It's safe to say that my biological father has some really bad anger issues which is why I stay as far away from him and his family as possible. Unfortunately, since an early age I also had some pretty bad anger issues which I deal with on a regular basis. Meditation certainly helps, deep breathing, and 95% of the time I'm great, no problem, but when something triggers me it throws me into major anger for the rest of the day and I have now been dealing with this twice in three days. And they haven't been your typical "someone cut me off and I'm pissed" kind of situation, they've been those "what the hell is wrong with people, doesn't anyone have any sense of decency or humanity???" kind of situations. (it takes a lot to get me angry, which is good I suppose)
Friday I got on the train and three black men sat behind me and proceeded to call me things like fat whore, ugly dyke, and told me to do any number of things to them sexually. Had it been one man I would have turned around and vollied an obscenity stream that would make my father blush, but being as I was vastly outnumbered I clutched my bag and moved to the next train at the next stop.
This morning, as my partner and I were stopped at a light, minding our own business a man pulled up next to us and looked out his window at me. No big deal, right? People tend to look at those next to them when waiting for a light to turn. So I talked to my partner and no big deal, then she looked over my shoulder and said "what is his problem?" I turned and he had placed his head in his hands and was staring out at us again, staring. I gave a quizzical look and turned away to face my partner and said "he's probably off his medication." That's when she went nuts screaming "what the hell is his problem!?" I turned around again to see him giving us the finger and the ladies his was with were laughing. I rolled down my window and said "What the hell is your problem?" He rolled down his and began spewing curses, expletives, and suggestions as what we should do to his black manly items that would make his female relatives spit in anger. The girls continued to laugh. I, of course, reached into the back of our car where the 15 softball bats are hidden. At that point my partner realized my anger-monster had surfaced, the light turned green and we took off, but I already had my seat belt off and the door unlocked. It took me about 15 minutes to calm down enough to breathe normally and be able to get on the train without killing someone.
What is it about anger? I can let go of jealousy, stress, sadness, depression, but no matter what I do (therapy, meditation, etc) I can't lick anger? And I'm not talking about just a little anger, I'm talking about so enraged I shake and grit my teeth and want to beat the daylights out of something. A therapist once told me that I should take boxing or karate to let off steam but my fear was that boxing and karate would only give me tools to use in my anger. It's bad enough that my partner is a softball coach (I know, very stereotypical) so we have a lot of bats in the car.
I suppose that the anger is good in some ways, as I have found when I am incredibly scared I can turn it into anger and it seems to get people to back off, like when I was babysitting and I took the baby for a walk through the park and this huge dog came up snarling and barking and no one was in sight. I went straight from deathly afraid to incredibly pissed off and I got in front of the carriage and starting screaming at that dog, matching snarl to snarl, bark to yell, arms up in the air to make me look bigger and eventually the dog went running off.
We were watching Twilight last night, as it so happens, and in one scene Edward, the vampire, goes into a rage at these guys who wanted to do some pretty bad stuff to Bella, the girl he loves. He gets so angry that all he has to do is look at these guys and they back off, then Bella has to calm him down so he won't go back and rip their heads off. That's how I feel sometimes. But I don't have the great excuse of being a vampire.
