A few days ago I posted, "you may have had your anger stolen from you as a child.

Emotions themselves are neither good nor bad, but they *are* powerful. Especially anger. It has some uses we need right now.

Many of us were literally told there were things we were *not allowed* to be angry about. That is authoritarian control. People "above you" do NOT get to tell you what you may or may not be angry about.

@Lily_and_frog
If you do wish to elaborate later, I would love to hear more!

It sounds like your approach aligns with what I am trying to understand better in myself. I like to approach my emotions with curiosity & understanding. I find this doesn't make the emotion go away, but it means I don't feel as "out of control" or overwhelmed.

@artemis

Okay, I'll try to explain my life philosophy in a very short way, and link it with anger.

Let's start with general, self evident, stuff worth stating clearly.

1. Everything has causes and effects.

2. We're the result of evolution. Evolution doesn't seek optimal condition, just survival. In fact, evolution doesn't "seek" anything, it just is. If something alive can reproduce, whether perfect or not, it will reproduce.

@artemis

This means we are living in an imperfect world, and we are imperfect beings. "Perfection" is a human construct and doesn't exist outside of human imagination. Our imagination is so amazingly powerful that we can effortlessly imagine a better state of things, optimal states, and tend towards it. Why can we do that? An accident that helps survival.

We can also do suboptimal stuff that doesn't stop us surviving too much.

@artemis

We have old survival reflexes that were useful shortly after our ancestors started to dwell on land, but are a bother, without killing us, in a social animal.

Plus, natural selection acts both at the individual and group level. A behaviour benefiting the individual in the group (selfishness) will doom the group of there's too much of it. Altruism, cooperation, empathy all make groups stronger.

@artemis

Humans have the capacity to learn, which is adapting their behaviour and reasoning to certain given situations. Some better than others. And the reasons for it is neurology (imagine ALL the factors affecting neurology, I'm thinking ASD and ADHD) or experience (one cannot learn stuff they've never been exposed to, or the conditions of learning), or even a learning useful in one situation but detrimental in another.

- Everything has a cause -

@lritter
I hear you, & I do relate. For me, that feeling of loss of control is why I want to become more acquainted with & comfortable with it, because I feel like I'm inexperienced with healthy anger. The only time I let myself feel anger is in those moments where it feels wild & out of control.

I'm hopeful that I can become better "friends" with it. When I am feeling sad, I'm able to sit & try to understand myself. When I feel angry, I try to shut it off, & I don't think it's serving me

@artemis @lritter

Losing control is not an inherent part of anger. It's what happens when you mix anger with dissociation, checking out

You can learn how to be present when you are angry, so that you are 100% in control, and also feeling the anger

It might be easiest to do this by starting with noticing when you are just a little bit angry -- also known as irritated, annoyed, bothered -- and being present with that small amount of anger

@urbanfoxe
I am such a huge fan of things that help kids recognize & understand their emotional experience. Learning that from a young age is transformational.

A few days ago I posted, "you may have had your anger stolen from you as a child. If so, you should find it & get it back."

I'm entirely serious about that. A lot of us were trained as kids that the people in charge of us could be angry, but we needed to be quiet & submissive in the face of "authority".

No. Your anger is yours. Your anger is powerful. Find it. Harness it. Direct it.

It was taken from you because it gives you power.

So it's now my job as an adult to figure out what a healthy relationship to anger would actually look like.

@artemis I wanna murder those that abused me does that count as a healthy relationship to anger

@artemis

To be continued later

@artemis

Riiight.

Anger is an emotion. We have no direct control on emotions, they're reflexes, reactions, to events (no, yoga master, fuck off, we CAN'T. Oh, you say you can? After how many decades of rigorous training?).

What makes us angry is when
- Other people step on our boundaries or hurt us.
- When other people or things don't act according to our preconceived ideal.
- It's worse when it's sudden, unexpected and in the midst of confusion.

@artemis

Anger exists because it's useful for evolution. At the individual level because it helps fulfilling one's needs, keeping would competitors away. At the group level because it helps all individuals to sort of keep each other's boundaries and setting theirs. Outwards signs of anger were essential before language.

But evolution isn't tending towards optimal conditions, just survival. So the more angry individual gets more resources for themselves...

@artemis

But if this one individual's anger is out of control, or if all individuals are angry too easily, the survival of the group is threatened, and the group won't survive. Or this animal will evolve to become solitary... think most cats, big and small, and polar bears, which is better for predators where there's a scarcity of food.

But let's stick to humans. Some angry ones gets more resources (good on them) but threatens the group (fuck 'em). Why They're like this?

@artemis

Remember: either neurology or experience. They were sort of born this way, in a normal setting with enough of what they needed, but the anger trigger much more sensitive than needed. Or lived in a shitty economic or social context where what they needed was scarce and anger meant survival. Or even encouraged because it made them rich because they were coming from a materially rich, socially poor context.

@artemis

And that's where "controlling" anger (outwards signs of anger, because anger cannot be controlled) becomes significant. And not all measures of control are equal.

So people try to control/suppress anger in others either because they want to keep power over them (since anger is a reflex to protect one's boundaries, which is bad news for those outstepping them), or because they fear they'll become angry pricks who will take over and monopolise resources, becoming a threat to the group.

@artemis

Without any understanding of neurodiversity and psychology, the latter well intentioned tendecy of controlling anger in others is blunt as fuck.

But psychology and understanding of neurodiversity happened an eye blink ago in the timeline of human evolution. Controlling anger with anger has been the norm. It kinds of work to keep social cohesion, although imperfectly. Evolution doesn't tend towards optimal conditions and people cannot know what they haven't had the chance to learn.

@artemis

But another source of anger is when reality doesn't match preconceived ideas. That's when one gets angry at their computer when it glitches, or when something isn't where it should be.

That's the most dangerous form of anger, yet the easiest one to control, if one is willing to.

We all have in our mind an idea of how things *should* be. This is usually learnt (through exposition to patterns, observation, reflexion, teaching).