On Provoking Anger

Now, my most primary Principle in regards to Anger Management is that there is never any justification for Anger (and for those whom I have still been unable to convince that Anger is NOT an emotion, you may say “there is never any justification for Angry Behavior).

But there are people who seem to deliberately or naturally or instinctively provoke the ire of other people. They are the Button Pushers… the Trigger Pullers.

Now, don’t we all here just hate those people? Well, yes, of course, that is why we get so angry with them. But what if some of us are wearing Two Hats? What if when we are not so busy being angry ourselves, we are seemingly doing our best to make other people angry. Now, that wouldn’t be nice, would it?

What made me think of this was a dream I had just last night. I was an adolescent again, back in my Mother’s Home (or I hope I was an adolescent, since I certainly was acting that way!). I had left some kind of a mess on the top of her nice little upright piano, and she pointed it out to me and asked about it. Well, I pretended not to see anything out of sorts… a kind of “So what?” or “I don’t see such a big deal” response. When she insisted that I recognize a problem, then I began to make excuses for why I did not clean up after myself – such as “the Thing I was working on at the time was very much more important than tidying up”. That is not what Mother wanted to hear.

Now, why was I being so stubborn? When once the little mess was pointed out, I could have probably pleased her well enough by saying something in the order of “Oh dear me! I must have gotten so busy fixing the Thing, and then making sure the Thing was working properly, that I forgot to circle back here and clean up the top of your piano. I am SO Sorry! Here, I will clean it up right now, and then I will dust and polish too.” Luckily, even in the dream, I had laid down a cloth on the piano so I would not scratch it up. There are some things one does not even dare to dream of, and one of them is carelessness with the finishes of fine musical instruments.

But I had been stubborn, and for no good reason at all. Now, any normal person might have gotten angry, but my mother, not given to being angry, simply made what she thought was a fitting decision: that I should move out forthwith. Well, that boggled my mind. I did not see that coming at all. Then I woke up.

Wow, I thought, what an awful little devil I had been. And I really don’t behave that way, so I wondered why I had such a dream. Well, it suddenly occurred to me, so that I could analyze it and mention it here on the Site. But, first things were first, and so while I was still sleepy and it was the middle of the night, I went over in my drowsy mind why all of the things I had done were wrong, and all of the things that I should have done that would have been right, and I resolved on what I would say to my Dream Mother when I saw her next time in Dreamland. Well, it turns out that I met up with my Mother in the next set of dreams, and she seemed already aware of my apologetic stance, and as I apologized she simply said “Yes dear, yes dear” as she nodded her head in approval. Then that dream went on in its own direction, but with the rift between Mother and myself mended.

Anyway, my point here is that while we are doing our best not to allow ourselves to be angry… show angry behavior… we should also do our best not to offend others. And to do this we must first listen to them when they speak. Then we must acknowledge their concerns. And when their concerns involve ourselves and our responsibilities toward them, then we should respond positively, and where we had been at fault, in their eyes, we need to apologize. All of this of course is subsumed under the larger heading of Being Polite and Civilized. We could all avert so many troubles and annoyances if only we could all be Polite and Civilized. Yes, there is never any excuse for Anger, but it would be a wonderful day if everybody would simply be non-provoking (as I hear I hear they are in Canada and Japan).