World Of My Own

Go and exercise. Get all of that energy out and away from the people you love.

Get a hang of when you're winding up to a rage and learn to tell people that you need to step away. I will warn you that the first time that someone refuses to let you go once you learn this skill will spook the hell out of you if you don't have a backup skill, so figure out ahead of time what you're gonna do if they won't let you leave.

Learn to set boundaries. One of the best things I ever did for my anger issues was tell people that I can't deal with people stealing food off my plate. Second best was when I'm mad, telling people not to touch me. I spook easily when I'm already angry.

Get a pack of pencils and if nothing is working, break one. Sometimes you really do need to break something in order to feel better, and pencils are cheap.

Don't cook with a knife when you're mad. If you get too much adrenaline, the knife can slip and hurt you.

If you have anger issues that pop up without any seeming reason and frighten you, I would strongly recommend going over the situation and over your mental health. If there's anything consistent with a mental health condition or with something particular happening to trigger it, seek to eliminate the trigger or treat the issue. Depression, anxiety, trauma, you name it, it can probably present as anger issues under the right circumstances.

Some quick notes for people without anger issues that want to help someone who has anger issues:

Fear transmutes into anger really, really well if someone's fear response is "fight". One of my guesses for why so many men have anger issues is that we're told we're not men if we have any other response to fear. However, this issue is far from exclusive to men.

Don't box people in when you're arguing with them or soothing them. If someone is backed up against a wall and upset, then getting closer to them without permission is a bad call for your safety and for their soothing, because that removes the ability to get away from you. Ask before getting close. This goes double if someone is injured or otherwise vulnerable.

Teaching angry people that are distressed about being angry the pencil trick on the spot is really easy and works more often than you can think.

Respect people's requests and boundaries. A lot of people think that some of the boundaries I set up are silly or that once we're pals, they can ignore them. No, because a lot of my boundaries are related to trauma, and crossing them will trigger me and bring up my anger.

All of this goes for children with anger issues as well. I was a child with anger issues, and a lot of disrespect for my boundaries and needs was because my anger was dismissed because I was a child. Respect children's anger.

Walking on eggshells is not and will never be a good way to treat anger issues. Recognizing that people with anger issues deserve to have their boundaries respected and to be treated like human beings is.

An end note: Anger issues are not the same thing as being abusive, because emotions are not abusive. Someone with anger issues can become abusive if they take them out on people, but so can someone with suicidal thoughts who takes them out on people. The issue is targeting another person in order to feel better, not having a mental health issue.

It is probably also worth speaking specifically about rage attacks. Rage attacks are a lot like panic attacks. They’re often a result of trauma or a build up of high stress. They’re your survival instinct going into overdrive for a bit because too much has build up and a release is necessary. Like panic attacks, rage attacks are waves of overwhelming emotions that generally have a build-up, a peak and a cool-down. The build-up and cool-down can take hours, the peak rarely exceeds one hour and is often much shorter. Recognizing these stages can help cope with them.

The build-up can feel like a tension in the whole body, especially in the chest which can feel like a weight is pressing on it. Trying to control the rage can feel like holding the lid on a pot of boiling water. From the outside, people in the build up of a rage attack seem irritated and non communicative with a short fuse. They might suddenly speak loudly or slam doors as the lid fails and bits of the pot boil over. This is often seen as being rude, when in fact it’s the person doing their best to stay in control. During the build-up fase, it’s sometimes possible to let the pressure off through acts of controlled destruction (pencil breaking, tearing up cardboard boxes, etc.). For some people deep breaths work, for some people exercise works, for some people writing down a violent fantasy and then tearing that up works. This will differ from person to person.

When not averted, the peak of the rage attack is an overwhelming phase during which the lid flies off and the rage can not be controlled, though it may to some extend still be directed at a point where it can do no or limited harm, such as punching a wall (or preferably, hitting the wall with some sort of stick so you do not damage your hands). People in this stage may ‘see red’ or see spots and may be nonverbal. There isn’t much you can do to support someone during a rage attack except keeping people away from them and trying not to redirect their focus towards a person. As long as the only things being hurt is inanimate objects (and maybe some bloody knuckles): do not intervene. Absolutely do not try to physically stop the rage attack.

NEVER call ‘emergency services’ when a person is experiencing a rage attack. A person in a rage attack can not control their actions, follow instructions, etc. Your phone call can very easily result in their murder-by-cop. Don’t do it.

After the peak comes to cooldown. Most of the rage has passed but the body is still full of adrenaline. Often at this point he person experiences shame and fear that the people who witnessed the rage attack will reject them. It’s quite common to self-isolate in this stage. If you’re supporting someone during this stage: give them that time to themselves. Once they return, you can check in with them in a nonjudgemental way, making it clear that you are still their friend and are not judging them for experiencing a rage attack. After a bit of cooldown, some people enjoy exercise, dancing or swimming to reduce the left over adrenaline in the body. Others might be too exhausted for such a thing.

People seem to be increasingly oblivious to the difference between thinking about or liking something, fixating or focusing on it, and /hyper/fixation as a disxriptor of the extreme of this that occurs in neurodivergent people.

If someone reads "I think about things sometimes" and sees "hyperfixation", then I can totally see it following that "I think about people sometimes" becomes synonymous with "I am an obsessive creepy stalker with no boundaries"

Which. Sure is something.

In progressive circles, I can only talk about how harmful the way we view and talk about men is through the lens of how it affects trans people. It's like we're so focused on oppression that that's the only language some of us can speak in arguments.

If I say "calling men gross and predatory and saying you hate them and cutting them out of your circles harms trans women who get thrown away with those gross stinky men you hate," I get some nods of approval.

But if I say "hey treating men this way is just actively harmful to men and maybe that's a bad outcome too because they're people" I get "men can't be oppressed, idiot." Which is just a total non sequitur; I get that men are not oppressed in a broad social sense, but you can still be shitty to them and it's still shitty. And it still hurts them.

And you know how I know that? Because of that first part. Because I know exactly what it's like to be treated like a predator the way men are, and some of you only fucking care about that because I'm not a man.

Usually I keep out of these discussions because I know it's mostly online shit, but... it happens in real life, too, all the time. I live it. I see how you look at me until you catch that I'm queer. And I see how you look at the men I love, who will never see your gaze soften.

I just want to be able to ask people to love and care for men without having to (correctly) label their gender essentialism as oppressive to sexual and gender minorities.

it's actually a GOOD thing to have lots of conservation efforts focusing on "Charismatic megafauna," especially apex predators

Because big animals like tigers need a LOT of space

So creating a preserve to save tigers...saves thousands of other species, because the tigers need miles and miles of habitat to live on, and that habitat needs to be healthy to support the tigers

me: having a devastating mental health crisis invisibly in the middle of a grocery store is so absurd it’s funny. here’s a doodle of how absurd it feels.