"Look back in anger, see it in my eyes..."

I am not very good about showing my anger and frustration. I was raised to believe that showing such emotions is manipulative and weak. Conflict is to be calmly and logically discussed.

I do get angry, but it is rare that I lose control. I was taught that if I am in danger of losing control, I should remove myself from the situation. I should never impose my emotions on anyone else.

I used to say that one could tell how angry I was based on whether my anger ran hot or cold. Now I would say that I think it’s pretty difficult to tell if I am angry. I tend to remove myself from most intense emotional interactions. I might be sad, angry, frustrated, or simply overwhelmed. As a friend put it, “Avoidant Rachel is avoidant.”

Appropriate emotional expression was not modeled for me as a child or a young adult. I was simply taught to take my emotions to another room. If someone was interested in knowing what was troubling me, they would follow me and ask. I was never shown that telling someone about my emotions was acceptable behavior in certain circumstances.

If I am showing emotion, something is really wrong. It doesn’t matter if I my temper is fired up or I am cold. If you know I am angry, I have lost control and I am going to be flailing at anyone or anything that comes near me. It doesn’t happen very often, but given that my anger usually involves a nuclear option, that’s for the best.

While I have spent the past few months working on my inner voices and learning how to define my limits and boundaries, being better about expressing my emotions, specifically anger and frustration, has been the process of years. I had to learn it as a teacher. Holding in my emotions and seeming placid and then suddenly exploding with nearly no warning is not good teaching. I can’t remove myself from the classroom. I have had to learn to express anger and resolve it constructively.

I have learned to share my feelings. I will tell my class that I am in an emotional state and set a firm boundary. My fourth period messed up today. It was annoying, but not all that bad. However there was other stuff that had me really riled up, so I could feel myself getting angry. I calmly told my students that I was disappointed in them and why. I told them that they would have 5 minutes for everyone to find equilibrium and then we would start class. I was able to teach the rest of class without incident. That is a huge accomplishment for me.

It’s not all sunshine, I was riled up due to another situation. Instead of dealing with it constructively the person in question was subject to my nuclear option, complete with ‘f’ bombs.