Do you find yourself getting angry at people only about the same bad things you do yourself?

Question

Whenever I get really angry at someone, like for cutting me off while driving, I always within a day or two realizing that I do the same things myself. I wonder if deep down the reason I get angry is because I know I do the same bad things.

Answer 1

You are obviously a thoughtful person. There are some people who think that that is always the case. I see a number of reasons why we feel angry at others for doing things we do ourselves.

In the case of another driver cutting you off in traffic, one of the reasons we tend to feel the emotion, anger, is that we perceive our life to have been put in jeopardy by the other driver. It is human nature to feel either anger or fear when we believe that our life is at risk, (the fight or flight response).

Another reason we can get angry at others is if we believe that they have violated our expectations of behavior. My x-wife would always feel anger if someone turned from a side street into her lane and she had to slow down to avoid hitting them. That was her rule for driving.

My rule is that because of heavy traffic, it is often needed to turn right causing another driver to slow down and that it is ALRIGHT to do that. Therefore I don't feel angry when someone does that to me. In this case I don't feel angry, BECAUSE I do the same thing. If I have to slam on the brakes, that is a different story.

Another reason that people feel angry at another people's behavior is, "projection". Projection is the process where we subconciously blame another person who is not doing anything wrong in order to hide a fault in ourselves.

As an example; when I used to drive to work I would frequently feel angry at a slow moving driver that was in front of me. On reflection, I would realize that the driver in front of me was not doing anything wrong, I was blaming the other driver in order to hide from myself that the problem was in me. I was guilty of procrastination and didn't start for work on time.

When you reflect on an incident where you felt angry at someone and realize (admit to yourself) that you do the same thing, your are following Jesus's teaching in the Lord's Prayer (or, The Our Father, if you our Catholic) to "forgive us our trespasses as we forgive those who trespass against us".

You are also freeing your self psychologically ( forgiving yourself) from the behavior that you also do. There is a psychological principle called "cognitive disonance". What this principle is, is that you can't believe 2 opposite things at the same time.

In this case; if I believe that someone is doing something terrible, that I also do, Then it causes me to believe (sometimes subconciously) that I am terrible for doing this too.

I don't know if you have any religious beliefs or not, but if you do; I found a prayer many years ago that has helped me a lot with this. The prayer goes, "Lord please help my brother/sister (who I am angry at) and forgive me a sinner, for the sake of that brother/sister's prayers. Amen.

This, of course is an actual prayer and should be prayed not just reflected on, but what it does for me is remind me that I do the same thing that the person I am angry at is doing. I often have to pray this prayer more than once, before my emotion of anger is disapated and I can see the situation more clearly.

As an aside. It is more helpful to say that I feel the emotion anger, rather than say I got angry. This is because anger is an emotion, just like feeling sad, happy, afraid, etc. and is separate from the behavior that a person might do when they feel the emotion anger.

This is helpful in being able to choose what behavior we believe is best, rather than act automatically. The other reason that it is helpful to separate the emotion anger from behavior is that most people don't know that and believe that the emotion anger is "bad" because of the negative behavior that some people may do when they feel the emotion anger.

Because of this many people believe that a person shouldn't "get" angry and blame others and themselves for having an emotion that is neither bad or good in itself.

I know that this has been a very long answer but you asked such a good question and seem deserving of as complete an answer as I can give in this relatively small space.

Answer 2

It's very possible it's called projecting which is where you get mad because what you are actually feeling is guilt and if you get down on yourself you become unhappy. Because you don't like yourself for doing bad things.

Answer 3

Because we are a "do as I say, not as I do society"

I'm guilty of it as well :(

Answer 4

Yes, that is really true for me. My mom irritates me because we are so alike.

Answer 5

sometimes, it's human nature i suppose.

can't help but be annoyed by things that people do and accidentally do them ourselves. it's a flaw.

Answer 6

It took a day or two, really? :-P

This is the realization we all come to eventually - if you're lucky, what happens next is you begin to realize that you can do the same thing in reverse.