Hello, Anger, My Old Friend

That old familiar feeling grips my stomach, and my breathing turns shallow. Thoughts fly through my mind and words hurl out of my mouth. I feel my blood pressure rising… And afterwards, the “cool down” when my mind and body refused to leg go, and the thought of a drink to make it disappear appeared in my head. A thought I realized, gratefully, I hadn’t had in a long time.

Twice in two days this week, an old friend dropped in for a visit: anger. The reason anger came to town was two visits to two different DMVs. If you don’t live in California, you might not have an immediate reaction when you read the words Department of Motor Vehicles. However most Californians have at least one frustrating, overwhelming, or rage-inducing incident to report. Or maybe it’s just me.

I tried to have everything in order for my visit with my son to take his instructional permit test. All the paperwork required to apply for the “Real ID” driver’s license. But alas, we were turned away the first day because we had a copy of a document when the website said they would accept copies, and the second day, at another location because we made an appointment for 4:10 and, go figure, they stop testing at 4.

Now if you are a sensible person, you would ask, why wouldn’t they honor a copy of some documents but not others, or why would they allow you to make an appointment for an instructional permit test at 4:10 only to have drive the 45 minutes to be told testing stops at 4:00? But no, my friends, lets not be sensible when we are discussing the DMV.

And it turns out, my anger, which is usually quite below the surface, is roused and on full display when I have to deal with incompetent people who waste my time. In fact, my husband, son and daughter, who were all with me on the second day, look horrified when I started to lose my cool with the manager, and asked me to go sit in the chairs (apparently where all the bad kids were sent), and they would take care of it.

In this case, taking care of it was yet another appointment for this coming Monday, which my husband will get off work early and my son will be pulled out of school for, so he can take the test with plenty of time. I’ve had my fill of DMVs…at least until he has to take the behind the wheel test.

I know part of my reaction was what I brought along with me, which is a history of non-productive, frustrating appointments where employees on power trips like to tell people no, or go home, or you fail, or get in line again, or come back tomorrow (always ending with “Have a Nice Day.”). But I was caught off guard by my anger, and after it was all over, a little ashamed in front of my family.

“You know, mom,” said my son. “When you act angry like that, it makes people not want to do things for you.”

Hmm.

It hurts being schooled by your kids.

When I got home, I still felt off; drained, and grumpy and uneasy. I took my blood pressure and it had crept into the Stage 2 Hypertension range. This, I remembered is when I would reach for a bottle to try to calm down. This

This desire for a drink surprised me. Since I quit drinking almost three years ago, I’ve had happy times, lonely times, sad times, boring times, and even stressful times. But this need for a drink surfaced because my anger was too uncomfortable to sit with. The discomfort was mental and physical, and I wanted it to be gone. So instead, I did yoga. When I re-checked my blood pressure after I finished, it was 15 points lower.

When I took the Enneagram Personality Test a few weeks ago, the report said each type has its own driving force, centered around a particular emotion. There are Body Types, Head Types and Heart Types. I was surprised to read my results made me a Body Type (I thought I’d be Heart) and that my core emotion is anger.

But I’m not an angry person. I usually just stuff it down if it appears anyway. Now that I’m sober, I rarely have to deal with true, powerful anger, which used to grip me at times, while drinking. Then I read on, “This does not necessarily mean that all Body Types experience anger frequently. Some people who are body types repress their anger; however it is still a driving force in their thoughts and actions.”

After the past few days, this really makes sense to me. Anger, when it arrives and I choose to acknowledge it, or let it out to play, is an emotion I feel with both my body and my mind and it is not a comfortable place to be. It takes me a long time to cool off and get over. And now that I no longer try to “drown it out” using booze, I realize adding alcohol was actually an accelerant.

Now that I am aware of the power anger can have over me, I can work on dealing with it in a more productive way. Getting angry at these employees didn’t help us one bit, and I think I may have lost a few “mom points” in my kids’ estimation. Hopefully, I can start using tools to help me stay cool in situations that provoke me…

And I can definitely stay away from the DVM as much as humanly possible.