as small as a world and as large as alone

8:05pm April 1, 2014

lichgem:

I don’t really trust people who are proud of being angry. I understand that a person can come to a place where they’ve been told all their lives to be quiet, to be more polite, to smile even when they’re getting shoved down, and they’re just fed up, and they want to be free. But I’ve met a lot of people who turn being angry into a lifestyle or something, and use all that as justification for treating people like crap.

Like by all means, be proud of yourself for finding your assertiveness, for finally being able to be angry when people told you that you weren’t allowed. Just don’t treat every interaction with another human being like either you’re allowed to snap at them and lash out every time you’re angry, or you’re not allowed to be angry EVER. There is actually middle ground.

[All of your later disclaimers about not trying to manipulate people into being a certain way, when you say you “don’t trust” a certain sort of person, apply to me as well.]

Also, as someone who tried that… lashing out at people never actually solved my problem of being a doormat.  It just meant I got the worst possible consequences of both worlds – people still walked all over me, and people treated me like shit for being angry all the time.  I didn’t get the good consequences of being assertive, because I hadn’t become assertive, I’d just become very reactive.  Flipping out at people does not, in itself, bring results or get you what you want or need.  The only thing it gives, sometimes, is a sort of temporary emotional release.

But even that is temporary.  And on that purely personal-emotional level… while flipping out feels better in the moment, it doesn’t actually get rid of your anger.  In fact, it increases your anger.  So you flip out more, which feels good but doesn’t actually diminish your anger.  And it actually makes you more angry.  So you flip out more.  And pretty soon you’re flipping out the moment anyone does so much as look at you funny.

Uncontrolled rage like that is not good at getting things done, and it’s not good at getting rid of the anger you feel.  So it’s not really that much good for anything.  Except it does feel good, sometimes, but only right at the moment that you’re flipping out – it feels good to lose control and not feel like you have any responsibility for your actions, but it’s not an actual “outlet” the way people imagine it is, because it only makes the anger worse.  And while carefully controlled anger chosen in really precise situations can actually get things done, this sort of situation we’re talking about isn’t a situation where someone’s in a lot of control.

Unfortunately there are a number of different mindsets that can make it easier to fall into this kind of spiral.  The most seductive one to me, when I was younger, had to do with the idea that as an abuse victim, I had no responsibility for my actions, especially when my actions were a result of abuse.  There’s another popular one that has to do with oppression, that’s pretty similar.  And there’s others.

I started questioning that (and my own involvement in it) when I ran into someone who was consciously using that idea to manipulate people.  As in, she was abusive and nasty and horrible, and she had this whole complex justification of it that was about her own history of abuse.  (In her case, she’d actually pick victims and then accuse them of abusing her so that she could abuse them with impunity, among other things, and then justify the whole entire thing with “I was abused as a child in ways too horrible for you to imagine, so anything I do is understandable.”  So it was much more consciously manipulative than the average abuse victim who falls into this pattern by mistake.)  I realized that if she wasn’t justified in doing a lot of what she did, just because she’d been abused, then neither was I justified in doing a lot of the things I did, even if the things I did weren’t anywhere near as maliciously nasty as the things she did.  

She’s the one who made me question it, because what she did was so over the top.  But most of the people I’ve encountered are less similar to her, and more similar to the person you talked about who went from “I won’t quietly take things anymore” to “I will flip out at anyone who annoys me, and feel it’s justified” within a week or two.  Or who started out pretty reactive and angry and used similar justifications.  And I used to constantly make excuses for other people like that, just as I constantly made excuses for myself.  Until I encountered that person who was so over-the-top that I questioned everything including myself.

But one thing I do see a lot of, is this idea that it’s either-or.  That any questioning of any use of anger ever, is the same as questioning all use of anger, ever.  That saying that certain acts of rage are actually doing people harm, is the same as saying that all rage is wrong.  That questioning any anger at all, deprives all people of the ability to fight back.  That confusion of any one instance with all instances.  (Maybe going hand in hand with the idea that your reaction to one situation is, or should be, the same as your reaction to all situations.)

Also when people questioned my expressions of anger, I used to immediately assume that they were stereotyping me as a bitter cripple or something like that.  And while I’m certain that happened sometimes, other times it was not even related to that.

45 notes