Anger Management for Dummies

Column Disclaimer: for all of the wonderful readers of EOS, we greatly appreciate your support and loyalty and appreciate your incredibly wonderful sense of humor!  

Word of the week: Assmonkey: n 1. A person labeled by others of higher intelligence due to their ridiculously pathetic actions. 2. Simpleton, with the intelligence of an idiot; see Nincompoop. 

Sometimes an opportunity presents itself and it’s simply too good to pass up. Case in point: my question regarding Ted King’s private part. Could I have skipped asking him if it really looked bigger when he shaved? Perhaps. Was I nervous? Embarrassed? Scared he might pick me up and boot-kick me across the crowded banquet hall? Most definitely. But was it worth it? Abso-frickin-lutely!

There are just some things in life worth the risk.  

That my friends, is why I am writing this column. Now I know I am not perfect, far from it actually. I realize I’ve made a mistake or two in my life, but usually, when I’ve made a mistake, I learn something. I come out of it a better person. Take for example, my disagreement with my best friend (who, by the way, has since apologized and wants to work on our friendship), I learned a big lesson from that one: never, ever say never. You just can’t predict the future. With that being said, I’ve decided to take a risk and write a column about anger management in hopes that people who carry issues with this ability will read this and hopefully learn something!  

There are some people out there who just cannot learn from their own mistakes. They continue to walk the same path in life, bump their head on a tree, turn around and go the same way, continuing to bump their head on that very same tree, never realizing a turn in another direction would save their poor head from all those bumps! Repetition, some say, is a sign of psychosis. (And apparently all of us have a bit of psychosis in us because we continue to watch GH, even if we’re not happy with the show!).  

One incidence in which people tend to continue to make the same mistakes is in anger management. Instead of learning new ways to handle anger, they used the same old tried and true behaviors, which continue to make them appear, shall I say, “assmonkey-ish”, leaving others to wonder “WTF?” and discount everything about these people.  

The past few days have afforded me many opportunities to learn about anger management from both my personal perspective and by watching others react out of anger.

Let me tell you, some people have got the patience of a God, while others refuse to accept any responsibility and instead lash out at others in an effort to increase their own personal assmonkeyness. And they are quite successful at it, I might add!  

Watching this interaction of the unstable vs. the totally stable got me to thinking…what are some key ways to control anger? Shutting up? Walking away? Letting it all out? Hmm. I’d been working on my daughter’s research paper all weekend and got extremely bored with the differences between public and private schools and decided anger management would be a pleasant change of research. Here’s what I discovered: 

Effective Ways to Deal with Anger

 1 THINK about your attitude to anger. We all have our own ways of feeling and expressing this emotion, but is our way the best way? Step back and take a look at yourself in the mirror when you’re angry. Is this who you want the world to see? Are your words the words you want people to associate with you? If so, did you use spell check so you don’t look like a total assmonkey when you express your anger?  

2 WORK out the pattern you follow when you express anger. In most cases, you will need to delay expressing the emotion until you have time to consider how best to do it. If you are a  hair-trigger type your best option is to practice this beforehand. Think back on previous episodes of anger, and work out the common causes - most frequently a feeling of loss of control or lack of self-esteem. Once you work through those problems and you’ve found an appropriate action, count to ten and rethink it once more. More than likely you’ll need to sit on it for a few hours, long enough to cool down and say what you need to say to sound even remotely mature, sane and logical and not like an assmonkey.

3 ACCEPT that you need to find a way of expressing your feelings without losing your reputation and your friends. And sometimes, even your hobby!  If you are angry at the webmaster, you will still need to express the feeling - though perhaps it would be better dealt with by punching your pillow or going for a five-mile run. If you are angry with a colleague, you need to tell him or her how you feel ('When you do that, I feel demoralized... I get fed up because I have to follow the rules,  to not demean and put down others...') rather than make dismissive comments, calling them names, placing the blame on them, making an assmonkey of yourself.

4 UNDERSTAND that anger, well-used and positively translated, is motivating and liberating. Charles Dickens used his anger creatively to press for reform. Amnesty International's anger at torture harnesses the collective feelings of the public, with extraordinary results. 'Clean anger is a beautiful thing,' says Wilks. 'You're saying "I'm powerful and can express my anger over this particular issue".'  If however, you decide to express your anger without thinking it through, trying to be mature and sane, without looking like an assmonkey, then onejust must accept the fact that people are going to come at him/her because he/she made a total assmonkey of him/herself and deserve to be ridiculed and baited.

Do I think any of this will work? With most people? Perhaps. With some? likely. With those few assmonkeys out there who just don’t have a clue and continue to make fools of themselves because they just don’t know any better? Nope. Never. They are what make the assmonkeys of the world prefer to be called nincompoops. They are the driving force of idiocy in our world. They’re the reason we have stalking laws, gun control, drivers license exams, insurance, security systems, email blocking, pictures on credit cards and money with special paper.

Maybe if they read my column they’ll take an honest look in the mirror, realizing what an assmonkey they’ve made of themselves and make a concentrated effort to be a decent, upstanding human being. Hey, if I can help, I’m certainly willing to try.  

The opinions written in this column are not necessarily those of the staff and webmaster at www.eyeonsoaps.com

(Pfft.  Sure they are... EOS management)