an analysis of anger
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The last time I got really angry was when I almost got hit by a car. I was about to cross the street one Saturday night, and I saw a black sedan waiting to make a left turn far across the opposite side of the street. I had a sixth sense that something might happen, but I didn’t listen to it because I thought it was just a crazy thought. The light was green, so I crossed. And before I got to the middle of the street, I hear a SCREEEECH! I turn, and the black sedan is stopped two feet away with the headlights shining all over me. He had made his left turn at high speed, and I guess he didn’t see me until the very last second. As I kept on walking, I glared at him, raised my hand, and said “Asshole!”
In the past, I probably would have felt justified in my reaction. I would have told all my friends about how I almost got hit by a crazy driver. And I would have been upset for the rest of the day.
But this time, a few moments later, I regretted my reaction. Because my ideal is to stop getting angry – and of course, I’m still a long way off. I still get angry, but I don’t believe anymore that it’s a good thing for me to be. It’s unhealthy, unproductive, and not very useful in resolving situations. And getting angry makes me unhappy. If I happen to be in a good mood, and then something happens and I get angry, it’s hard to return to that good mood on the same day.
I started to think about why I got angry at the driver. The driver should have seen me earlier. The driver shouldn’t have been driving so fast. The driver should have… and that’s when I realized that the surface reason why people get angry is because they think someone else did something wrong. Because somebody else should have done something, but didn’t; or because they shouldn’t have done something, but did. Anger starts with the “shoulds” and “shouldn’ts” we expect from other people.
Let’s assume that this is the case, that when you get angry, it’s always justified because someone else did do something absolutely wrong. If the person immediately apologizes, you might start to feel better. But still you will feel uneasy, because you hope they don’t do the same thing again in the future. If the person doesn’t apologize, it makes you more upset. Sometimes the person is gone (like the driver), or there is just no one there to make an apology to. Maybe they just don’t think they made a mistake, which makes you even more angry. So you lose whatever good mood you were in, and you enter into a bad mood. And this means, you are paying an emotional price for someone else’s mistake. You pay with your own happiness.
I don’t like getting angry because I don’t want to pay for somebody else’s mistake. I don’t want to lose my good mood just because another person did something wrong. If my peace of mind depends on everybody else around me not making mistakes, then I know I’m never going to be happy – because everybody makes mistakes. Somebody, somewhere, is eventually going to make a mistake in my vicinity. And soon. It’s inevitable. It’s almost impossible for somebody NOT to make a mistake because nobody is close to my version of perfection.
And I’m going to get angry – because I think that mistake is going to affect my life. Because that’s really the deeper reason why we get angry – because we believe that somebody else’s mistake is going to negatively impact our life in some way. Their mistake is somehow going to cost us - or it already did cost us. Because if somebody makes a mistake and it doesn’t affect our life, we don’t care – so we don’t get angry.
I have to learn to live with the fact that not everything is going to go perfectly – in other words, the way I want it to. Many people use up a lot of emotional energy in getting angry because the world is not going the way they think it should be going. The driver should have paid more attention. Your secretary should have remembered the memo. Your boyfriend should have called you. Your student should have done his homework. Your husband should spend more time with the kids. In all of these cases, you have an expectation of the world, and the world didn’t or doesn’t meet it. This means you think the world is something which it is not. Which means your anger is a result of not fully understanding the world as it is, and not just simply a mistake by another person. The other person didn’t just make a mistake – you also made the mistake of assuming the other person would behave in a different way than they actually did. You, quite literally, didn’t see what was coming – just as I didn’t see the driver coming. Which means that on a deeper level, anger is a result of our own ignorance.
Back to almost getting hit by a car. I’m sure the driver didn’t intend to almost hit me. And just as I had gotten angry and afraid because I almost got killed that night, he was probably also afraid that he had gotten very close to killing someone that night. So the ideal state for me would be to not lose my peace. Perhaps I could have said to the driver, “Hey, man, be careful next time. Next time, you might hit somebody you know.” If everybody drove around thinking that they might hit someone they know, people would drive a lot more carefully. Or I could have said, “Hey, man, is everything okay?” To the driver and to myself, either of these lines would have been much more productive than “Asshole.”
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Re: An Analysis of Anger:
I agree with much of your essay. Anger is a wasted emotion and one that seldom leads to happiness. I can’t help but notice that you missed something in your essay. You say that you could have gone over and just told the driver to be more careful to avoid repeating his mistake. You in effect say that you would have been a more enlightened person had you transcended these feelings of anger resulting from the driver’s actions. But nowhere do you accept responsibility for your part in the situation. You still view it as his mistake. You say that you had a sixth sense that something would happen but you didn’t listen to it. You saw the car there; did you make eye contact with the driver, or somehow ensure that he was aware of your intention to cross the street. The fact that you had the right of way does not absolve you from the responsibility of confirming that that right of way is being honored. I believe that all to often, people’s anger comes from a desire to avoid responsibility for their own actions. By getting angry, one can avoid looking at their own role in the sequence of events and pin the blame on the other party. Furthermore, I think the more one secretly believes it may acctually be their own fault, the angrier they must get to cover up this nagging suspicion of personal imperfection. The true path to avoiding anger is accepting your own faults. With this humility you can approach the other person and make your feelings understood. More often than not, you will find there isn’t really any need.
Like you, I still get angry sometimes, regardless of how hard I try to rid myself of this emotion. I recognize I am not perfect. By recognizing this imperfection, I come one small step closer to my ideal.
Dao
Comment by Dao — December 3, 2005 @ 3:20 pm
To Dao:
In many negative conflict situations (like relationship ones), you are right, the responsibilty often lies with both parties. However, I don’t believe this was one of them. This situation was not an interpersonal relationship, but a matter of traffic law. You have suggested that I should have somehow made sure of the driver’s intention. It was night time and the car was 30 ft. away on the other side of the street, so I couldn’t see the driver’s face. But this is not the point, in my opinion.
If I had actually gotten hit and killed, every court of law in this country would have found the driver 100% guilty and in the wrong. I would have been at zero-fault. Right-of-way is 100% right, not 90% or 80% right-of-way shared with another person. And under traffic rules, only 1 person has right-of-way at any given time, and everybody else has to yield.
I believe you hold me partially responsible because you do not know me - to you, I am a faceless person on the Internet, so it may be difficult for you to feel empathy. So consider this: if your mother, son, or daughter had been walking across a city street on a designated crosswalk with a green light, and he or she had gotten killed in the same situation, neither you, the law, or even the driver would place any blame or fault on the victim. The driver in such cases would say, “I didn’t see him/her,” and not “He should have seen me coming!”
Would you still hold your position if you knew that the driver had been drinking, street racing, or just liked to drive fast? Drunk drivers and speedsters have killed hundreds of thousands of people - but nobody blames the random victims they kill for a reason: they’re not to blame. They were only at the wrong place and time. The problem does not lie with the victims’ lack of skill in identifying speedsters or drunk drivers at night (when people tend to be drunk), or with the victim not having the excellent driving skills or running skills required to avoid getting hit by an unpredictable driver. The problem lies with the drunk driver or speedster.
You also believe I may be partially responsible because I ignored my sixth sense? My sixth sense was a hunch, not a vision of the future. Unfortunately, I am not gifted with strong psychic powers - so will you then blame me because I could not see the future clearly enough? No court of law on this planet would fault me for not listening to my undeveloped psychic powers. I read that some passengers who were killed in the planes that were hijacked on 9/11, they had told their loved ones before they boarded that they had “bad hunches”. So would you say they also have 5%, 10%, 20% or 50% responsibility for what happened to them? I say they have 0% responsibility.
If I get into a fight with a friend, then I am partially to blame. If my relationship with my family isn’t so great, then I am partially to blame. If I get angry at my students for not understanding or paying attention, then I am partially to blame. If I hate working for my company because I don’t like my boss but I still stay there, then I am partially to blame. For interpersonal relationships, the responsibility is often two-sided.
However, if I get injured or killed (or almost killed) by a drunk driver, a mass serial killer, or a terrorist, then I am not to blame. If anybody you loved were injured or killed in such a way, you would not blame them either. Nobody would.
Because if such a terrible thing did happen to your loved ones, you would definitely feel angry, and you would definitely blame the driver, murderer, or terrorist for your tragedy. Everybody would.
If such a tragedy ever befalls our loved ones, forgiveness is a stage we may have to move through if we desire to go forward with our lives and release ourselves from hate. Forgiveness is possible only because it first begins from blame. We blame another for the suffering we feel because we think they have caused it - for there is nothing to forgive to another person if we think they did not hurt us. But blame is obviously not the end of forgiveness.
However, the point of my writing this essay was neither about blame or forgiveness (which is a great essay topic as well), but simply to find ways of understanding that may help us to go beyond just feeling and expressing anger - even when that anger is justified and the other person is 100% to blame. To me, it doesn’t really matter who is to blame; anger is not something I want to hold onto in my life. This is why in the essay I do not analyze the driver (or spend my time blaming him), but only analyzing myself and the topic of anger in general.
I chose this situation because it’s clear that the driver was 100% at fault (and would have been found 100% at fault by law if he had actually hit me), so it’s easy for most people, including myself, to feel angry. I wanted to explore anger, not almost getting hit by a car. If I had chosen a situation where I realized I was clearly to blame (of which there are many in my life, of course), then there would be no point in me getting angry, and no point in me writing about anger.
In such a situation, the writing topic would be humility, which I agree with you, is a very worthwhile quality to have in measured amounts (although I believe too much humility can cause self-abuse and continued abuse by others), and a necessary one if we are to not let our own egos get in the way of our relationships and our lives. Humility is an excellent topic for a different essay.
But thank you for your critique. Even though I do not agree with your premise that I was partially responsible, your comments do show that there are other ways of perceiving and dealing with anger.
I personally believe that anger hurts our potential, rather than helps it. Becoming less angry may help us become better people. But some people do not even believe that becoming less angry or becoming a better person is possible, desirable, or even important - which is their free choice to believe. If they are content with who they are, that is the most important thing. But I am not one of those people. To become a better person (or to choose not to), each individual takes the road that he or she believes is the fastest and most suitable; so no road is necessarily right for all. What makes sense and seems true to one person, may not be so for another at any given stage or position in life. There are just simply too many different kinds of people in the world for there to be one right way to think, do, and live. Agreement on any one way is not only unnecessary, but probably impossible.
Comment by sky2evan — December 6, 2005 @ 7:38 pm