Hey. I was told having issues controlling anger or emotions in general can be related to ADHD. I know I get WAY angrier than anyone should ever be sometimes.
Especially when injustice and ignorance come my way. I get furious beyond anything I’ve ever seen or heard of anyone else talk about. Maybe aside from depictions of killers or berserkers in fiction. It’s not cool.
Only a few times have I gotten in trouble for it luckily and I never actually done anything more than shout the most disgusting insults at someone.
Now I do feel bad afterwards if I got angry at someone I like. But often enough I feel they fucking deserved it. If someone is an ignorant asshole willingly ruining someone’s day, week or life they deserve some ruin thrown back at them. I know this might not be a good and healthy thing to think. But if someone provokes someone don’t they ask to be yelled at?
I know they do this to ‘win the argument’ because of that imo idiotic notion that who yells first is wrong. But honestly I rarely care to be right enough for shit to matter.
I’ve read a few books on anger management and some techniques help a bit. But the amount of anger described in the book seems so very mild to me in comparison to what I experience and how fast it builds up. One book told me to count to three. I am ready to launch nukes before I reach 1. That won’t work.
And I don’t get angry at something. I have pure rage and fury, hatred and contempt for existence itself at those moments. Angry really doesn’t cut it. It’s scorched earth, blown it all up and piss on the ruins kind of anger.
So anyone else experience this? Any tips to deal with this shit?
I’m pretty sure I’m also ADHD and I certainly also hate injustice and inaccuracy. (Jordan Peterson talking about IQ will basically send me into a rage.)
More to the point: anger, criticism, shame, fear – those emotions will have my chest tightening and my pulse racing.
Anyways, a piece of advice that I found once that was weirdly helpful (no idea where I found it) was a cardboard cutout metaphor. But I’ll be using a snake metaphor instead.
Get this, we have more than one brain.
We have a brain we share with lizards (that’s got our territoriality, our fear, and our anger). We have a whole layer of brain around the lizard one that we share with mammals (cuddling, protectiveness, affection, etc). And then we have the thinking, rational part of the brain. I think it’s called the cerebral cortex.
And part of what that last brain does is take in stimulae and interpret it. Only after this part of your brain interprets stimulae does the rest of your brain feel an emotional response.
The Snake Metaphor
The example given in the article was with cardboard cutouts of gang members. But I choose this:
Because your emotions are a slave to interpretation.
There’s a moment when you recognize, “oh, this person is willingly hurting someone.” You feel the rage only after that recognition.
I’m guessing, given your description of your quick rages, you will most likely NOT have time to apply this in the moment. So you’ll need to do it all in hindsight: reflect on individual incidents after they occur. Every time you calm down, try to reinterpret the situation and then add it to a databank of reinterpretations. Eventually, you’ll start to encounter scenarios you’ve already seen and added to your databank.
Reinterpret “this person is willingly hurting someone” until it becomes “this person is a wounded dog, biting everything who approaches without knowing or caring who it hurts or who is trying to help. It’s not cruelty; it’s pain.”
Reinterpret this:
until it becomes:
And suddenly anger becomes pity.
And once you start looking for it, you’ll realize a rather profound truth,
Evil Never Emerges From a Vacuum.
I had an older brother who called me an, “outcast among outcasts” and that hurt me deeply until years later, when I found an old essay he wrote where he described his greatest insecurity. It was, word for word, “I felt like an outcast among outcasts.” The exact “insult” he had used on me.
Like a wounded animal lashing out.
I have a mother who’s deeply immersed in the intellectual dark web. (Hence me hearing Jordan Peterson enough to drive me crazy.) And I thought that was pretty cruel of her until I realized:
… was a damn good description of her entire childhood! All of the adults. All of the people responsible for her. And she cannot look past that, because she formed her worldview in the years during which no figure in her life set aside their own self-interest to be kind to her.
And she needs people like Peterson who will tell her that an unchecked flood of human greed and selfishness is exactly what capitalism was built to endure and to harness.
In reality, most people are better than that, and she should have been treated better. And a bunch of teenagers stranded on an island for fifteen months treated each other better than anyone in her life ever treated her. And she can’t see that.
Like a wounded dog blinded by pain and rage.
Just the other day, my chest was actually constricting due to some random anonymous commenter getting mad at me. (Yes, that happens to us ADHD folks). And the ONLY thing that helped was when I realized, “the commenter also accused me of being a Fed at the end of his comment. Clearly he wasn’t angry at me. He was angry at an FBI agent he believed to be monitoring him and trying to mind-control him on behalf of the globalists or something.”
Yet another wounded animal lunging at every shadow he sees.
I don’t believe it’s possible to dampen an emotion. I certainly don’t think it’s possible for a neurodivergent to bring an emotion to neurotypical levels. After all, as an ADHDer, your hyperfocus will always amplify the shiniest thing in the room, and rage and shame and fear are always the shiniest thing in the room.
But you can cut them off at the source. You can choose to interpret the situation as one that does not call for an ounce of rage in the first place.
Firstly, we must recognize that our empathy and compassion are a privilege – we were loved at a crucial, formative time in our development. We were cuddled at a very specific age that allowed our brains to develop empathy. We were loved at enough pivotal moments that we believe kindness can be expected from people.
Which – at least for me – is impressive, because it was a traumatic upbringing that could have been a hell of a lot better. It’s impressive that such a childhood created someone “good.” But as twisted as our parents and relatives and role models may have treated us (I don’t know your story, but there sure is a lot of trauma in mine) we both still got enough affection to understand human connection, which is a form of happiness that exceeds all of the other forms of happiness combined. Ludicrous wealth? Being top dog? Preying on the weak? None of them come close.
Not everyone got what we got.
Have you heard the phrase, “hurt people hurt people” ?
Edit that. Change it to, “ONLY hurt people hurt people.” Turn it into a mantra: every time you’re upset, look for the hurt that causes the cruelty. I promise you, you will always find it. And when you do, your anger will abate, because you will recognize: it’s not cruelty. It’s pain.
Thank you for your well thought out comment!
What’s funny about Jordan Peterson is that while I rarely agree with him, he does not make me angry because I believe he argues in good faith. Imo he actually does believe what he says and I wouldn’t blame anyone for that. I came to that conclusion by watching quite a bit of his material and even reading his twelve rules book. So I believe my opinion is well-founded. But it definitely confirms your snake example in a way.
In general I don’t think I am quick to judge at all. That’s probably why after I get angry I will often regret the extent of my rage but rarely feel it was fully unjustified.
When it comes to looking for where it hurts, yeah, sure. Lies and people being deliberately unfair and reckless, selfish has hurt me in the past. And when it happens again I get angry as a defensive mechanism. I am fully aware. And other people do their shit because of what they have experienced. So far it has not helped me control it better to know that.
I know this might be a bit intrusive, but would you mind telling me a story (with some fake names) of a recent time that you got mad?
Something that sticks out to you.
And would you mind if I asked a number of follow-up questions about the story and the people you describe?
I’m going to take your non-answer for a “no.”
Which is acceptable. I didn’t mean to pressure you.
But I’m also going to try again to explain myself. Because I feel like I did a poor job.
I think I mislabeled my solution when I said, “look for the hurt.” Because upon reflection, it wasn’t finding the “hurt” that helped me.
It was finding the target. It helped when I convinced myself that the real target of the cruelty was not the person who ended up receiving it.
My brother in the above example? I was able to let go of his barbs when I realized his barbs were aimed at himself. He didn’t even really reflect on his own statements enough to know whether “outcast among outcasts” applied to me. He was insulting himself, and wound up missing himself and hitting me.
My mother in the above example – who currently embraces a bunch of people telling her, “some people are beyond saving,” – doesn’t actually understand that the resulting philosophy defends and maintains a system of oppression over minorities and poor people, (and over several categories to which she herself belongs.) And she wouldn’t be happy if she realized that. Because the real, true target of her desire to give up on people is the people who gave up on her. She’s just missing them and hitting the wrong people.
That commenter that somehow got my blood boiling? His target was an FBI or NSA agent, or any number of his “normie” friends who started to distance themselves from him after he entered the alt-right. He’s lonely. He’s isolated. And he’s lashing out against everyone trying to control and punish him by inflicting this loneliness upon him. And he ended up missing them and hitting me.
In all cases, these people were throwing darts after being spun around a few times, blindfolded. In all cases, they had a target that it might have been okay – or at least understandable – for them to hit. And realizing that they were missing their true target is what gives me peace.