Day 151 When We Point A Finger...

No, not THAT finger. How we respond to other people's anger says something about us.

One thing for sure, someone sometime is going to be angry with us. It happens: we get attacked. Just about daily. That's just life. And we're going to get hurt....bumps, bruises, cuts, and the occasional life-altering amputation. (Hopefully that last one isn't frequent.)

There are a lot of reasons why people hurt each other. Sometimes the people who hurt us are misdirected and other times their intentions are completely intentional. Sometimes they're impulsive or kind of shot-gun. Other times they're completely malicious, being viciously planned and savagely implemented. Sometimes people act on a misunderstanding of an event or circumstance...these can be tragic mistakes and gross misfires. Sometimes the intent is simply to hurt us and whatever hurt the person in the first place is irrelevant. When shit happens, we naturally respond.

But what does our response to anger say about us?

Well, the first thing to do when someone is angry is to pause....this is hard. Don't just respond automatically even though that's the easy thing to do. Take a sec, and ask yourself what the response your about to give an angry person says about you: Ask the hard questions. Do the tough analysis. Face yourself without the nip and tuck of justification, and without the Botox of rationalization. You will be a better person who leaves behind a better world even when that world attacks you. 

Our responses are the fingerprint of our heart and the DNA of our conscience. If we peer into the mirrored reflection of our response, we see ourselves looking back. Fulke Greville wrote that "No man was ever so much deceived by another as by himself." That should create a whole lot of caution within a whole lot of us. 

There's a tendency in human behavior to respond without asking why we're responding the way that we are. Maybe it's something primitive, something that has to do with the whole concept of fight verses flight. When it comes to survival, we don't necessarily have the luxury of stepping back and thoughtfully pondering what we're doing because we likely to get eaten alive if we do. Or maybe it's more about convenience; that stopping and thinking and contemplating takes time and energy, and maybe in the rush of it all it's just messy and inconvenient to do that. Or maybe we don't really want to understand why we're doing what we've doing. Maybe that will uncover some less than complimentary things about us that we'd prefer not to know. Or maybe we figure that just feeling the need to do something justifies the doing, so we do it. 

 Here are six things that our responses to anger could be saying about us:

Insecurity: Often our responses reflect our deep-seated, gnawing insecurities. In some instances those insecurities result in a response that's wildly disproportionate and entirely over the top. Our insecurities cause us to retaliate in outrageously greater proportions to whatever it was that came at us. In responding like that, we insure that whatever or whoever's attacked us is sufficiently repelled by us, or better yet, they're outright annihilated altogether. Sometimes an excessive response is the way we get the other person to think twice about messing with us again. At other times we don't respond at all, fearing that if we do we're likely to incur further attacks or more abuse. So we run and we hide. Whatever our response, responding out of our insecurities will insure a bad one.

Immaturity: Sometimes are responses are entirely misdirected, mis-allocated and misapplied; in other words it's all reflex and nothing of reflection. We haven't quite learned yet that pulling the trigger prematurely may pull everything right down on our heads. We may not have the maturity to fully understand exactly what happened to us and why it happened to us. We may not have developed the depth of intellect, insight and the balance of maturity in order to render a response that's appropriate to the offense. Or, we may simply take a chainsaw sort of approach thinking that the nature of the response is irrelevant so we just have at it, rather than taking scalpel in hand and doing something a bit more clean and surgical. So, if our response is rather wild and blithering, we might be immature.

Impatience: We do tend to have a prickly kind of impatience where we quickly find ourselves on pins and needle if things don't roll exactly like we want them to. Impatience simply means that we want some sort of result in the 'right now.' Impatience means that we forfeit thinking in favor of doing the deed so that the deed can get done. We forfeit gathering data in favor of dueling it out. We strike out instead of strategize. We cut people to the quick instead of taking time to quietly contemplate. We retaliate instead of reflect, and we burn hot in the flames of revenge rather than cool our heels in the pool of patience. Our impatience drives us to an immediate, reflexive action that will likely serve to enflame a situation that we're attempting to douse. If our response is knee-jerk, we're likely impatient.

Selfishness: Many times our response is deliberately directed to meet our need or serve our agenda. In the fuming mindset of retaliation we take little if any time to consider the collateral damage of our choices. Collateral damage is a concept that's solely related to the impact that our choices have on others. In most cases, we're not all that much concerned with anybody else. Correspondingly, the bigger the offense against us, the more we narrow down our response until the focus of our response is nothing more and nothing less than 'us' based. If we ignorantly act to solely serve our agenda, we're simply slogging around in the egocentric and brackish backwaters of selfishness. Any response that comes out of that kind of cesspool will be vulgarly irresponsible. If our actions are all about self-preservation and they spurn the common good, we're selfish.

Moral shallowness: Most of the time, our responses challenge our ethics and our morals. When we respond to an attack, the most devastating, brutal and agonizing responses are likely unethical. If we really want to ravage someone and leave the landscape of their lives scorched and barren, that action will probably be immoral or so close to immoral that we'd be stupid to engage it. If we really want to wail on somebody and drive them so far into the ground that they'll never crawl out, we'll probably have to stuff our ethics, turn a blind eye, and live with the guilt of it for the rest of our lives. Morality is easily lost in the heat of hatred and the scorch of revenge. If morals aren't guiding our actions, our actions will be misguided.

So, what do our responses to anger say about us? I know which one I tend to use. You know the saying...When you point a finger at someone else, three more fingers point right back at you! (I hate that! ;) Love you, Hon!