Whose Faulty Vision

Dealing with my Anger

I’m feeling a little better, because I’ve finally found a way to deal with my anger over Christmas’s betrayal. The reason I was having so much trouble, the reason this anger was debilitating me so much, was that I’d literally never felt like this before. Whenever I was angry in the past, it was quick flareups of anger that burned intensely but subsided quickly. My anger over the betrayal was a constant burning anger that didn’t subside, but just continued to burn and eat away at me. Since I’d never been angry like that before, I didn’t know how to cope with it.

So I found something that I did know how to cope with, and, like a mathematician, tried to “reduce” this problem to that one. In this case, the thing I do know how to cope with is anger at myself, when I’ve done something stupid or wrong that caused me a lot of damage. (Say, for instance, when my camera and stuff were stolen in Costa Rica.) When that happens, the mental process I go through goes something like this:

1. Naturally, my first instinct, like anyone, is always to make excuses for myself. So the first step to recovery is to get rid of all of the excuses. I have to be honest with myself, and admit that I did something wrong, and stop making excuses, before I can try to make things better.
2. Next, I take full responsibility for the consequences of my actions. I admit that all of these negative consequences are because of what I did.
3. Finally, I figure out exactly what I did wrong, and what I can do differently in the future, and vow to do the right thing next time. This is what really helps me move on, but I can’t honestly do it until I’ve been through the first two steps.

I call this, in mental shorthand, “It’s my own damn fault, and I can deal with it.” I’ve occasionally thought it would make a decent self-help book, if I could stretch it out that long.

So what I did in this case was, I asked Christmas to walk through those three steps for me. I asked her to do it both over the phone (so that I could hear it coming from her) and by e-mail (so that I have something to re-read when the anger comes back). I asked her to say these things to me only if she really meant them, and she assured me that she did. In case you’re curious, here’s specifically what I asked her to say to me:

1. What she did was wrong, and there are no excuses for it.
2. She takes full responsibility for all of the pain that she caused me.
3. No matter what her emotional state, she is never going to be unfaithful to a monogamous relationship again. (It’s too late for us, of course, but if this prevents somebody else from suffering the pain that I suffered then at least some tiny amount of good came out of it.)

So she willingly said these things to me, and wrote them in an e-mail that I saved on my phone, so that I have it with me whenever I need it.

I still hate what she did to me. I still hate the fact that she was capable of doing it. I’m still tortured by mental images of the two of them together. And I’m still seriously worried about my future ability to trust other relationships. But the visceral anger that was preventing me from thinking about anything else has subsided a lot as a result of this, so I think I may be on the road to recovery.

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