A telling psychological fact about me

is that whenever I feel irritated with someone else, my natural reaction is to write them an email apologizing for how I have acted and how I feel. In part this is a reaction to my desperately felt need to repair whatever rift with the person in question my irritation might have created or simply might represent. But this reaction is also plainly an expression of the manner in which I tend to transfer irritation at individuals around me onto myself. In this way, for me, feeling irritated or angry at someone else is never a stable state of mind. Rather, with time, I will inevitably turn such anger around on myself. For I simply find it easier to bear being angry at myself than at someone else.

The question, then, is why I find it easier to focus my negative emotions inward than to leave them attached to their original targets outside of me. Surely, part of the phenomenon here involves the difficulty I have in acting on anger or other negative emotions when they are directed at others. For instance, when I'm angry at someone else, the natural thing for me to do is to respond to them in ways that express this anger. But to do this - to criticize them or even attack them - is almost impossible for me. So whenever I feel other-directed anger, I feel myself drawn to actions that I simultaneously find impossible to perform. And this seems to explain much of the instability of this state of mind.

On the other hand, I find it quite easy and natural to attack, undermine, and criticize myself. And so when my anger is directed at myself, the actions that my anger brings to mind seem entirely natural to me. Thus, self-directed anger is a much more stable state of mind for me than anger which is direct at others. And this, I think, explains a good deal of my tendency to shift from a state of other-direct anger to a state in which I'm angry at myself. But...

(To Be Continued)