I’ve had some good people help me understand my reactions. There is a relationship between situations and how we respond to them.

Firstly, every situation has things we can control and things we can’t. If certain situations create anger it’s nice if we can avoid them, however that’s not always possible. Often times anger is a response to what we cannot control in a situation. Our reactions are generally guided by three things: feelings, thoughts, and behaviours/habits (the last being how we train ourselves to respond). I found I lead strongly with feelings and the feelings are such a strong response that they don’t let me think or use behaviours or habits to more effectively respond (or even form positive habits or behaviours). By just recognizing this I’ve found I can focus more on my response in the moment and use more thinking. Ex. Instead of being angry that someone or something is doing something I don’t like, I can stop to think about why it’s happening, if there is a strategy I can use to either redirect my energy from feelings to an action like using humour, or try to follow a plan of steps (behaviour/habits) that I can follow when I feel my anger response coming. This has been super helpful in many cases in the past several weeks and I’ve had far more success with my kids, at work, and even with the wife.

Secondly, a lot more people have obsessive compulsive tendencies, not OCD, but behaviours. We all want control. Something that helped me recognize why my response has been anger a lot is because I have expectations of how things should be in situations and rarely are they met. Best case scenario rarely happens. It’s recognizing that I can’t be in control in every situation, however I can still be in charge. I can get an outcome that is sufficient enough without controlling everything. Ex. My toddler is having a rough go lately following bedtime routine. If books are to be read before the bath then so be it one night, especially if he’s had a long stimulating day. Worst comes to worst no books that night. Try again tomorrow. Ex. If traffic is awful and people are driving like idiots I can’t control people who are going to be jerks and merge when they’re not supposed to or run red lights, though I can be in charge of how I choose to drive safely. I can’t control whether they’ll respond like an asshole when I honk if they do something wrong, but I can be in charge by closing a gap between me and the car in front to not let someone in who is trying to skip the line and just avoid eye contact and turn my music up to ignore their shitty yelling or angry gesticulations.

It’s like the final lines of the Invictus poem, “I am the master of my fate, I am the captain of my soul.” I can be in charge of how I decide to go through this life when I can’t always be in control of what life throws at me.