #it sounds weird but it bugs me #even the position ”scum of the earth” is one I could only aspire to #I get so tired sometimes of always being the least terrifying person in the room #but also: #if you can be terrifying enough to scare people into submission and not know it #then you don’t get to take any sort of pleasure in that capacity #not even the twisted power-tripping kinds of pleasure #perhaps the people who’ve hurt me *weren’t even enjoying themselves* #perhaps they *still believed* they could-only-aspire-to-scumbag #zero-sum situations are bad and all #but it’s negative-sum that most chills me deep down #that I might have hurt people and *not even benefited from it* #an interaction that nothing good came out of at all #not even good things at somebody else’s expense #I wonder if I’ve ever been in a fight that both sides believed they’d lost #I wonder if any of the people I am haunted by are haunted by me #neither of us ever getting even the visceral satisfaction of knowing the blow struck

~ Brin ~ Leave a comment

gruntledandhinged:

thing I have noticed in current workplace:

There seem to be significant class gaps in the use of “anger” vs. “frustration”. Specifically, it seems like using “anger” as a personal emotional descriptor is more common in lower-SES (American) conversations about emotion and that “frustrated” replaces that at higher SES.

People in both categories (in my limited experience) will describe a situation as making them “feel rage” in the moment, but when we talk about it more, one will say “I am still pretty frustrated” or “it makes sense for me to be frustrated because,” while the other will replace that with “anger/angry”.

Do you do this? Do you distinguish between frustration/anger? Regardless of the answer to the second question, how comfortable are you describing your emotional state as angry?

*This is interesting to me because I once had a therapist point out that I was using “frustrated” repeatedly and asked why I wasn’t angry.

**My SES measure is not fine-tuned here, I’m mostly using Has College Degree vs. Does Not Have College Degree.

I [in process of getting college degree] view frustration as a sub-type of anger, and mostly not a distinction worth making. When I do specify an instance of anger as being “frustration”, I mean that it was directed at an impersonal force rather than an agent. However, the sensation is the same, and the response is the same*, so I usually just refer to both sub-types as “anger”.

My mother [has college degree] thinks this is weird, as she experiences anger and frustration as being entirely separate things.

(I suppose that explains why she doesn’t snap at the first person to ask if she’s okay after she stubs her toe or accidentally causes a frozen food avalanche in the freezer. For me, the target-less frustration!anger tends to latch on to the first target that presents itself, if one presents itself quickly enough.)

As for describing my emotional state as angry, I think I’m fairly comfortable with that. (I had roughly the opposite experience as you: I was talking about my emotional reaction to something and Mom said that I was using “angry” a lot more than she would have. This is how I learned about her anger/frustration distinction.) I’m not angry as often as I was this time last year, but that’s not because of a change in my capacity or definition, but rather because I’ve put more work into avoiding things that make me angry when I don’t have reason to think it will be worth the unpleasantness. (I am not one of those people who enjoys anger.)

*Theoretically the responses are different in that I can punish an agent but not a force, but in practice punishing either is equally impossible.

Tags:

#reply via reblog #is the blue I see the same as the blue you see

~ Brin ~ Leave a comment

aheartmadeofglitter:

I hear people say “oh my god I hate people” all the time without backlash. everyone knows they don’t hate every single individual in humanity. they have friends and family they love and hang out with. they simply hate the greedy, corrupted, oppressive nature of some human beings.
but the minute we say something about white people or men, no one seems to understand that it’s the same concept.

How does that saying go? “The line between good and evil runs through every human heart”? Everyone is worthy of love, and everyone is worthy of hatred. No exceptions.

When I say I hate everyone (which, admittedly, I generally don’t do out loud, as it’s rather rude), I mean literally everyone. I mean my psychological barriers preventing me from contemplating why I ought to hate everyone have failed.

Said barriers are currently only in the alpha stage of development, and fail frequently: about 2 – 5 times a month, for about half an hour at a time. I’m working on it, though. I hope that one day, I’ll be able to repress my misanthropy as thoroughly as I do my mortality.

(I note that the anti-mortality barriers were a huge project, taking something like 2 – 3 years to develop to a point strong enough that I could talk about it without really thinking about it. I was around age 7 when I started it, so it was a big chunk of my total lifespan at that point. I don’t expect the anti-misanthropy barriers will be any easier, both in terms of how long it takes and in terms of the amount of pain suffered in the process.)

Tags:

#Misanthropes Anonymous #’everyone knows’ my foot