Misplaced Anger
This picks up where yesterday's note on displaced aggression left off. I want to sit a little longer with those moments when the anger we feel lands on the wrong target, or gets triggered by the wrong thing entirely. We tend to say that a person or a situation "makes" us angry. And once we're in that state, it becomes very easy to dump the feeling onto something or someone that had nothing to do with it.
Often the original source has already walked out of the room. Or it's a person we don't feel safe getting angry at, maybe a boss, maybe someone we depend on. So the anger drifts toward whatever is close and convenient. A scapegoat, in other words. You've probably watched someone chew out a waiter, or snap at a kid, over something that waiter or kid never did. That's misplaced anger doing its work.
Two things are worth sitting with. The first: at some level, getting angry is a choice we make. Not always a conscious one, but a choice. We tell ourselves we're "justified," that given what happened, the anger is owed to us. A lot of people grew up learning exactly that, that certain events give them a right to be furious, that when those events arrive the anger is automatic, maybe even unstoppable. Those are the people with a short fuse, the ones who seem impossible to talk down once they're lit. And they're frequently the ones whose anger ends up on the wrong head.
The second thing is how personal that sense of justification turns out to be. What one person considers an obvious reason to be furious, another person shrugs off. There's no shared rulebook. People have gone to war over whose list of justified angers is the correct one.