Angry at myself
Published: Tue, 10/20/15
Geoff Thompson tells a story of how one of his fellow doormen once allowed himself to be intimidated into letting some very unpleasant characters into a club he was supposed to keep them out of. Later that same evening a confrontation with someone relatively harmless escalated until this same doorman took a baseball bat to the other person’s head. The result was brain damage for the person on the receiving end and a prison sentence for the doorman. The initial confrontation earlier in the evening could have turned nasty had the doorman stood his ground, but at least he would have been in the right at that stage and he would not have been left with feelings that festered into completely inappropriate violence a few hours later.
Okay, the story retold above is an extreme example. But, doorwork (as it apparently was in Coventry in the 1980s) can be an extreme situation with the possibility of violence ever present. However, displaced anger is a constant threat to sound judgement and appropriate behaviour. If you find yourself on the receiving end of ‘road rage’ you may have done something to trigger the anger in the other motorist but the chances are that there is a lot of displaced frustration being unloaded too. Last night I came back from a preaching appointment (of all things) and found myself getting very angry and upset because I put cooking oil into a pan that turned out not to be clean when I had assumed that it was. Of course it didn’t really matter but I was furious with myself for not looking properly before I started using the pan. This makes me aware that should I have some kind of aggressive confrontation my biggest danger is simply poor
judgement because of displaced anger.
I have not written postings for two weeks because I have been working very hard on projects which need to be completed before the winter sets in. Not that I could not have found some time to write sometimes if I had tried harder. There was also an element of displacement in the working hard to try and avoid confronting feelings around a business arrangement which is damaging to my life in general but is going to be hard to change and disappointing if I have to get out of it. However, not confronting the situation creates displaced anger resulting in dangerously poor judgement. As a result of my poor judgement I have already made on embarrassing and unnecessary mistake. Nothing irreversible but the situation doesn’t make me feel any better.
Just because I am aware of what is going on in my life does not mean that I am not allowing it to happen. The question is whether or not I am prepared to let it continue? If I have any sense I won’t.
Why share this? A number of reasons, but primarily to show that self-defence and self-protection really needs to focus on recognising displaced anger in other people and being aware of it within ourselves. It is not impossible to get into a violent situation when we are at peace with ourselves and our opponent is equally in harmony, but I think you will agree that in the real world this us highly unlikely. So 80/20 principle applied to self-protection suggests that if you can recognise displaced anger in others and you can acknowledge and deal with anger within yourself then violence is unlikely to affect you.
However, if you would still like to do some CQC training for self-defence classes are on Wednesday evenings and there is a 2 hour seminar in Crewkerne at 10 am on Saturday the 31st of October. A lot of the emphasis is on developing awareness and maintaining safe distance. And it is fun. http://www.somersetstav.co.uk/sd.html
regards
Graham