authority & anger

I do not have a clean relationship to anger. 

I have two relationships to anger.  First, I become irrationally irritable extremely easily, especially with intimate partners.  This irritability is rarely justified, and, even when so, is often expressed inappropriately. 

And second, it’s very difficult for me to handle legitimate anger.  It tends to terrify me when I have cause to be actually angry, and I go to extremes in justifying people’s behavior in order to avoid it.  (I really can and do get angry.  But when it comes time to express it, I have a hard time.  I fear being unfair.  I’d rather be wronged than be in the wrong.  And having someone angry with me is so hard for me that I find it difficult to inflict that on someone else.)

Near the end of my relationship with my last serious boyfriend, I was angry with him all the time except when he was with me.  I would have a pleasant phone conversation with him, then put down the phone and say, out loud, “FUCK YOU.”  Yeah, I don’t know what that was about either.

I have always snapped at my boyfriends, and they have always more or less taken it.  My last one would tell me to cut it out, and that worked.  Others have ignored it, letting it slide off them, like my roommate (with whom I am very close).  My experience has always been that the longer I know someone, and the more intimate with them I am, the more irritable I become with them.  (I have gotten way, way better at managing this over the years.)

When I snap at Joscelin it freaks him out, a lot.

If I have a legitimate grievance, he wants to respond submissively and be corrected.  But when I snap, I don’t usually see myself as having a legitimate grievance, so when he becomes deadly serious and asks me to explain the situation, all I can say is something like, “Never mind.  It’s not important.”  (And then, when pressed, “No, seriously.  You didn’t do anything wrong.  I’m just being irritable.”)

So then he suspects me of knowing a way that he could serve me better and simply being unwilling to tell it to him, which is maddeningly frustrating.  Is it a lack of trust?  Do I not think he can change?  Is he not worth training?  (I don’t claim he’d think this rationally, but this has to be how it feels.)  Am I so uncertain of myself that I cannot exert my will in this way at all?

Neither my sense of fairness nor my sense of what will actually work permits me to say something ridiculous like, “The way you held that bag was not the way I would have held it and whenever you hold a bag you must magically imitate the way it looks in my mind or you’ll be in trouble with me.”  (I am a control freak too, but mostly not in the fun way.)  So after my initial outburst (likely to sound like something “Can’t you…urrrrr!”) I’m just not willing to do much other than tell him that I was being unreasonable.

We’re both working on this.  In the long term, I’m working on identifying things that he really can do that I’ll find pleasing (or refrain from doing, etc.), a power I haven’t had in prior relationships.  Ideally, I would correct him where it was something that could be corrected, and behave fairly and pleasantly in other contexts.  But I doubt I’ll achieve that ideal, despite my continued attention.  (I’ve been working on this for at least 14 years, after all.)

One of the constant obstacles to being submissive to anyone must be that they are sometimes wrong (factually or morally).  This is no more or less true for me than for anyone else.  I hope that Joscelin and I can improve the way we both cope with these difficult situations.