Looking for People with Anger Problems

[LittleWolf]

I don't smoke pot myself, or anything for that matter, and I don't have any particular problems with it; except for the people I find in the morning after any given weekend when the local pot head college students decide to go all out.

I don't know if it is the pot, or just the fact they go to college that makes them such annoying pests.

Thank you for sharing that with me, Elspode. My partner doesn't drink but he does take medication for his bipolar. He told him it made him feel calm, and I could very well say his anger is mostly due to bad circumstances he's going through.

Do you still face anger problems today? And how long did it take you to kick it into place? If you don't mind me asking, of course :/

[Elspode]

I certainly still *get* angry, but I am much better at expressing it in a more positive way. Over the years of having the meds on board, I was able to identify situations that would have set me off in the past, but didn't make me feel like going off anymore because of the meds. It wasn't that the meds were really suppressing the anger, but more like they allowed me to have some perspective on things that I lacked before.

The biggest problem for me was what is usually termed as "negative self talk", wherein my internal dialogue was always hashing over and over the shit I perceived, the stuff that I felt justified an angry response on my part. With the meds, there seemed to be less need to conduct such negatively reinforcing internal dialogues, and as time went by, I noted that my anger outbursts were greatly lessened, and when they did happen, I was able to express myself in a more rational manner, rather than simply puking outrage.

There is some work involved, there's no doubt, but as you put some space between the You that has the anger issues and the You that is much better about that, it is easy to identify the things that would have been better addressed in a different way, and the progress becomes much quicker and easier.

This is all pretty hard to explain, actually. You say that your guy's current circumstances might be what are causing his anger, but really, there's always going to be situations of some sort or other, so the issue really ends up being how he deals with them. Being angry about something is often a reasonable reaction to certain situations, however, constructively expressing that anger and dealing constructively with the situation that causes it are the only ways to any realistic solution, both for the anger issue and the issue that caused it.