I have a habit. For the longest time, I didn’t even realize I did it, or did it as often as I did.
I am an imaginary confrontationalist. Yes, I made that title up, but it’s a real thing.
It is an aspect of my fight with anger which I briefly touch upon in my first post Addicted To Anger: A Self Portrait (Part I) about my issues with anger back in August.
I am a warrior in my head. I fight battles every day, and I always win.
And you probably do the same.
How often has this happened to you? You have some nasty argument with someone, and it isn’t resolved. At best, you and this other person break off contact. It could be a stranger, an acquaintance or even your best friend. But, more likely, it is someone you have a naturally adversarial relationship with, such as a road rage incident where you and another driver are trying to occupy the same stretch of road, the irritable clerk at the DMV, or the cop who gave you a ticket for speeding.
After this incident, do you just move on and go about your day? Unless you have some impressive resolve or suffer from short term memory loss, chances are you do not. You probably replay the argument over and over again. You relish the wins, if you had any. You think of how you could have gotten to them further, caused more hurt, won.
Or how about this scenario, which is probably more common? Now the target of your wrath is someone you must have regular interaction with, such as an asshole boss, a lazy co-worker, your ex-wife, or your unreliable brother. In this spot, you don’t have the incident, but you want to. All of the anguish and spite and misunderstandings in your relationship boil under the surface, so you play it out. You imagine yourself really letting these people have it. You are so righteous, and have been wronged so very much. You cannot lose.
This is an imaginary confrontation. And it is the meal your anger feasts on.
If you’re like most people, you don’t let your anger out unless it overwhelms you. It is not socially acceptable to do so. You can hurt people with your anger. At the very least, this can have disturbing consequences for you in your relationships. Worse, you could be provoked to violence. You could be arrested. You could really hurt someone, perhaps irreparably.
So you don’t have that fight. And your anger stays within, simmering, always threatening to burst out. You engage in offhand comments, passive aggressive behavior, complaining or talking down to others, and actively working to subvert the goals of any who dare choose to cross you.
This is how anger undoes everything you wish to accomplish. In order to best achieve your goals, you must generally be as sound of mind and accepting of reality as possible. Any deep anger or resentment takes you from both. Reacting with anger is rarely done with a rational mind. There is a reason why when someone gets angry, they are described as just “snapping.” It is because they have lost control; anyone who is not in control of themselves is not sound of mind in that moment. And anger colors your perspective, introducing bias, both for your own conclusions and against any that stand in your way. Ergo, anger deprives you of the ability to perceive reality.
If you have these imaginary confrontations, as I sometimes find myself doing, you are keeping some form of animosity under wraps, and in allowing it to remain within you, sabotaging your efforts to be a better person.
It took quite some time before I realized that my little mental battles with a boss I was powerless to challenge, or a past girlfriend I was unlikely to ever run into again, or an argument with an unreasonably surly customer, and so forth, were manifestations of my own addiction to anger. Allowing myself to experience them was only furthering this unhealthy compulsion to feel the power of rage.
At first, I simply told myself to stop, and that is still primarily what I do. But I am now also exploring the source of that anger inside me, so that I can release it in a healthy way, or accept the flaw of personality or psyche from which it stems.
The ultimate battle to becoming your best self starts in your own mind. If you can’t control yourself, what can you control?