Anger Again!

by Kaleb Montgomery, Doctor of Traditional Chinese Medicine

You would think that I would get tired of writing about anger. However the more I examine anger the more I see.

Lately I’ve noticed another situation I use anger in; to avoid feeling hurt. After reflection I realized that many times I have felt hurt and instead of telling the other person I lashed out in anger at them. Heck many of those times I did not even realize I felt hurt until after the fires cooled and the ash settled. I can not tell you how many times I’ve wasted energy arguing and fighting when really I felt hurt initially and not angry.

Why would I do that? I’ll bet that I could have avoided many pointless argument and uncomfortable nights on the couch if only I had acted how I felt, hurt instead of angry.
On even further reflection I saw that the reason I didn’t act hurt was that I was scared to let the other person know that I was hurt. I didn’t want them to know that they had gotten to me. I was afraid to let them see that they had found away through my carefully constructed armour. As I mentioned earlier this fear of acting vulnerable and showing others my soft spots caused many a useless argument.

Scratching a little deeper even still I saw that I did not want people to know that I was not perfect. It does not to take a rocket scientist to see that that statement is ridiculous. I am certainly not perfect. However I keep striving to be perfect because somewhere deep down I felt that if I wasn’t perfect people wouldn’t like me as much. If I never showed anyone my faults and weaknesses than no one would ever dislike me. The more people I got to like me the better I felt about my self. I sometimes feel that people will not like me if I show them who I really am, warts and all. I don’t like those soft dark spots in myself so why would anyone else like them either. Most of us spend a lot of time trying to pretend we are something that we are not just to get other people to like us better. We spend an awful lot of energy and time trying to keep up with the Jones’s. Next time we will examine some of the costs and consequences of maintaining our personality facades.