Today’s Wednesday Whine is a reminder to those who find it impossible to sit with anger before acting out.
Ever get an email or text from someone containing all kinds of rage? Or maybe you received an email from someone who is livid at someone you know and they are trying to ruin their lives by influencing you?
Or maybe you were the sender? After all, someone just did something that completely ticked you off and basically took your ego, stripped it naked, poured green slime all over it and then stomped on it and the only way for you to instantly feel better is to get revenge? So you pour out all kinds of hurt and fury into this message and before any kind of rationale or logic sets in, you hit send.
Ah, that felt so good. The pressure has been released.
(sigh)
For at least five seconds.
Then just as your breathing regains that of a normal resting human filled with common sense, you start to recap your words in your mind. Do you dare? Do you go back, open the sent folder and see what you sent into cyber space, to be directly delivered to your victim’s inbox never to be taken back?
Of course, you do. Your curiosity has even less patience than your logic does. So after maybe ten seconds of calm, your heart rate rises again with anticipation of the foot you put in your mouth. You might have exaggerated just a tad in that email. But, you’ll just read it again to make sure. This person really deserves it, right?
But, then you read it. You slouch more in your chair with each word. It’s the email you should not have sent – nonsensical accusations, typos and all. And while it’s written in black 12 pt. Courier, it reads as if it’s 24 pt. RED in Bold Arial!
What have you done?!?!
You rehearse all of the crazy thoughts the recipient is having about you, not to mention sharing the email with every person he/she knows proving just how much you’ve gone off the deep end.
The best outcome now would be for you to flee the country and find a nice hut to live in, dye your hair, get some sort of Face Off type surgery and become a Gypsy.
Yep, you wrote things that were not quite accurate. You might have overreacted just a bit TON. Perhaps whatever the other person did really wasn’t so bad and if it was… it could have been dealt with differently, right?
Unfortunately, it’s too late. This is the kind of thinking you should have done before you launched your heat of the moment piece of mind. It’s been done and you have successfully tainted a relationship.
One piece of advice I received years ago was that if I felt something so strongly and it was involving a relationship with someone else (family member, spouse, friend etc.), to write a letter to that person, but don’t send it! Dump the hurt, anger, irritation and all the goopy soup of emotions into a letter and then just let it sit there.
I’ve done this many times and only once did someone snoop and actually see a letter composed to them. But, no. I never sent it.
We all experience anger and all kinds of emotions on the spectrum. But the difference between doing something irreversible that you may forever regret and maintaining grace is control. *Note: Grace is so much more appealing.
The next time you think it’s a good idea to rock someone’s world with an email aimed at destroying them, take a moment (actually take an entire night), and then make a decision from a calm state rather than a hyped up state of nerves.
P.S. Interesting scientific research states that the neurological response to anger lasts less than two seconds. Beyond that we fuel it ourselves with our thoughts and choices. Counting to ten when angry actually makes a lot of sense!
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