[ahimel]

Originally Posted by ABdude

The reasons why I burst out are often silly. For instance, I lost it today when I found out that on facebook, my best friends have a lot more friends added than I have! Can you believe how stupid it feels to type something like that?

Yeah. I sympathize, and kudos to you for finding the courage to do so. I sometimes will snap at my husband for not doing something I didn't ask him to do, and then yell at him when he does it. Wow... it does feel stupid to type. I haven't turned out as lucky as you - I destroyed a $2000 laptop by throwing a book at it when it froze up.

I found a book with a character who did the same thing, and I've kind of adopted her system. From Rachel & Leah, by Orson Scott Card

"Crying for joy," said Leah scornfully. "What do I have to be joyful about?"
"I'm always happy," said Zilpah
"That's ridiculous," said Leah. "Nobody's always happy."
"I am."
"You have nothing to be happy about," said Leah. The girl was fatherless! She had no hope of a decent marriage.
"True," said Zilpah, "but I have dreams that make me happy. And besides, I don't have to have a reason. Being sad or angry won't make my situation any better, so I might as well be happy."
"You can't just decide to be happy."
"Why not? You decide to be angry whenever you want."
"I don't decide", said Leah, letting go of her arm.
Zilpah laughed.
"And now you laugh at me you nasty little..."
"Go ahead and say it," said Zilpah, chuckling. "I know the word. I've heard it before."
"I don't know what word you mean," said Leah.
Zilpah laughed even louder.
"I don't need your scorn," said Leah, walking away.
But the servant girl stayed with her. "When I said that you decide to be angry whenever you want, this is what I meant. You could have laughed at me and said, 'Be careful or I might decide to get angry at you.'"
"I could have but I didn't."
"No, because you decided to get angry. But if you had decided to enjoy the silly thing I said, then you would have been deciding to be happy."
"But I wasn't happy."
"And that was your decision." Zilpah laughed again. "You must enjoy being miserable, since you choose it all the time."
And with that, Zilpah was gone, dancing away, her feet scuffing lightly on the dirt of the path.

At first Leah felt as though she was spending every day pretending to be someone else. She would catch herself becoming angry over some slight, and then stop herself, force herself to be silent. Often the best choice was simply to walk away, to go back and hide in her tent. There she would brood about the offense - someone assuming she was incapable of doing a task, or someone expecting her to know something that only people with good vision could possibly know.

Or someone praising Rachel's beauty and then falling silent when they realized Leah could hear - didn't they know that praise for Rachel was never an offense to Leah unless they showed so plainly that they thought Leah could not bear to hear it?

However it happened, whatever it was, Leah would hold her tongue and go back to her tent. There she would find that Zilpah was little help. "You should be angry, mistress, they had no right!" Only Zilpah rarely understood what it was that had hurt her feelings, and often added her own inadvertent insults to the original hurt. But even at those times, Leah controlled herself, and instead of flying into a rage at Zilpah, she would ask her to run an errand, or tell her that she needed to sleep.

Zilpah wasn't stupid. She knew that Leah was getting rid of her because she'd given offense. For a while she even asked, "What did I say? Tell me so I won't do it again!"

But Leah did not want to teach Zilpah not to offend her. She wanted to teach herself how not to be offended.

She knew perfectly well what people were saying, because several women made it a point to be sure she overheard them: "There goes Leah, off to pout inside her tent again." "Well, at least that's better than her having a fit over nothing the way she usually does."

And it was better. The camp was more peaceful. Of course, this realization led Leah to have the obvious childish, spiteful thought: Things would be even better if I were thoughtful enough to get sick and die.
But that kind of thinking led nowhere, she knew that. It had nothing to do with walking with the Lord.

So in her brooding, instead of going over and over again how unkind people were, she would try to find excuses for them. Sometimes there was no excuse - they had clearly meant to hurt her, and it had worked. But most of the time there was no intent to offend.

When someone thought she knew something that only people with good vision could know - who it was who was visiting the camp, for instance, or how the first buds were coming out on the trees - then wasn't that a good thing? Wasn't it proof that they had forgotten that her vision was bad?

And when they made allowances that she didn't need, and offered to help her to do things she was perfectly capable of doing, wasn't that good, too? They were just trying to help, to make her life easier.

As she trained herself to think this way, she stopped feeling hurt and angry so often. She began to be able to say, "Thank you for offering to help, but this is a job I like to do myself." Or she'd say, "It's so silly, because I know most people can see it, but I just can't make out things that far away." At first they almost cowered, expecting her correction to turn into a rage. But gradually they realized that she wasn't going to rage at them over such things, and then they responded more naturally, too.

...
Of course, all this did not happen at once. There were still rages in the first few months, and now and then in the first few years. Times when someone's deliberate offense hurt her so badly that she lost control and her temper flared.

Then she would weep bitterly afterward, ashamed before the Lord and before the people of the camp.
....
And after a while, the miracle happened. She was no longer pretending. She really didn't get angry. She couldn't remember why she ever had. There was no reason for it. She was not ill-treated.

That's the passage I come back to when I feel like I'm getting nowhere, and I'll always be a horrible person controlled by anger. If I could get down to a few outbursts of anger per year, I'd count myself practically cured!

I've gotten to the point where my response to these "insults" is to press my lips together and breathe heavily through my nose. Not socially graceful, but it does give me time to edit the first several thoughts that pop to mind before they come out of my mouth. My husband has started to recognize this expression as "Amanda's pissed" and - like Zilpah - keeps trying to get me to talk about it. It occurs to me that if I showed him this passage, I wouldn't have to get angry at him for nagging me!

I found it helpful either to keep track of the number of times I lost my temper (keep a string in your pocket and tie a knot in it for each outburst) or to rate myself at the end of the day on a scale of 1-10. The first day I managed not to rage at anyone was a major achievement! Now I'm trying to reduce the number of time I want to rage at people.

In summary:

• Develop an alternate response that keeps you from snapping at people
• Keep track of how much you lose your temper, and celebrate as it gets lower
• Remember that with practice, it will get better.

Maybe we could keep this thread open and track statistics? I wanted to snap at 3 people today, but only did so once. (Staying home and talking to no one helps a lot )