KOCHI: What are you like when you get angry, especially with someone you really want to love very much?
For a lot of us, anger starts mildly enough. We can quite easily tell when we start to get irritated or annoyed, or other shades of emotions, in the early stages of the anger spectrum. At that time, we can very nicely differentiate between the ‘what’ of our irritation, and it doesn’t become a ‘who’ of our irritation. We can say, “Stop that! It is irritating!” rather than, “You are irritating. Stop!” The action is very separate from the person, and we might even be able to remember that this is a person for whom we generally have loving feelings, and that this irritation or annoyance is about something that’s happening rather than the person that they are.
We can still see the pink of our love, so to say. The love we feel allows us to stay connected with each other, and we are able to communicate through that connection, holding that connection as important. That’s why at this stage we still have endearments coming in, even when the annoyance is at a level 4-5 and we start to get sarcastic, like: “Babe! Can you please stop strumming the table top? I know the food is taking a long time to come, but do we really need the background score?” We don’t react well to sarcasm normally, and yet, when there’s that little heartfelt ‘Babe’ there to soften it, we might see pink rather than red, and just stop what we are doing, and join in the frustration with maybe, “Sorry, hon! I am just getting really hangry!”
Seeing pink might just save us from seeing red — that angry place where nothing matters except the anger itself, and it takes over your whole persona. When you see red, it is like love doesn’t exist; there’s only a destructive rage, which just wants to release and validate itself, no matter the impact of it. This can quite literally be murderous rage with absolutely no thought for consequences.
That’s when we break things, throw objects, physically hurt each other, and say the most hurtful and painful things, not caring a whit about what was private or confidential, or what was shared in a moment of vulnerability. We use anything and everything to push away, to get back at the one we are angry at, and it isn’t even about what happened at that time, it just becomes about that person vs us and that’s why we use the most explosive epithets and insolent insults.
Returning from that and repairing the love we wish to have is hard work. Always, prevention is better than repair, and seeing pink rather than red might just help.
(The writer’s views are personal)