anger management
19 May 2008 by devastatingyet
A couple of weeks ago, Dylan made a recommendation in a comment about how Jos and I might handle his anger, which tends to make me fall apart. You can read the whole thing, but basically he recommended that Jos kneel and give me time to recover when he is angry, and some other things around that.
So, well, the synopsis on Jos’s anger goes like this: it’s more frequent than with anyone I’ve dated before. He expresses it fairly (not with comments designed to hurt me, for instance, and not passive aggressively), and lets go of it pretty easily. It’s not that scary except that I can’t really handle someone being mad at me. It almost always makes me cry.
I’ve given some thought to Dylan’s suggestion, and I don’t think it would work for me. It might work OK for Jos, but the situation where he is angry and kneeling feels like withdrawal to me. It feels to me like he hates me so much he won’t even speak to me. As much as I don’t really like angry words, angry silence feels much worse.
What’s funny is, if we can leave out the small matter of me falling apart, etc., I handle his anger quite well. We both do. He tells me what he’s upset about, and if I think he’s wrong or has misunderstood something, then I gently push back, as many times as it takes. If I’m wrong, it usually takes me a few minutes to apologize (during which time I’m quiet), but I do apologize. And we talk about how to prevent the situation in the future in either case.
It’s all quite sane if you ignore the part where I cry and have to be extensively held and comforted.
I’ve decided we might try something you can do with kids. If you have a kid who, say, throws a tantrum every time you try to leave the park, one thing you can do is practice having them not throw a tantrum. You do this sometime when you’re not actually leaving the park. You just roleplay it. And if your kid manages not to have a tantrum in the roleplay, you give them some positive feedback. It lets them practice a different response in a much easier environment.
So maybe it would be helpful if Jos and I did a little bit of roleplay where he pretends to be mad at me and I practice not freaking the fuck out. I don’t know if it will help, but if it can help kids, why not me? And why should the submissives get all the training?
One other thing that I’ve found useful regarding people being mad at me is to alter the way they present it such that it doesn’t feel like the same *kind* of anger to me- I need anger to be presented in a pretty neutral way in order to be able to deal with it well. If it’s presented in a frustrated tone of voice, yelling, or worse, with physical presentations like hand-waving or furniture-thumping, my processing centers just shut down and I want to go hide. I don’t know how Jos presents his anger, but having him try to present his feelings in a neutral way might help if he doesn’t already.
Other than that, just good luck. Dealing with anger is hard when it doesn’t come naturally.
I hear ya girl. I can’t deal with people being upset with me, and I start crying too. I had a male friend who was mad at me about something, and I wound up crying so hard he had to stop being mad and calm me down. And when my bosses would get mad at me, I’d have to work real hard to calm down. (Though, at the last funeral home I worked at, he got off on making me cry. I really do think he was into kink. Had to be. Fuckwad)
But I found its something I need to learn to deal with, and learn to control. However, its pretty damn hard.