I soon found willing participants to my anger in my toxic work environment. It was no surprise that many felt the same way I did. It took some time to figure out who was a compatriot and a saboteur. I commiserated with my compatriots sharing anger and self-pity for the most part. We did that on company time and off the clock, typically at happy hour events at nearby bars. As time went on, the compatriots became an underground network, of sorts, that served as both an early warning system when trouble was coming and a resource that could spot opportunities to do workarounds with incessant leadership roadblocks. Our network expanded to include kindred staff in our customer organizations.
It worked. We were highly creative and could accomplish many good projects despite the perceived self-interest and ineptitude of leadership. We felt sure that we were doing the right thing. How many times had the director taken us to the brink of near disaster, only to fumble to a marginal solution trumpeting victory? How often had leadership demanded we skirt ethical boundaries established by our professional association?
We firmly believed we were justified, but that came at a high personal cost I did not realize at the time. Anger. Mark Twain once said, “Anger is an acid that can do more harm to the vessel in which it is stored than to anything on which it is poured.”
The anger I felt ranged from red hot poker rage to simmering, seething resentment. It is not an emotion that I can readily turn off or stuff down inside. So it was only natural then to start displacing it. Oh, there were so many targets. The Board I worked with, the politicians I served, the staff that did not all into line, the issues they represented, the successes they claimed. Now, one might get angry at a peer staffer in another organization, but one cannot express anger outrightly to a politician without severe consequences. Still, there were many dysfunctional tools in the toolbox: resentment, passive aggression, deception, manipulation, self-pity, avoidance, gossip, the list is long.
What I did not understand about anger, at least how I processed it, was that the more I displaced it into my external world, the angrier I would become. I remember one instance where I was upset with a series of negative comments from the executive director which led to angrily reaffirming my rightness for being angry with likeminded staffers which led to drinks after work and more angry conversation to talking with my partner and friends that evening about how I was 'wronged' at work which ended in a restless night of tossing and turning. The next day, tired, physically and emotionally hungover, I repeated various parts of this cycle. It escalated into an angry outburst with my direct report supervisor. Later, over dinner with friends, I recounted in excruciating detail, several times over, my pain of being 'wronged'. My friends did not seem to care and happily burbled on about their life activities. I displaced anger onto them, building resentment over their self-centeredness, becoming sullen, trying to casually sabotage their fun. I gave up, went home, and decided to withdraw. What was happening to me? I knew I was unhappy yet I seemed to be powerless over changing it. I only knew how to dig deeper.
It was not long before it began affecting my relationships with my friends and family, particularly in the form of resentment, judgment, confrontation, and gossip. And from there, it spread out to a general sour outlook with the state of affairs in the world. Here was a perfect forum to get stuck in because each day brought fresh news to inflame my pissed-off self.
The litany of reasons for being angry for any particular reason became so numerous that I could not always determine the source or the cause of my anger. The anger response had become so ingrained, so automatic. Like so many other men, I had poorly developed anger coping mechanisms, or they were missing entirely.
I estimate this evolution to angry man took about twelve (12) years from college student to career professional. It was insidious and unnoticeable to me, at least initially. Nothwithstanding the pain and suffering I put myself and others through, I was very successful in my career. I climbed the organizational ladder and received excellent compensation. I had a reputation for good work and getting things accomplished that others could not. I positively impacted the lives of others with my projects and found a modicum of inner satisfaction.
Still, there was a pervasive feeling of unhappiness, a gnawing sense of dread that would wake me up in the middle of most nights.
And then something happened that caused the dam to break.
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