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For someone like me, who suffers from emotional dysfunction emotions are very important. "Getting it right' with emotions isn't easy and getting it wrong not only haunts my thoughts and leaves me feeling bad about myself it wreaks havoc on every aspect of my relationship to the world. That sounds simple enough, but for decades I really never thought that with respect to my emotions that I was getting it wrong. And while I am aware of the danger they present and know I should be careful, I often still 'get it wrong.'
It seems to me that to recognize an emotion is to be self-aware of nonverbal responses to internal and external stimuli. In this sense a recognizable emotion, like anger, is a signal that I am responding to something. The signal isn't inherently good or bad. But because people care about how I appear in repsonse to them and how I act, what I do with that signal makes a hell of a lot the difference. When you 'don't take the shuttle there' you are making a conscious decision about how to respond to the emotional signal you get when you think of your wrecked roses. I think it's great that you can do that.
Intellectually it's easy enough to invision an ideal mental system wherein we encounter stimuli, recognize and interpret our emotional signals and then make motivational choices about how we behave. But signals get ignored, misinterpreted, become intolerable generate impulsive responses, and end up generating affect and behaviors that others, and even ourselves see as inappropriate. And as the field of psychology has demonstrated this system quickly becomes no simple matter.
We can get the stimuli wrong either because we just don't get them, or because we can't empathize or mentalize with the people we encounter. We can misread the emotion, substituting a generic 'being pissed' with frustration, disappointment, anger, etc, and the result is we think of ourselves as being always pissed-off because we have no other words to describe how we feel. Our tolerances to stimuli may be shallow or deep; immediate impulsive responses can give little time for thoughtful 'appropriate' choices about behavior (responding to our emotional state with alcohol which I have done because it 'makes me feel good' can make a person even more impulsive) and how the emotional state decays can be different, for some it goes away slowly, and repeated exposure to stimuli result not only in 'getting activated' but in getting 'worked up.' Indeed, some of us can live like a mouse-trap ready to go off when triggered. Finally some of us have different behavioral outlets we have 'got to' behaviors that are appropriate rather than inappropriate. Just like being generically pissed off, we can have generic behavioral outlets, like saying 'fuck-off,' 'leave me alone' and then reinforcing our demands with physical displays--arm-waving, throwing or breaking things, retreating to a mental or physical sanctuary.
Consequently, 'resolving anger' has no easy solution. And it doesn't always go well. In 1993 I confronted my father about my anger with his mental and physical abuse of me, my siblings and my mother. I did it because he was in MY living room trying to defend my sister's abuse of her children (the state of Illinois wanting to put the kids in foster care). It was cler to me that she her abuse was an inheritance and he endorsed it. It was a powerful event with little yelling but a lot of sincere anger. The results were bad. I walked out of my own house and spent the night sitting in my woodlot. My parents and I never spoke again (indeed my father was dead for years before I learned of it). My mother defended my father and my aunts, uncles and grandparents shuned me. My wife got angry at me for not respecting my father, whom she liked, and as we divorced several years later one of her comlaints was that I had embarrassed her in front of my parents! All of that was pretty easy for them because by then I was living a borderline's emotionally dysfunctional existance and was generally difficult to be around.
Yes, I confronted the source of my anger, but it didn't make the anger didn't go away. I can still go off thinking about it, because on that crisis I'm still like a set mousetrap. I think the reason for not getting past the anger is because my anger really was about lashing out to avenge myself of what had been a childhood full of danger. It may have been one of the more rational things I've ever done. The emotional signal was indelible, my response was authentic and true to my feelings, but the people in my world didn't accept it and it gets chalked up to my mental disorder as an example of the familial estrangements that are typical of borderlines.
In retrospect, much of life seems to have gone that way. I believe that people around us generally don't care why we feel or why we do the things we do. They just want us to look and behave in ways that don't challenge their own circumstance.
So now, I do "try not to go there," which means not only thinking about him and my childhood, but avoiding things that remind me of him and my childhood, like anguished discussions about things that go wrong at work, and avoiding television such as the Kardasians, Jersy Housewives, and Hoarders. If I don't get 'worked up' I reduce the risks associated with 'acting it out.'
In the 1990's as I struggled in a marriage and in my job it dawned on me that I spent a lot of time 'pissed off.'
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