While none of the people who know me would ever guess anything like that, I have been a substantially angry person for many years of my life. Not angry like shouting loud and punching stuff (I very rarely shout), more like a loaded spring: I just needed a little flick to unleash the potential energy I had inside.
A delayed bus. Traffic. No parking space. Even a glass full of water falling on the table. Any of these could set it off, and when it happened, I exploded.
If that sounds horrible, it’s because it was. It was constant, relentless, and most of all tiring. Living life like a continuous war drains your energy in a way that is difficult to understand for those who never lived it.
If you did live it, or if you are living it, then this is for you. And for me, to not live it anymore.
Table of Contents
Why am I like this?
Oh, to know the answer of such a question. Despite all my efforts, I still haven’t found out how I did become such an angry and reactive human being. I’ve spent years trying to trace the origins of the issue, including in therapy, and I’ve never arrived at a clean answer. I only have a best guess about the mix of factors causing this, which is probably as good as any other explanation.
First of all, I grew up in a very angry environment in a very angry town. I was honestly surrounded by rage, and since you inevitably absorb what surrounds you (especially when you’re young), if you’re surrounded with rage you become rageful.
Beyond that, there were years of loneliness that I experienced as a fundamental injustice — I didn’t deserve this, and nobody cared. This produced a resentment that had nowhere to go. Low self-esteem added its weight. Being treated as less capable than I was, well into adulthood, added more. Let’s be real, what else could have happened?
Of course, none of these are excuses, I’m not looking for those. They’re origins, that’s what I’m looking for. If I understand the origins of a problem, I can probably start working on it. And working on a problem is the only way to solve it.
What is this, exactly?
One of the very few things I understood about my anger issues is that they were rarely about the thing that triggered it. Yes, a late bus is inconvenient, and of course being stuck in traffic is awful, but do these warrant such an explosive reaction? I doubt it, there must be something more.
I think the real target was usually the feeling of things not going as they should, the world not conforming to reasonable expectations (my expectations, of course), being let down by circumstances or people again. A constant stream of things going the worst way possible. Every now and then everybody will get mad for this kind of things, but I suspect most of the times people are capable of keeping their reactions for themselves. I was not.
Thankfully, my reactions were never violent. I never hurt anyone physically, but I frightened people who were close to me, more than once, and I’m not proud of that. I can’t go back and undo those moments. I can only work to make sure they don’t keep happening.
How did I recognize this as a problem?
As incredible as it may sound, I didn’t think much of my rage episodes at the start. I can’t even identify the start, to be honest, but I remember that, at a certain point in time, the issue became impossible to ignore.
Two specific moments stand out.
The first: during the COVID pandemic, I was living temporarily with my family after years of living alone. While I don’t remember exactly how or why, a bad argument erupted. Like, really, really bad. I felt a sense of not being treated as the adult I was, that I was constantly being explained even the most basic things and bossed around like my thoughts and desires didn’t matter, and I found it humiliating. At the peak of it I broke down crying (bear in mind this had been going on for years at this point). The people closest to me know I have only cried a handful of times as an adult (at most six or seven). That finally broke the stand-off. All it took was my tears to make the other person understand that I was as human as her and I had something real to say.
The second: driving back home after a solo hike on a mountain with zero phone coverage. My family and my girlfriend at the time had received none of the check-in messages I’d sent (they had been queued and delivered only when I got signal again, on the drive back). Nothing I could do about that. They called, angry, attacking me and accusing me of never having sent them. I attacked back, said things I regret, and when it was over I felt our relationship was broken. While I understand their concern, I wish they had waited for me to be late on the time I had given them to start worrying (I was perfectly on schedule). Also, nobody ever made an effort to understand my feelings, which has made me even more mad.
These episodes happened at a short distance, and they made me understand that I considered myself as much more of an adult than they would ever consider me. It was time for me to act accordingly. Since then, I started not giving much importance other people’s opinion, and it helped a lot with managing my anger.
What did I do?
I had finally recognized it as an issue. I had been angry for so long that it felt like personality rather than problem. Seeing it as such made it possible to approach it accordingly.
The second shift was structural: I moved back to living alone. I realized that an adult who lived alone and created his own dimension should not go back to living with his family. If possible, he shouldn’t even have flatmates, since that would create a shared space instead of an own space (ideally, of course, because I know that doesn’t come cheap). Either way, that removed the daily friction coming from two different, incompatible ways of life clashing. In the end, the therapist I started seeing after the move told me, with some surprise, that I didn’t seem like an angry person to her. That was such a huge accomplishment for me, I really can’t explain how happy that made me.
Did the anger disappear completely? No, not at all. A dropped plate can still produce a disproportionate reaction, one more red light than I can tolerate can still make me fuming. What has really changed is that I’m not angry as my default mood anymore. It finally allowed me to breathe.
What can you do to alleviate the problem?
First of all, something you should not do. The most common error (which I also made myself) is trying to eliminate everything that causes anger rather than examining why certain things produce that response.
Some triggers can’t be removed. Traffic will always exist. Delays will always happen. People will sometimes be unfair. If your anger depends on the world cooperating, you’ll be angry indefinitely.
The work is not on the trigger. It’s on the response, on understanding why certain stimuli produce disproportionate reactions.
That reframing is difficult to arrive at alone. A good therapist can help. But you have to start by recognizing that the anger itself is the thing to examine, not just the list of things that cause it.
In my case, I absolutely had to reduce my baseline of anger. Once I did it, everything kind of went back into place (kind of, not really).
My message for you
I almost never say this, but the first step to solve this particular issue really is admitting that it is a problem. Recognition comes first, and it’s harder than it sounds. You might think that anger is your identity, but the reality is different. You’re not an angry person (I don’t even think angry people can actually exist), you’re just a person who developed anger as a response to specific conditions, and those conditions are way too common.
Once you’ve recognized it, the goal is not to stop feeling anger. Anger is sometimes appropriate, sometimes useful, sometimes the only response available. The goal is to understand what the anger is actually about, and to respond to that rather than to the surface trigger.
Please remember it, rather than thinking Thanos was right the next time you’re stuck in traffic.