9. Text. Don't Call
That whole impulse control thing is going to take some time. Many of us have to start using little tricks until we get our mouths under control. This why texting is much better than calling. Texting is better than talking face-to-face as well if you're dealing with someone that upsets you. This isn't something you should do forever though. Eventually, you should be in a place where you can control your temper and have conversations with people without flying off the rails. Until then, text instead of calling.
For years, I put my son's mother through hell. I was a drug addict and alcoholic, and she eventually had to leave me. I lied to her, stole from her and put our son in danger because of my substance abuse. When I got sober, I wanted the whole world to praise me because I was now turning my life around. Unfortunately, that's not how it worked out. My son's mother and I have an amazing relationship today, but for the first two years of my sobriety, my name wasn't even Chris to hear. She pretty much just called me a piece of shit.
I have a fear of being disrespected, and I knew I couldn't control what she said to me (see how I slipped foundation 1 and 2 in there?). I couldn't control how she treated me, but I also couldn't control how I'd clap back at her either. I'd say terrible things that I ended up regretting, and it was all bad.
What I started doing was texting because there were a ton of benefits that I found by doing so. The first one was that I could read what I wrote before hitting send. I can write a lot in a text and explain in great detail how upset I am while calling someone names, and my ego tries to make me destroy them by degrading the person. By writing all of these things in a text, I could look at it again and ask myself, "Is this really the person I want to be by sending this?" If the answer was "no", then I could delete it and reply with something else like, "I'm sorry you feel that way."
Note: If you have someone in your life who is constantly instigates a fight, the best thing you can do is not engage. If you really want to upset them, be the bigger person and don't engage.
Now, writing out a text, reading it and deleting it if needed sounds great, I don't know about you, but a lot of times my brain tells me that I'm justified in my anger. This isn't good. The other reason why texting is better is because you can send it to someone else and ask them if the think you should send it to the person. We must always remember that we can't always trust our brain, which is why it's good to get a second opinion before we do something dumb and cause our own problems.
Trust me, there were many times that I sent the text to a friend and asked what they thought, and they told me not to send it, and I called them an idiot. I'd then send it to someone else, and they'd tell me the same thing, and I'd get more angry. I'm the type of person who will ask 15 people the same question until I get the 1 answer that I'm looking for. The thing is, eventually I would realize that I was wrong and shouldn't send that message no matter how justified I felt.
Like I said, my son's mother and I have an amazing relationship today, and I also have an amazing relationship with my only mother today. I truly believe that one of the primary reasons for these amazing relationships is because of the dozens of text messages I never sent.
Before I end this section, I just remembered that I often get push back on this section (mostly from older people because they don't like texting). I get people who say, "But I don't want to text someone. I'd rather call." Well my response to that is that when you can't control your anger, you have lost that privilege. Mental health is not about what we want to do, but it's about what we need to do.
