I'm Tired of Being Angry...

No, I have not taken AM classes. However, in my wise 45 years, I have come to realize, and more importantly, accept, that sh-- happens. The secret is in how you handle it. I have the attitude now that I will not react negatively and simply do what I need to do to fix the situation with as little negativity as possible. Good luck!

Although I don't tend to lose my temper I am pretty sure there is a note on my Dell service account, "give her what she wants or she will make you cry." I also have this irrational fear that I will be rushed to the emergency room where the nice Indian doctor will recognize my voice and ask how my computer is. :(

If you can't tell I make jokes about my customer service experiences and that goes a long way to making me feel better. :)

Oh yeah, and so you don't have to find this out after years of abusing them, a good chunk of Dell's tech support are med students.

Mabey we can get a group rate on anger management and send the bill to Sears! We had a Sears repairman once come to fix our washing machine and he was higher than a kite and did a horrible job. I told the Sears store about our experience and the repairman's MOTHER called to talk to me and chided me for complaining to Sears!

I don't have any advice on the classes but I changed my approach with service calls. When I get a service person on the phone, the very first thing I say is that I am mad/pissed off/royally winged (whatever degree explains my state). I then tell this service person I know he or she is not responsible for bearing the brunt of my bad attitude. However, maybe together we can fix someone else's screw up. The tactic is effective in two ways. I diffuse my anger by immediately putting it out there for the other person. Also it creates a common ground with the service person. I gain his or her sympathy instead of anger or indifference promptly. After all who hasn't been mad at a service person? Instead of making the service person the recipient of my anger, though, I am asking this person to be my ally. I find this approach is very effective and keeps the focus on the issue at hand – there were certain promises made and they have not been met. What is going to be done to fix that? Remember too we are all human and we do waste our efforts on silly things. Such is life. Good luck.

Love it......i think you are selling yourself short....its ok tooooooo get a bit pissed off once in a while! After all the idiots, leave go take a nice ride & listen to some good tunes.

Sears used to be great, Mum. They aren't now, that's for sure. I took my lawnmower in to be repaired and when I got it back, the feature that "pulls" it forward instead of me having to push it, no longer worked. (It worked fine when I took it in.) It was at the end of the season, and I didn't find out until the following spring. Goodness knows the rigamaroll I would have gone through with that, so I have given up on Sears for good.

I feel sorry for good people at Sears - they need to go get another job because I believe Sears will end up going out of business,.

Dawn

How about just working on re-programming yourself. Go to Youtube and search for meditations for gratitude or peace. Do one every day and see if that helps.

Counseling helped me. Being aware of the irrationality of the anger was an important step. Staying aware as the anger would usually take over was a HUGE step. Being able to talk myself down seemed impossible for years, and it still sometimes does. Anger can be such a strong-hold. Gotta find the root of it, and work it out. Counseling helps, a lot. Meditiation can help A TON. Prayer, if you are a christian, works the absolute best.

I find myself angrier when my social and love life is empty. If I have a good social network or if engaged in a good relationship--I can deal with anything.

That being said, when Sears came to install my storm windows, they sent Mexicans who only spoke fragmented English! Outsourcing. I was pissed and complained.

I've never taken anger management, but hugs to you..... dealing with idiots can send you over the top.

I get what you're saying, but mine is with anxiety rather than anger.

What helped me was a combination of things..... CBT (cognitive behavioral therapy) + meditation. I won't lie - cutting loose a cheating SO helped alot.

I prefer the CBT to talk therapy. CBT, I would imagine, is pretty close to anger management. It's just about determining what behavior is destructive and then finding an alternate behavior to use instead (that isn't yelling or martini's).

The meditation helped with the emotion - I swear to you I never realized until I was 40 and spent some time with a hindu meditation guru that you can actually have a thought/emotion and then actually make a conscious decision to ignore it. Novel concept, I know. But I promise you that it had never occurred to me. And if I did try to "ignore it" then it just pent up inside me and festered until I snapped. Meditation taught me WHAT TO DO with that energy. How to redirect it away from me.

I would definitely encourage anger management. Or a counselor that deals with CBT in regards to anger (sometimes that can be paid for with insurance or copay, btw).

Good luck!

Sounds like Sears is frik'n annoying and you have a right to be angry. Why is someone in India taking your call? Why is our country giving that income to someone in India? You sound like me... I am also sick of stupid choices people make that screw up my day when I am simply trying to get something done. Before I was a mom, when I was a know-it-all twenty something year old counselor I'd tell you to take deep breaths or meditate or find the childhood source of your anger. Now that I am a mom and understand that life if hard, our country and economy is screwed up... My advice... Kick someone's @ss. J/K.... I think it's okay to yell at annoying people. I used to keep it inside, too. But not anymore.

How i learned to control my temper, long, long, long ago was to buy a crate of cheap barware (like 25 cents per glass).

Then, whenever I got mad, I'd go throw glasses.

Doing so let me learn how to slowly recognize when I was getting angry LONG before I actually got angry. I went through several hundred glasses originally. I haven't thrown a glass (or anything else) in over 15 years.

At approximately the same time, I was learning how to shoot. The thing about shooting, is that you have to control your breathing and your heart beat, or you miss.

Combining those 2 things together... recognize the precursers, and then being able to slam my gearshift into neutral (breathing and heart rate)... means that about 99% of the time? I just start laughing. It's fast forward to the 20/20 'This will be a funny story someday' kind of thing. And the 1% of the time I do get angry, I just take a deep breath, and step outside for 5-15 minutes on a time out. No glassware needed! I do still go shooting though. No matter how mad I am, shooting triggers an 'instant calm'. Sort of like jumping into a pool. Or holding a baby. Physiological response. So I'll often trigger that at home. "I'm in practice mode, I'm in practice mode, I'm in practice mode." Poof. 40 beats and 3 breaths a minute. Chill.

A lot of anger management is EXACTLY what I did (recognizing anger before it actually becomes anger, learning how to slam into neutral, or how to remove yourself and calm down if you trip into anger). Meditation is one of MANY tools used in anger management (doesn't work for me, btw. meditation makes things worse, but I'm quirky that way). There are many different TYPES of anger management counseling and therapy.

The above is what I did back when. But it's the same series of things with the same series of results.

There is something called Neuro Linguistic Programming (NLP) that teaches you that how you react to something is under your control. You might see a man on the subway letting his 2 young kids run wild and make noise. What a jerk for not making his kids behave in public. Then you find out they just came from the hospital where their mother died. Poor guy, no wonder he is overwhelmed. You cannot control the world, only how you react to it.
http://www.holistic-online.com/hol_neurolinguistic.htm
I agree with that idea, but that does not mean I don't get ticked off when I have to spend hours on the phone to fix things that could have just been done correctly to begin with, especially when insurance gets denied because it was just coded wrong, or when I get double billed and call once to have them tell me it is fixed but the credit never shows up and then you have to call a few more times. arrrgh!
I find that I am much less patient when I am already stressed or tired. So do not make these kinds of calls when you have very little time, or when you are exhausted from a long day. Hang in there.

"The Secret" - read the book, listen to an audio version, or watch the movie. It will change your life.

I mean, look at what you're mad about. A dishwasher, a non-necessity, an applicance. Is it really worth it, in the long run, to hold onto that anger for so long? A hunk of plastic & metal is getting the best of you.

Anger is a form of fear. Ask yourself what you are afraid of. Deal with the fear issue and your anger will probably go away. Anger Management classes are a good thing. I know people who have gone through them and it has helped them tremendously.

N.