And then in the night I remembered the poster hanging on the wall in Year 4 at school, in the seventies.
The class decorating committee thought it would be good to flood the wall with wise sayings, and to decorate them with coloured markers and handmade butterflies.
And directly behind me was written, black on white, the following sentence:
"To get angry means to punish yourself for other people's stupidity."
Years passed, hairs turned grey and… well, they were right.
Frequent anger and rage are a fiendishly bad mental position. Anger and rage give birth to children who are criminal and even more problematic — resentment, contempt, poisonous cynicism, alienation and disconnection.
The tantrum-loving public reminds me daily — by negative example — of the mantra I am so fond of: the best way to conduct yourself emotionally in the world is to work with your intellect.
You may ask: "But what use is the intellect when someone in front of me is having a tantrum and revving up to the height of a skyscraper?"
You'll be surprised: there is a use.
Anger, like all human communication, is a source of information.
And the most important information you can obtain about people hides in one dry word: regularity.
People don't behave randomly. There is hidden software driving them. There is an internal hierarchy that makes them react as they react. Even when they lose their temper, they didn't just snap. The carousel started spinning in them a long time ago.
In simple words, anger is frustration in the face of something you wanted to happen and that didn't happen. When that frustration is directed inward, we call it depression. When that frustration is directed outward, we call it a tantrum, a rage, a fit.
When someone loses their temper in front of me, he exposes his operating software in the most direct way. He shouts out his primal desires directly and unprocessed. That can be frightening, but mainly it is interesting.
A lot of women and men recoil strongly when anger is directed at them. That is entirely understandable, but perhaps there is a certain relief in understanding that open anger folds within it two not very sexy emotions — despair and alarm.
You see, when your partner allows himself to get angry at you, he understands that he is too weak and unable to put an adult rein on his childish desires — and this is true of poisonous and nasty insults too, by the way — and in his mind he stands before a wall he doesn't know how to knock down.
And that is frightening, but it is also sad, and above all… interesting.
And let's not forget that everything relevant to others is relevant to you too.
When you boil with anger again and again, there is an alarming message rising to the surface that you refuse to acknowledge — perhaps you don't love him any more, perhaps your daughter is disappointing you and you are afraid to admit it, and perhaps… you didn't think this is what your life would look like at thirty-five, and you don't know how to get out of that abyss.
Listen, the easiest thing is to let anger govern our counter-response. When someone screams at us, our reactions usually go automatically to one of two survival channels — either we scream back ("attack") or we retreat, fall silent in shock and curl up ("flight").
A pity, and ineffective.
The angry person sees the damage of his anger reflected back from the furious or alarmed eyes of the person he is talking to, and he goes on pressing the accelerator, because he "feels" he can't do otherwise, not now.
Try the following alternative response next time the rockets of rage fly in your direction:
"Just a moment. Stop. I don't understand what's going on here, and you're shouting right now, so there's no way I can think clearly. It may be that there's some big problem with me or with you that we're missing, but it matters to me more to understand than to shout at you too.
If that doesn't suit you and you'd rather go on laying into me — be my guest. I won't scream back."
It may work better.
To get angry means to surrender to a simplistic solution. If something significant is bothering the system, it's worth stopping and looking.
I have a great deal of respect for your genuine frustrations. For your hysterical screaming — I have no respect whatsoever.