Mastering Rage, part #56856423

One of the things that people tend to notice about me (if they know me for more than a few hours), is that I have "anger issues". Not anger issues like one of my best friends back in Germany, who, in fourth grade or so, upon being teased, put another kid in hospital (and he went to therapy for it). Still, he had a flaring temper, and whenever he'd encounter frustration or even evil, it visibly boiled under the surface. He was a guy you'd want on your side in a battle in any case. Maybe that was why we got along so well.

I'm now 37 years old, and I'm calling my anger the "crusader moment/response", when I'm so deeply affronted by something that my response--after a shock moment, is rage. There are two kinds of people, I've heard a fighting teacher say, when they get hit, one freezes, the other freaks out and goes medieval.

I'm the medieval type. For much of my childhood and teenage years, I was the bullied outsider. I was the gentle giant who would, after enough drops of anger had accumulated, spill it all in one glorious berserk rage, sometimes resulting in (mental or physical or both) damage to people and property. When I'm in real danger, I go cold. When I encounter violence, I stand and fight. It's even worse when my friends are threatened.

I've done some looking into this anger thing, reading some books and listening to people and attempting to come to terms. I like my rage. It's hyper-real, chest-pounding, high-energy. I get really snappy and sometimes even funny when I'm angry. It's good to never really feel physically threatened, because if something or somebody attacks me, I know that I have fight in me. It's the whole "I might go down, but I'm taking you with me" approach to conflict. Losses, pain, blood--don't matter. My mind is on destruction then. And it's fun, which is the worst part.

I believe the formative causes of my rage are two-fold. I was bullied. That gives you a lot of rage you can draw on. I also learned that, first hand, being the "gentle giant" doesn't work. I'm pretty sure that if I had fought back against the bullies (yes, actually punching them in the face), my school years would have been less traumatic, and I'd spent less time thinking about killing myself.

Another factor is genetic. My biological father had rage issues. He was also a drunk, a mean alcoholic, a wife-beater and a marital rapist. Part might be me, absorbing his rage as a toddler, part might be his genetic input. I often say that I have inherited that rage from my father along with the blue eyes and the shape of my nose. I mean, we're talking about a guy who threatened a cancer patient with a rifle.

Reading about anger and emotions, I encountered the concept that anger happens when our values are threatened.I'm finding that concept actually really quite useful; it explains why I can go berserk for a friend who's threatened or has been harmed, and why I still want to punch some bigots and transphobes in the face. It's not my anger, it's my sense of loyalty, friendship and equality--just fighting back. Anger, then, is less of a dark, destructive force that provides a hit like cocaine, it's my value system's self-defense. An immune system reaction to somebody stepping on my innermost beliefs. It explains why I struggle forgiving former friends who wronged me--friendship is one of my absolute core values, along with loyalty. But it's also internal--anger is my response, and I can choose it.

As an example. You guys might know that I've recently attempted to get some garden/landscaper people in to sort out my garden. After discarding a pretty dodgy first provider, the second looked all right, so we started talking about doing fencing work and laying a patio. Then, however, those people say they need to cut the overgrowth before they even start laying the patio. The "overgrowth" in question was 2-3 months' worth of brambles, ivy and bushes. To do the job, those people attempted to charge nearly three thousand dollars (which includes tax). At which point I took a pair of clippers, gloves, and did it myself in a lazy afternoon.

The thing was, that $3k quote really burned me. It came up suddenly, without warning, and put the whole garden revamp into a price category where it might be financially more reasonable to make a down payment for a rental property. The quote was getting that expensive. There were so many reasons why this made me angry, but I think it really affronted several of my values: how I believe a business should be run (fairly), how I believe customers should be treated (with transparency), what I think a provider/customer relationship should be like (you do a good job at a fair price, and you're getting my repeat business and I'll recommend you).

My Inner Bull raged, I was so angry. Did the guy think I was made of money? How can two untrained gardeners, even if they have to work for two days cutting back some brambles and three bushes, ask for more money than I'm taking home in pay in a month, after having graduated and having accumulated nearly a decade of experience? Did this guy think I'm dumb? Did he actually believe I'll hand over a wad of cash for three hours' work? Why would he jeopardize the much larger, much more expensive job over cutting back three bushes?

The anger was building up. I had some choice words for him. It got to the point where I wouldn't have hired them to do anything, even if they had been the owners of the only pair of secateurs left on the planet.

But then I thought about it, analysed it. Dissected my anger and my responses. (I know, this shit is really obvious to better-adjusted people who learnt sooner to understand and harness their anger; hey, I'm a late bloomer.) He called again and lowered the quote by 50%, then told me he'd match any quote I got from a competitor. Too little, too late, but I still didn't shout at him, merely listened to that proposal. I may have sardonically smirked to myself.

Same day, I got a different landscping firm in, they promised me a quote by Friday.

Next day, I called the first guy and told him the deal was off. By then, I'd realised that, while I could make him miserable and angry if I let loose at him, there was really no point. Losing several thousand pounds in profits will do that job quite nicely. So I thanked him for his time, cancelled the whole deal, apologized profusely for the cancellation (I did tell him that I'm not questioning his prices--they were merely "out of budget" for us at that stage), and let him move on with life.

Knowing which of my values were hit, much like musical bones, I'm also aware that I can't change the way he does business. If his values are elastic enough to rip people off, and if he finds fools willing to pay ten times what a job is worth, then more power to him. My choice is to find somebody whose values are closer aligned to my own. There's no need for rage. I'll keep in in the box, along with other survival mechanisms, for far more dire events than a dishonest landscaper.

I can't guarantee he won't make it into a story, though.