I recently had an unfortunate confrontation.
During this battle of wills, I briefly lost control of my mind, as one does when angry. I said things I regret. I said things to hurt, and to intimidate.
The who, the what, the why of it all, doesn’t really matter.
The only concern is that I got angry and lost control.
Whenever something like this occurs, I tend to get reflective after the episode and try to determine where I went wrong, and what I could do to stop it from happening again.
I found myself particularly disappointed in my actions, as the person with whom I argued is someone I have a good deal of respect for.
So I decided to dive deeper into our words and my feelings, to really get at the root of why I reacted so strongly to his words.
The rage I felt in the moment, that overwhelmed my control, came from a feeling of being dismissed.
Now, I wasn’t really dismissed. The core of the message was for us both to calm down, and talk sensibly when we had cooler heads. This is entirely rational and the correct way to defuse a volatile situation.
But I felt dismissed, unimportant, and inferior.
“It’s not a sensible strategy,” my bruised self proclaimed. “No! It is a personal attack!”
As I now calmly type these words and recall, this line of thinking strikes me as sheer insanity.
And, yet, I went there, I thought that, I reacted.
What is the problem with being dismissed? I ask myself now.
That is the core of what set me off. I was in fight or flight mode, and viewing the entire discourse as an attack on my person. My lizard brain was already inclined to defend itself, to be prepared to return fire.
Why?
Ego, of course. To dismiss me is to make me less. And my ego could not stand for this. Or at least not when I’m in a confrontational state of mind.
As I mulled this, I considered other times I have gotten angry, or seen others do so.
For instance, if I am cut off on the road and I react with anger… why is that? I can only guess that in “taking my road,” this other person has in some way made me less once more. He took something from me and now I am less valuable. Sure, the road is a public good and the time lost as I slow down behind him or consider a lane change is fleeting, so how less valuable is my state of life at that point? Negligible, of course.
And yet still I react with anger, as do others. Road rage is a common occurrence nowadays.
It all comes down to ego. Almost every time I have felt aggressive or angry, it has come down to a reaction to some perceived attack on my person or my identity. And almost always, that assault is a fiction of my own creation.
In doing so, I cause myself and those around me to suffer unnecessarily. Indeed, the misperception of an attack on my ego results in an actual loss of respect for and trust in me on the part of others who see my reaction, a loss which is much greater and more serious than the imaginary one in my head.
With this intuition in mind, I am now telling myself, whenever I start to feel a little tense or irate, that anger is ego. And ego, in most circumstances, just gets in the way and leads to negative consequences.
The anger is not necessary. I am not being dismissed. I am not being attacked. I am not in actuality hurt whatsoever.
I may regret that confrontation, but it may have given me a powerful tool to combat these feelings when I get triggered. I merely repeat to myself “Anger is ego” until I calm down and can assess the threat rationally.
If this proves beneficial, I will have taken the good out of an otherwise regrettable situation and made myself a better person.
If you also struggle to keep control when confronted, maybe try this and see if it works for you as well.