Comment on How to deal with agression?
captainlezbian@lemmy.world 1 day agoLearn to recognize it and step away. Taking a walk really does help. Decisions made in anger cannot be undone. Most mature people will hear “hey I’m feeling pretty emotional about this topic, I’m going to go clear my head and think on it for a half hour or so” and understand and let you go with little to no judgment. As you get into that habit you’re likely to find yourself less and less aggressive. You instinctively do what you practice doing, right now that may be lashing out, but hard work can change that.
Having parents who were really bad at emotional regulation resulted in me not really being taught it well. But I found myself embarrassing myself and hurting those around me. I got big on walking my feelings out, and started using the CBT techniques I learned for anxiety, and they worked. Eventually it really became second nature. Big feelings are now followed by introspection. In the rare cases I snap at someone it’s immediately followed by an apology, stepping away, and introspection with an appropriate for the situation explanation.
sem@piefed.blahaj.zone 1 day ago
Thanks. I can relate to that. I’ve been thinking about the “I am feeling heated about this, I suggest we both take a break” idea and this kind of confirms it.
I am not sure really what to do during that break, but there are a lot of ideas that everyone has shared. What that introspection can look like. I have to reflect a bit on it.
captainlezbian@lemmy.world 1 day ago
Yeah I’ll begin by saying anger issues are one of the areas CBT and DBT shine. This is because anger is a very misunderstood emotion. Its job is to protect you, and in a person with good emotional regulation, a healthy understanding of danger, and a healthy perception of the self it’s a very useful emotion. It’s just that we’re often wired to jump at shadows and those three caveats play an important role.
So what do you actually do about it though? You start by figuring out how you process emotions. Some people like my wife are internal processors. They need alone time just thinking about their feelings to understand them. Some like me are external processors who need to talk about it to understand it.
For anger I’ve moved to basically having an internal dialog with an imaginary therapist who just asks me questions like “and how did you feel” or “and why do you feel that way”. They’re all questions cbt told me to ask myself. The goal is to first determine if my anger is an appropriate response. If it is, then I start trying to determine what the best way to act on it is. But far more likely, I’m moving towards asking what threat I percieved, and what cognitive distortions lead to that. Maybe I’m defending my ego, and in reality the ego is actually what’s hurting me. Maybe I’m seeing people who hurt me before in the actions of people who deserve grace, and failing to understand that everybody fucks up sometimes.
Whatever the distortion is you acknowledge it, but refute it. “I feel unfairly attacked, but I know that that person’s point was legitimate criticism that they felt I needed to hear.” Or “I feel like my partner is nitpicking and never gives me a break, but I know that words like always and never are cognitive distortions, what I need is to calm down and figure out if this criticism is valid or if it’s fair for me to request more grace and to attempt to change behavior where it is valid.”
But yeah, take a walk, the movement is good for getting the emotions out and thinking. And look for where your brain is lying to you. CBT and DBT are best administered by professionals, and if it feels like it’s just talk therapy it probably is. This is the sort of therapy a lot of therapists assign workbooks for. If therapy isn’t an option there are books on the topic and you can just buy the workbooks. But self administered therapy is a lot like any other form of self administered medical care, sure you may save a lot of money and get great results, but you’re also at risk of fucking up and now needing to hire a professional to fix your mistakes.