Anger Management
I woke up angry yesterday.
It was 2:30am and I embraced the emotion, even though I couldn’t use it at the time, so I let it make me feel sick and I didn’t get back to sleep until last night. Then this morning, I tried to put that experience to good use by writing about the dangers of holding onto anger.
But that column didn’t work because trying to write about managing emotions made me realise I don’t want to do that all the time. In this case, I want to act… but I liked the headline, so I decided to keep it.
I’ve also decided I’m not cut out to be a Buddhist.
I say that because they believe anger is a negative emotion that needs to be supressed and eventually eliminated through disciplined meditation. I like the idea of mind control, but sometimes it is not my own mind that needs taming, so despite my loss of sleep, I still value anger… or more to the point, I value my ability to get angry, and I don’t want to lose it.
I believe we are able to get angry because sometimes we don’t have the luxury of coming to terms with our fear and then being brave. Sometimes we just have to act to protect ourselves or loved ones, or we have to be able to tap into our anger to mentally subdue aggressive people and animals. In other words, anger can allow us to skip fear in dangerous situations.
Okay, it can cause a great deal of stress in the modern world where we are not supposed to punch our doctors, our bosses or anyone else who pisses us off, so there definitely is a need for management. But anger can also motivate us to do something to try to correct injustices we see in our everyday lives.
I mentioned wanting to hit doctors because my local medical clinic here in England is the source of my current anger.
The practice gets all its funds from the government, but the partners run it as a small business and keep as much money as possible for themselves. They pay their staff minimum wages and provide poor service for patients. They have not employed enough receptionists to answer the constantly ringing phones or enough contracted doctors to provide primary care for all the people they claim money for.
I know my anger is not good for my health, but evidently neither are my doctors, so I’m willing to hold onto it for motivation while I plod through the legal options for forcing them to comply with their government contract. And I want to hit them hard because many, if not most, other small business doctors in the UK are taking the same liberties. I want this case to set a precedent that can be used to go after them as well.
Do I sound like I’ve got my teeth into this anger thing a bit too much?
Maybe, but now that I’ve started doing something about the cause of my anger, my stomach has stopped churning and my mind has cleared enough to write this column.
So, I guess I am managing my anger after all.