I’ve always been fond of the precept “Do unto others as you’d have them do to you.” Being phrased so simply, it sounds pretty easy to achieve. I’d be a liar, though, to claim pious adherence to this bit of sage advice.
Nevertheless, “Do unto others…” has often been helpful when working through personal conflicts or moral dilemmas – for example, in my dealings with anger.
Growing up, a few people close to me were particularly prone to angry outbursts. What triggered the anger wasn’t always obvious and sometimes the content of the aggression didn’t seem to have that much to do with me. But these sorts of observations were never very comforting in the heat of the moment.
Not many of us are able to be blasé in the face of anger, especially if the angry person is someone we see all the time or whose respect we hold dear. Throughout childhood and adolescence, I usually handled the frequent run-ins with anger by making myself small and sheepish – crying, apologising and hoping for the quickest path to resolution. Then, once the emotional tornado calmed down, I’d never mention it again.
It doesn’t take a psychologist to realise this isn’t the healthiest response to anger, but I doubt things would have turned out much better had I instead fought fire with fire – and being attacked certainly incited feelings of annoyance, displeasure and hostility in me (which, according the Oxford Dictionary, are the three core elements of anger).
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Please note that the blog post ends with a short advert for training in anger management at Happy (www.happy.co.uk). I have not done any of the psychological/emotional learning at Happy but I was more than happy about the software training I did with the company some years ago.
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