Anger

[Hashi]

Anyone have any ideas on what I can do about my facial expressions other than working through my anger?

If anger is showing up in your face all the time, then you must be feeling the anger all the time, even in unrelated situations. I think it's about working on the anger at certain times, and emotion regulation and using skills like distraction when you're in a situation where showing anger isn't appropriate. Also mindfulness - being in the present as much as you can, reacting neutrally to what's going on now, rather than having your attention and energy on past experiences.

This isn't denial or suppression. It's self-management. It's empowering to have some control over when and how you express anger (facial expression being one type of expression - you are feeling and communicating your anger).

We need to do this with all our emotions to an extent, in order to function. When I'm at home, I'll cry and feel defeated for hours, but if I'm at work I have to set that to one side and get into a different persona. I need to focus on what's happening at that moment, which isn't to do with my trauma. Both are still me, in fact I find it a relief to be a different aspect of myself for a while and have a break from the deep emotions.

DBT skills are very helpful for this - not pushing the emotions back down, but setting them to one side to work with at a more appropriate time.

 

[Abstract]

t makes my blood boil.

Anna,
This will be affecting you and impeding your life more than anyone elses. And these are things you can change. If you choose to see peoples actions in a certain way then it will make you angry. If you choose to look at their motives differently it will not make you angry. Anger can become a habit as can mindreading and giving people motives you have no way of knowing.

People think I'm angry at them and that's not the case

It is really good that you can separate your feelings for those around you in the present from your internal anger. It does sound like you are stuck in anger mode. Sometimes there can even be a self protecting aspect to it. I agree with Hashi that using DBT and mindfulness skills can be very useful. it might also be useful looking at what is underneath the anger. Is there fear there? What is the fear about? Writing out those thoughts or feelings can be helpful.

Expressing the past anger is very necessary and that anger is a good and important emotion when expressed in the appropriate environment. Anger is an important emotion when expressed and used appropriately. Not being able to access anger or being stuck in anger are both unhelpful and unhealthy. Especially when managing relationships with others.

 

[Anna]

Anna,
This will be affecting you and impeding your life more than anyone elses. And these are things you can change. If you choose to see peoples actions in a certain way then it will make you angry. If you choose to look at their motives differently it will not make you angry. Anger can become a habit as can mindreading and giving people motives you have no way of knowing.

Indeed, but I have learned to avoid these people who only care about what they have and material wealth. We can afterall choose our friends. When they brag about what they have and criticise you because you drive a cheaper car etc... it is pretty easy to see where their heart lies. You cannot change the way they are, you have to accept it and move on. Learn not to care, avoid those people who cause you pain. I prefer deep people, I try to avoid shallow arrogant money grabbing people, and trust me you can tell who they are when you have a conversation with them.

 

[Abstract]

I certainly agree with you about avoiding negative or superficial people Anna.

there are only a few people I like, even then most of the time they manage to piss me off with their egocentric hypocritical ways

I just think this goes way, way beyond that. It's your prerogative of course but I don't think it makes ones life easier or happier.

 

[Anna]

Aye Abstract, I guess it is individual differences of course.

I just have the Motto that it is better to have a few good friends rather than lots of superficial shallow ones. If you have a few good friends then you are a rich Person indeed.

I also believe life is too short.

 

[Resilientbibliophile]

Responding here to the telegraphing of anger via facial expressions,

I have a terrible time with this. My public demeanor and body language is quirky and tightly-controlled, whereas I just don't know how to trim it out to possibly call less attention to myself. If I visit a particular place repeatedly, especially restaurants whereby staff might come to know and understand me, then soon I'm treated very well. I arrive with books, I set them up, and communicate my wishes and inclinations within a fairly narrow band of practiced courtesies that I hope - I hope will be translated into respect afforded to wait staff, etc. I draw comment, but most of it kind and rooted in a certain bemused/intrigued curiosity for how many deeply introverted types reading in public does one encounter on a day-to-day basis? For myself, informal encounters with people habitating a public environment may be my only experience of even trace social validation in a person-to-person sense for days at a time, hence I dare not put a foot wrong. I desire to refine a style of personal and professional interrelation uncommonly humane even if the effort seems a bit rarefied. :O_o:

What is less savored is diving into a new environment which might be tonally rough and tumble for people will mistake a certain lack of ease and reflexive gregariousness for outright stuffiness if not hostility. Rather like how I write, a lot of my presentation is 'simply me' - a certain adaptation to identifying with my books and what is found across studies however manifest. I don't strictly wish to telegraph to others as though I were some wildly intolerant Prussian officer, but that impression is wordlessly established far too often as I struggle to negotiate what I'll term 'social space'. In short, I bob my head up, and notice that a certain *hitty dynamic has taken hold absent my participation. :speechless:

With the passage of years my manner in this regard hasn't improved, for I seem to become ever more stuffy even I don't strictly think about it regarding encounters with the aforementioned 'rough and tumble' set. In particular, my 'man of the people' setting just seems permanently broken, while if I could wear a tight-fitting mask that might telegraph to the man on the street my reasoned desire simply to make my way through life without causing harm to others, perhaps I'd be first in line to buy such? I am getting better and reflexively telegraphing social ease and courtesy, although just in a plain waking sense, I strongly telegraph as an intolerant nerd deserving of his comeuppance. I wish in a sense I could wear a device that would transmit in real time to any parties interested what I'm thinking, what I'm mulling, versus lookers on presuming my investment on non-investment in social scenes is characterized by non-stop caustic judgment of 'them' for it simply isn't. Sigh, double-sigh, sigh-squared then... :geek:


M.

 

[Hashi]

if I could wear a tight-fitting mask that might telegraph to the man on the street my reasoned desire simply to make my way through life without causing harm to others... I wish in a sense I could wear a device that would transmit in real time to any parties interested what I'm thinking, what I'm mulling, versus lookers on presuming my investment on non-investment in social scenes is characterized by non-stop caustic judgment of 'them' for it simply isn't.

In my case, a device that would transmit what I'm thinking would probably not be a good idea. :)

Seriously, I think what you're saying is interesting. Wouldn't it be great if people didn't jump to assumptions about what others are thinking. I got very tired of this in my last job.

 

[Deleted member 12723]

Hashi, I have a big problem with assuming things about others. I have to watch myself like a hawk. But i do try to be careful. I understand what you are saying. It would be great. I wish I did not do this at all. I have too much black and white thinking. I really have to be careful around others. At least the good part is that I am aware of it and am doing something about it. You are very wise.

 

[Hashi]

Resilientbibliophile is very wise, I'm just agreeing! :)

Maybe we'd all benefit from those devices to show what we're really thinking. Don't they say that the biggest shock in finding out what someone else really thinks would be that they're not thinking about you at all!

Which does come back to anger, and the point of the thread. Sorry if this took it a little astray.

 

[Abstract]

Sigh, double-sigh, sigh-squared then.

((((Resilientbibliophile)))),
It is awful to be misunderstood and trapped by the perceptions of others. And to feel that whatever we do we can't shake them! :rolleyes: I do think we human beings assume way too much from way too little.

And there isn't anything wrong with being :geek:

If you manage to make the devices you can let us know. What would be nice is if we could programme in what we intend to convey.

 

[Resilientbibliophile]

Thanks everyone for the very kind and considerate feedback afforded,

My incapacity to relate to people occupying my everyday is rooted in traumatic legacies now interwoven with what passes for my studies. Depending greatly on the phase of the moon, I'm alternately aware and then oblivious to this reality. I have strong passive aggressive tendencies, and struggle mightily to throttle powerful projective tendencies most unappealing. Advances made to tightly control aspects of my presentation have been made, although impossible it is to look past the reading on a certain internal gauge that reveals my daily social and emotional needs are simply not being met. I'm quite terrible with people then, whereas pressure felt prompts me to embrace ever more tightly my chosen process addiction; i.e. reading.

I love my materials, but at select moments I'll ask the ceiling to what purpose did I set this dynamic in motion? Did I really want to push people away with such demonstrable effectiveness even as I sought to protectively dissociate? Sometimes I'll try to self-soothe to the extent of reading academic journal articles which deconstruct the dissociative tendencies that take hold; i.e. that such are unconscious and very, very human adaptative behaviors in the face of overwhelming stress. As most everyone here would agree, wouldn't it be nice to create a throughway that would bypass the lower brain/amagdala function and send signals right up to the higher brain/cortical function direct? Practice, reading, etc. can strengthen such neural pathways, such habits of cognition and reasoned adaptation to stress. Improved and enhanced emotional resilience can be ours - in time.

I tell myself again and again that what determination I evidence in relation to the application that I make to my studies is overlaid atop a foundation of trauma. Without the trauma history, I doubt I'd care so very much about anything, hence a certain promise exists in relation to tapping into outrage and refashioning such into oversized constructive commitment if not stamina in the face of many challenges existing now and into the future. I thirst to be effective in all that I do.

One reads of dynamic professors who have suffered many a personal tragedy, people challenged to internally process overwhelming experience in a way most productive. Hyperawareness in such instances isn't strictly a curse but a potential (if unstable and volatile) benefit. I ask myself if I too can research, write, and communicate broadly in a most creative and vital way within an internal psychological environment of lived traumatic experience? Can traumatic recall tendencies be mobilized and informed to cement and recement commitment to cause again and again? No tears shed as I write this, but an impassioned view communicated just the same. Endeavoring to plot a way forward for myself - not out. Thanks for reading...


M.