Anger will lead you to the dark side

If graphic violent fantasies bother you, please do not read.

Sometimes I get angry. Not normally angry, but really, really angry: there is the feeling of more energy flowing through me than my body can hold, and extremely vivid violent images. There is a feeling of buzzing in the head, sort of like some kind of drug (adrenaline?). Some 7 or 8 years ago there was a short period when suppressing this impulse caused physical pain, but this has passed.

Among some other things, this is often triggered by unexpected physical pain or sudden threat thereof.

Yesterday I was walking by Forum and some guy who was smoking there threw his cigarette, which he did not bother to extinguish, right in my direction, missing my leg by centimeters. He did not mean to hit me - just threw a burning cigarette on a sidewalk about three meters from him without even looking.

I immediately went into my "enemy! kill! destroy!" mode, and the very graphic images of assaulting the guy, throwing him on the ground, stomping on him, ripping his nostrils out, scraping his eyes out with a pencil, breaking every joint in his body, etc., started overflowing my mind. My face, apparently, too, because the guy started screaming "sorry, sorry!" and disappeared faster than an evil spirit.

I have no problem suppressing such impulses, at least in the sense of not acting on them (or in general choosing to act according to my much better judgement rather than to my occasionally rather bloodthirsty emotions). But still there is always fear in the back of my mind: what if one day the suppressing does not work? What would have happened if the guy's cigarette had not missed my leg?

It also scares me to think that this kind of ultraviolent impulses happen to everybody else, including people with less self-control. Anu says they do not happen to everybody, but I find it hard to believe that they are particularly rare.