Silvia reminds me about an age old something to do: count to ten—slowly. Some say that can help, but that depends on what we do for those ten seconds. If we can gain a new perception on the situation, it might help. It can also give us ten more seconds to stew and stir our anger to a higher pitch. It also doesn't help if you already slugged the other person and Rocky is down for the count.
This idea also relates to the notion of what gets called "anger management." That clearly implies that the anger will happen, and we need to manage it. That's quite an image. Someone sets fire to a house, gets it going, and tell us to manage it. That's not much of a choice. A more effective choice might appear in the form of not setting the fire in the first place. No fire, no management. Besides that, most if not all of us know when our anger happens, and we can examine why it happens as we do above. When we question our anger, especially the naturalness of anger itself, we critically reflect on the meaning perspective we hold about anger. In that way, we can enter into transformative learning about anger, and we might discover we don't have to manage what we can avoid. We can say "Yes" to maintain our locus of balance, our personal power.
Just in passing, anger and I know each other—quite well, so I don't discuss the idea abstractly. Once after a long day driving a taxi, I walked into my apartment choosing anger like crazy. I threw my substantial bunch of keys on a table near the door. That scarred the table, and I had to look at that evidence every day until I moved. The keys bounced off the table and hit a wall. The keys bounced off the wall and went straight through the picture window. I can't for the life of me remember why I was angry, but I will never forget the sight and sound of that window smashing to bits. It cost me a day's work, and it cost me for the window, and I felt it a very critical moment for me and my anger meaning perspective. That moment brought me to realize that I could not remember any incident of anger having done me any good at all. They all cost me dearly in many ways, and they always cost me dearly in personal power. I certainly could remember the harm as I can remember that window now.
Once I was working on anger with a group of single parents many of whom admitted to carrying a good deal of anger with them most of the time. The discussion was going well, when Barb, my partner in the support group she founded, slammed in. She said she was furious, and she had every right to be. "That guy really pushed my button," she said and looked at me to see if I would like to do some pushing. Everybody stirred but stayed quiet. I drew a button on the board and said, "That guy really pushed your button." Barb walked to the board and pushed the drawn button a number of times. "Yes, he really pushed my button." Satisfied for the moment, she stopped.
After a pause, I asked whose button that was. She said it was hers. I wondered out loud why she had that button hanging out there for anyone to push. We all laughed, and I erased the button, and said that I had never thought about that phrase until that moment. Why would any of us have a button to our anger, and if we have a button or buttons, to what are they connected? When we look at the sources of anger, critically reflect on that anger, the thing to which our buttons are connected, we might disconnect from that something and find ourselves free.
We are all individuals, and so is our anger. Critical reflection on that anger and the meaning perspective it represents is a process in which all of us can engage if we choose to do so.