In one of the Marvel movies, Banner looks at one of the other characters and asks, “Do you want to know my secret? I’m always angry.”
That line has always made me rather sad. There are many people in our world who were never taught how to “get their angries out” as we used to call it when the boys were little. Angries left inside can turn the best of us into an angry, raging hulk. I know this from experience…it happened to me once, when I was in college, and I swore then that it would never happen again.
Because of not getting their angries out, many people walk around more than half filled with anger, and it almost fills some to the brim, so there’s only a small space left for other emotions. As a result, all it takes is a wrong word or action, likely something relatively small, to push them over the edge and turn them into the hulk.
Last night, I revised the history with someone close to me. In my imagination, I went back to the very early days of our relationship and we had a talk about their angries and about finding creative outlets to let the angries out. We talked about safe ways to release the pressure, so the hulk wasn’t always on the edge of wanting to come out.
Today, we had that talk. I didn’t start it, didn’t bring it on. We were talking about someone else, when my friend paused, looked at me, and started applying the same things we’d just talked about to themselves. That led to talking about how too many of us suppress our emotions instead of finding safe outlets, ideas for safe outlets, and the results of not having a safe outlet for emotions. We talked about how sometimes the results of “stuffing” (their word for not doing anything with the angries) mean you’re always just one straw away from exploding and ways to change that. Honestly, it was an amazing conversation, and not one I ever expected to have, except in my imagination.
