…wait, your anger subsides?!
Much better as I get older. Both at not getting mad easily, and at thinking before speaking. I have generally been ok at the latter. Less good at apologizing after so I wait to see if I am really mad before expressing it.
I was like this before I got an IUD. I had intense, crippling pain every month that doctors wouldn’t do anything about until I did my own research and paid for the device out of pocket. Turns out getting gaslit about the worst pain of my life was making me pissed off all the time.
Honestly more of a question of dealing with emotions. Emotions aren’t something that you should be directly regulating, because that can way too easily turn into suppressing emotions. I’ve seen entirely way too many people think they’re controlling their emotions when they’re actually suppressing them (it’s happened to me too to be honest). Thing is, when you suppress your emotions, they’re still there, and they can suddenly pop back up and hit you in the face, which is often what happens when you get a bout of uncontrollable anger for a reason that seems benign in comparison.
That’s the problem: dealing with difficult emotions is, well, difficult. But that’s also the thing with long term solutions: they’re usually the more difficult ones short term.
Impulse Control, is something people don’t talk about as much as Emotional Regulation these days. Impulse Control matters a lot because it goes with emotional regulation, in the way that you can be sad but you don’t slice your wrists. That’s both working together, right? Now what if Impulse Control and Emotional Regulation are lost in a moment but to the extreme? That’s when you have self-immolation in public kind of stuff because the ultimate loss of impulse control in a second can mean everything doesn’t matter to that person. Then you have it the other way around, you’re a city hall worker and you have someone screaming in your face about something absolutely pointless, you can’t hit them or scream back at them. You can tell them to leave, you can call security but if you hit them, that would be a lack of impulse control and emotional regulation, they work together about 99.8% of the time, I shit you not. Emotional Regulation keeps you from getting too wound up or too low and that works together with impulse control. Like you could get super angry at your job and punch someone in the face but then you’d have no job and conversely you can’t unload your life being sad onto people because then they’ll become uncomfortable and again you might not have a job.
It’s like when you see those people who jump into the drive-through windows into the fast food places and start hitting the workers, they’re not only lacking emotional regulation that regulates, anger but also the impulse control that tells them they shouldn’t do that action.
DBT techniques are great to read about on this. It teaches not only emotional regulation, but also tackles impulses with “distress tolerance” skills.
Check out DBT skills. I like them. Plus in a DBT book that I read, they teach you that some of us just seem to feel things more intensely than others. I always felt different that way and it was nice to hear that it was ok and “normal” for me to feel so overwhelmed all the time. You accept that that’s who you are and it’s ok. Just have to try to work with it.
I’m not a big fan of The Hulk, but I sure as hell identify with Banner’s famous line “you wouldn’t like me when I’m angry.” I don’t like me when I’m angry.
Though any high enough emotional stimuli will cause me to overflow or shutdown. It’s kind of a 50/50. It does take a lot more these days than in my teens and twenties, tho.
I have alexithymia, I’m as surprised as the next person when some emotions decides to flare up randomly out of the blue and then I’m left wandering what that was and why it happened.
Though from the outside perspective, im regularly described as one of the most chill/apathetic/non-caring/calm/nonchalant person they have ever met. So i guess there isn’t much to regulate at all.
