Anger management problems
I am aware I have trouble keeping my cool. I wanted to post about it earlier but since I was busy I couldn't. What made me come back to post is a recent argument with my wife. However it's obviously not limited to my wife. I will provide examples the best I can (my memory is blurred during the times I get angry). This is going to be a (really?) long post, so if you don't want to read all of it, I will provide a TL;dr summary but I do recommend you to read all of it to understand.
So you can provide the best advice/comment/whatever, I'll provide additional info about my wife:
She knows I have AS. She did not hear about it before. I doubt she knows what it means aside from her own observations. I have asked her to read more about AS because I'm not the best person to explain it. She has not done so yet because she thinks I'm making such a huge deal about it. She's very loving in general but I'm making her life miserable by shouting and getting really angry at her during arguments. I'm quite scary when I shout, I've been doing it a lot (and suffering from it a lot obviously) during my childhood and teenage years so my voice is really powerful.
So here is what happened: after some discussion, I reproached my wife that she can't use rhetoric when she speaks. We were discussing the health-related aspects of something but she argued about the legal aspects of it to win her argument. It made me angry because it was absolutely irrelevant about what the problematic was ("Is it healthy or not to do this?").
After that my memory is blurry.... I'll tell you what I can recall. She went to the bedroom (maybe to avoid the argument?), I followed her, told her how important logic/rhetoric was in life to me and that she ought to consider that when she says anything. She didn't reply. My voice was progressively going from shouting a bit to really shouting...
It's somewhat difficult to recall what happened from there, sorry... I wish I could remember more but when I'm in such an angry state like this (you call it a tantrum, right? I'm not a native English speaker) it's really difficult.
Then she said she couldn't believe I was so stupid. I wrote on a sheet of paper about the different kinds of intelligence and what I wished she didn't do (talk so surely about things she didn't know, disregard rhetoric when speaking) I asked her: "There are many types of intelligence... Which one do you think I'm stupid at?" and showed her that piece of paper I scribbled on. As soon as she got a hold of it, she squished it into a ball and threw it on the floor. I got really angry from then on. I started shouting, hitting the mattress with the pillow...
I don't remember much from then on, but there was a lot of shouting. I'm certainly forgetting a lot of things here, but I said she was horrible and didn't care about me, never listened to anything important I said (especially about her eating problems), she said she regretted marrying me to live such a bad life with a husband causing so many problems, that she didn't want "this kind of love"... The fight became physical (both sides hit each other) after a while but fortunately for the both of us it stopped very quickly. I feel so terrible it came to that... It's not the first time (but it's rare) but I always feel absolutely terrible when it happens, this is something a married couple shouldn't ever ever do, but we crossed that line.
I don't know how to keep my cool, I don't know when I should stop speaking/arguing even if I know I'm absolutely right to prevent some damage... Because I know I'm often unreasonable even when I'm right.
How can I deal with these totally destructive tantrums? I am tempted to say that my wife set me off most of the time but really I'm the only one responsible for the mess I'm making. How do I delay anger? What do I do? I get so caught up in these discussions at time I can't stop. But it's destroying my marriage. Sometimes it's not even important to start with...
Another shorter example unrelated to my relationship:
I'm an ESL ( english as a second language) teacher. One school I work at modified my schedule a while ago. I wouldn't work any evening classes (adults), just the weekend mornings with the children. They trusted me with that earlier so I didn't understand why I was cut off of that (maybe because one class did go wrong because they gave me insufficient directions on what pages to teach on a 1h30 class, usual classes are 45 minutes). I went back in the teacher's room and yelled at the staff (who was not responsible for my schedule and did not understand English that well) how could this happen and that they gave everything to a native speaker teacher because I wasn't worthy of it... I got into trouble the next day because of it, fortunately I managed to keep silent and not say anything about it to my boss when she asked why I was yelling at her staff and that if there was a problem I should be telling her.
So:
Why am I so uptight about logic and about things making sense? Is it an Asperger's thing? Because the world doesn't make sense at all... I probably shouldn't try to make sense out of life.
Do you know effective strategies to cope with rising anger? "just do it" is not an acceptable answer.
How do I get less angry? In other words, how do I progressively raise my tolerance to things that make me angry?
How do I remind myself that I'm getting angry and that I'm probably need to stop unless bad stuff will happen?
I'm really happy at all the progress I made on other aspects of my AS, but this is really limiting me right now.
TL;dr: got into arguments with my wife, troubles at work. Have trouble to keep calm in general. Need strategies to keep my cool. Thank you in advance.
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