A Girl and her Anger

In my experience, it’s never a good idea to simply swallow things back and not get mad. When that happens, all you do is compound the anger and end up exploding at some later point over something relatively small. I’ve experienced it a lot with friends. The most frustrating of these situations is when there is a simple misunderstanding. Sometimes I’m even conscious of the fact that they may have misunderstood something I’ve done or said but now they are being cold to me and won’t talk about it. I’ll ask “What’s wrong?” and they invariably answer with the ever frustrating “Nothing.” They think they are making things easy for themselves, or even for me, because they don’t want confrontation. But all they’re doing is creating resentment in our friendship that’s eventually going to bubble to the surface and ruin our relationship.

Personally, I deal with anger in a different way. First of all, I’m not generally someone who is quick to anger. I understand that people have multiple ways of communicating and going about doing things that have nothing to do with me, so it doesn’t usually upset me. However, when I do get angry I give myself enough time to calm down about the situation before I can rationally discuss it. I use that time to look at situations from multiple perspectives so that I can put myself in the other person’s shoes. I think that most of the time, it is simply a misunderstanding because in my experience typically people don’t do things to intentionally insult or hurt someone.

The most important moment in shaping my relationship with anger was an experience with my best friend from high school. Notice the use of “was”. We are no longer friends. We were very good friends throughout all of junior high and high school. Unfortunately, our senior year she had to move back to Texas with her family because of her dad’s job. She was never an overly social person and it took her a very long time to meet people and make friends. For this reason, she began to resent me because when we would talk on the phone I would mention things I was doing or people I was hanging out with while she had nothing going on in her own life. I wouldn’t learn this until much later. She was angry with me for seemingly moving on so easily from our friendship and having so much going on in my life. This wasn’t true. I still very much wanted to stay friends, but I wasn’t going to lock myself away in a room just because she wasn’t there. So naturally it took me completely by surprise when one day she went off on me, spewing so much bile about how much she despised me and wished she’d never met me. What!? “What the hell did I do to you all the way in Texas?” I wondered. Years later she apologized, finally admitting that it was her own insecurities that created this rift. But it was too late to repair our relationship. I would never again be able to trust that she would be totally honest with me about her feelings. I fully believe that if we did try to fix things, she would have continued to quietly harbor resentments toward me because that was her personality. And then she’d just explode much later on to continue the cycle. This experience was a defining moment in my life. It was at that point that I decided that I would never again be able to be close with anyone who bottles up toxic anger instead of expressing it. Gradually I started “cleaning house” to rid myself of these sorts of toxic relationships and it has made a very positive impact on my life.