I used to be a very angry young man. You probably wouldn't be able to tell it if you didn't live with me, you'd think I was a calm and understanding young man. But that was far from the case.
You see, any time something bad or unfair happened to me, instead of handling it responsibly and sometimes with justified anger I would push those feelings way down into oblivion, far away from the reach of anyone else. I spent most of my life doing this.
It was an interesting dilemma to say the least.
I say that because the most angriest people walking this earth aren't really very angry on the surface. They are the guys that will be nice to your face, and you'll really like them, but as soon as you say no then they'll call you a bitch and tell you that you were leading them on, or they will be the women that try and destroy your entire social world so that you end up being a social leper because you said something they didn't like.
Hell hath no fury like someone that is supressing their emotions, and especially their anger. You might think that the quiet boy across the street that gets picked on handled it well but one day he's going to erupt like Yellowstone.
There's a reason why, "going Postal" is a saying. It coined this saying because the postal service was (and I expect still is) a highly stressful and demanding job, and the workers have to take a lot of abuse from the customers -- so eventually they crack and end up with a rifle shooting random passers by. Hence the term, "going Postal."
Harbouring your feelings like your anger, or, just any feeling is going to get you into a lot of sticky situations several years down the line. Those feelings have to go somewhere and they don't just disappear.
When I married my wife she would say that I'd wake up in the middle of the night and punch a light, or I'd shoot upright and scream at the top of my lungs during my sleep and then go right back to sleep again. For me all the ugliness tended to come out in my sleep. It was kind of nasty.
But everyone is different, and people have ways and means of venting that anger. Like the time I threw one of my oven dishes through the window because I was just so fed up of getting nowhere in life. It all comes out eventually, and in ways some people don't expect.
It can come out in addictions too. In times of stress, confusion and anger some people can find themselves more embroiled in one of their unhealthy habits -- like drinking themselves stupid more, or hitting the gambling shops more.
The trick to defeating this is allowing yourself to get angry when you need it. My family now call me the angry one, and when I get upset I tend to just let it all out. But luckily thanks to my family, who can be understanding, tend to give me back as good as I get.
Now of course this doesn't mean we sit here and have epic shouting matches all day, no, it just means that we allow each other to be angry and hear each other out. I even let my kid storm off screaming to his room as long as he isn't breaking anything or harming anyone.
Again, that's my way. Some people go for a 5 mile jog, or smash 100 punches into a punchbag at their local gym, it all works getting that anger out -- the difference is channelling that anger out in healthy ways rather than unhealthy ways.
Everyone gets angry of course, and in a perfect world we'd all have places we could go when we feel angry, but life isn't ideal and lots of other people live in this world too and that anger tends to rear its ugly head sometimes. But, justified anger is often good, and stops people from taking advantage of you. Especially if you put your foot down.
That's what I had to learn. I knew how to apologise for outbursts, I didn't know how to feel justified at being angry.
And that's the lessons we had to learn.
Maybe I'll go in depth about why I was this way, but that's another post for another day.