How do I stop obsessing over something that makes me angry?

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It happened in my Craft of Fiction class on October 4th. In the beginning of class, the teacher, [Name Withheld], turned on music. I found it annoying—since I have sensory defensiveness, I’m particularly sensitive to music I don’t like. I plugged my ears with my pinkies. He saw this and said in a rather bitchy sort of voice, “Is that really necessary?”

I replied, “I get annoyed by music I despise.”

He turned it down slightly, but not really—I could still hear it completely clearly. To me it seemed that he really didn’t care if it bothered me or not. He wasn’t apologetic, wasn’t kind about it. There wasn’t even a real reason for the music to be on in the first place. He didn’t even seem to take into account that I was trying to be selfless, by simply plugging my ears instead of asking him to turn off the music, since he was clearly enjoying it.

A minute later he asked if any of us listened to music when we wrote, and what kinds. People raised hands and said their genres. When I said mine he interrupted me, saying, “We get the point.” I’d said more genres than anyone else, true, but I’d said them all quickly, and hadn’t really taken up any more time than the other people. Plus, when he asked me to stop, I did. (This comes into play later.)

At one point we were discussing how “great” the plot for a story was. I raised my hand and explained something I didn’t like about the plot, how it didn’t work for me--particularly the ending. He asked the class how many other people agreed with me in an irritated voice. There were two or three other hands.

Then one person said, “I disagree with Jonathan because--”

“Jonny,” I corrected. I’d had to correct people about the name like five times now in this class.

“Sorry, I disagree with Jon because--”

“Jonny!” I said again. It was rude, and I didn’t like interrupting her, but I felt that she’d been rude to me for getting my name wrong even right after hearing it. Anyway, she continued on, and that was okay. I don’t mind being disagreed with. I just don’t like people getting my name wrong right after I tell them what it is. (If I get someone’s name wrong I don’t consider it rude for them to interrupt me and correct me. I do not have a double standard about this.)

So then we had a break and the teacher asked me to see him. He proceeded to rant about how I was disrupting the class, reminded me repeatedly that he had 34 other students and that the class wasn’t all about me (in other words he told me a lot of things I already knew); got on my case for listing too many music genres (even though I was answering a question he asked same as anyone else, even though I hadn’t taken up more time than anyone else, even though I had stopped when he’d told me to); said I was acting like an immature child (and saying this in a high pitched voice that showed how angry he was, just like how a child does); lectured me about the bit with me correcting the woman about my name (even after telling me that this class was a community that I had to be a part of, as though a class can be a community when nobody knows each other’s names); and then accused me of trying to get attention, saying that if I did this sort of thing again he’d point to the door and expect me to leave the class because he couldn’t deal with it. He was totally making a scene, which made all that he was talking about seem really hypocritical. It was only after a long, emotional spiel that he finally allowed me to get a word in edgewise. Most of what I wanted to say I didn’t get the chance to say because he kept interrupting me, making judgments about me and my intentions over and over even when I insisted that that wasn’t what I was trying to do. I didn’t understand how he could think I was wanting attention. If I wanted attention I would do something to impress people...did he really think I was stupid enough to think that I would get attention by being negative? He called me a “contrarian” (a word he uses excessively, as well as a word that gets a red underline in Microsoft Word), which is silly because I never intentionally disagree with people. I just happen to dislike most things. He also kept telling me to not “expect” various things. For example he said, “You can’t expect every story we read to click with you.”

I said, “I don’t. But I don’t really like any of these stories.”

“But this is Pushcart! If you don’t like any of these stories, you need to get help.”

This statement alone was unprofessional, self-righteous, and very, very insulting, and it really ticked me off. But I didn’t argue with it. I just said, “And what kind of help should I get?”

“I don’t know, I just think you need help.”

I felt that it was bad enough to tell someone they needed “help” for disagreeing with you about art (since the beauty of art is that it’s all about personal opinion), but to not even give them a suggestion as to how to fix their supposed “problem” is just ridiculous.

I said, “You always say, it’s just your opinion, it doesn’t matter. It’s the same with me. It’s just my meaningless opinion. I’m entitled to them too.”

He then told me, “So put it in a way that helps the class learn,” which didn’t make sense because that’s what I’d been trying to do when I explained why I hadn’t like the plot of the story we read. I might have done a better job of it if he hadn’t taken every negative comment I’d ever made about any of the stories as a personal offense. Whenever I’d say anything bad about a story, he’d be like, “Oh come on,” looking at me with this infuriated expression. So I really don’t think he cared at all how I phrased my negativity; he was just saying it to seem politically correct. The fact that I didn’t like the stories at all was what mattered to him; he just didn’t want to admit it. And the fact that minutes before he’d said that I needed “help” for not liking the stories was even more proof of that.

At one point I did say that I had been disrupting the class, and that I was sorry for it. Before I could finish what I’d said he said, “I accept your apology.” I wasn’t done, though: I wanted him to understand that I wasn’t trying to get attention and that I hadn’t known I was being disruptive, so that this wouldn’t happen in the future and he wouldn’t continue to believe what wasn’t true. Because of my AS I don’t always know it when I’m being rude or disrespectful. But when I tried to explain this to him, he interrupted me again, this time accusing me of wanting an argument. So in other words in his mind it was okay for him to attack me and judge me and insult me and yell at me in front of the entire class, but not okay for me to apologetically explain how his judgments about me were false.

I told him I didn’t want an argument, that I didn’t like arguments. He said, “Here’s what’s happening,” holding up two hands. “You want an argument!” he said with one hand. “No I don’t!” he said with the other hand. “You want an argument!” he said with one hand. “No I don’t!” he said with the other hand. “You want an argument!” he said with one hand. “No I don’t!” he said with the other hand. He repeated this a few more times in the most annoying way possible. He could have just said, “By saying you don’t want an argument you’re arguing,” but no, he had to do it in an annoying way. I felt that he was mocking me.

“But that puts me in a catch-22,” I said, really starting to get frustrated now. “What am I supposed to do, lie and say that I do want an argument?”

He then told me that the class was starting in a dangerous tone that implied that I had to sit down. I’d come up to apologize and this was his response?

I felt like telling him, “You just want your judgments of me to be true because you’ve made up your mind about me. You don’t like me and you want more reasons to not like me, and you want to interpret anything I do to be something despicable somehow.” Then I’d pause, and say, “There. See how it feels to be judged?” Though I had worked very hard in the class, I realized that I simply could spend the next few months being that pent up.

Another factor was that I did not feel that I was learning anything in the class. The book we read, Janet Burroway’s Writing Fiction, was very good, but frankly I read it last year in Creative Writing 301, so it was all review for me. In class, most of what we did was regurgitate what we read in the text and apply it to the story we read for that week, and considering that I never thought that the stories are good examples of the ideas in the book anyway, I rarely felt that I’d learned anything when I walk out of the classroom. (An example: Burroway says that we should always want to find out what happens next in a plot. I did not care to find out what happened next in ANY of the stories. In fact, for most of the stories, the only time I felt anything was at the end, because I always felt like the endings were inconclusive, disappointing, and unsatisfying.)

Another problem was the workshop groups. We were not allowed to give any constructive criticism, yet we were required to say things about our group members’ works. What this meant was that you have to say a paragraph—or in some cases a page—of nothing but positive praise if you wanted to get a good grade. And what this meant was that you can never know for sure if your group members were being honest. You might have made some terrible mistakes in your piece, but you’d never know it because nobody would be able to tell you. I found that had to lie most of the time, because most of the time I found very little to like in my group members’ pieces. That is not to say that there were not a few things I liked; I pointed them out. But there was much that I wished I could say but was not allowed to say, for there were so many ways that these pieces could be improved. I felt that having to say nothing but praise was both disrespectful to them and disrespectful to myself. How was I supposed to learn how to be a great author if nobody told me of the mistakes I made in my writing?

And so I eventually decided to withdraw from the class. I was told that I had to get the paper signed by him, and attached my reasons on the back. (The reasoning is basically similar to what is above, al bit with more angry commentary.) I made an appointment with him to get his signature. So on October 18th, I went to his office. After letting me in, he immediately glanced at the papers on the back of the forum and said that he didn’t agree with the reasons (before he’d even read them through) and so he couldn’t sign the forum. I told him that it didn’t say he had to agree with my reasons, just that he had to agree to let me withdrawal, but he disregarded this. He also told me that he’d already withdrawn me from the class and that the forms were a more “formal” approach to it, he didn’t know if it even mattered or not. (Later I checked at my login at the web site: I was still enrolled in the class. So apparently it did matter.)

Then he said he was interested in having a “discussion,” which I didn’t really want, but I stuck around in the hopes that he’d apologize for what he’d said. But he basically started sucking up to me, telling me that I was smart and that I had been getting such good grades and that I was passionate about writing, and saying that he just thought that some of what I’d said was disruptive to the class environment, but he didn’t have any personal problems with me, that he wanted me to improve my writing, and—

“BS,” I said. “You DO have personal problems with me. You’ve been nothing but disrespectful to me.”

He said that he hadn’t, that he’d been “nothing but empathetic with me” from the start.

“BS!” I said again. “It’s empathetic to tell your students that they quote-unquote ‘need help’ for not liking the stories?”

“That’s not what I said,” he said, “that’s your interpretation of what I said.”

“Those were your exact words!” I said. “I specifically remember them because they pissed me off so much. You said, ‘If you don’t like the pushcart stories, I think you need help.’ And then I even went with it and said, ‘Ok, what kind of help do I need?’ And you told me, ‘I don’t know, I just think you need help.’”

He said, “Well, what I meant was…you need help, I need help, we all need help...everyone in the world needs help.” And he did this awkward laugh. (So in other words instead of apologizing for saying that or saying, “I shouldn’t have said it, I didn’t mean it,” he instead just tried to make it seem like he hadn’t said it at all.)

He seemed like he was trying to keep his calm, even though I was yelling at him, even though my hands were shaking from frustration. This almost made it worse because it just seemed even more like he didn’t care what I had to say or how I felt things were. He tried going back to the complimenting, but this time it was skewed. He said, “You know a lot about writing, but I know a lot more about writing,” as though this meant he was entitled to be disrespectful--really it just made him even worse in my eye, because it showed that he was arrogant about his knowledge. He also praised his communication skills, saying, “It’s my thing.” (At this point I remembered how he’d been casually mentioned the awards he’d won at the beginning of the semester. He seemed, at this point, quite arrogant.)

He also uttered the word “contrarian” and the phrase “35 other students” another few times, told me that he wouldn’t get in trouble just because I’d written bad things about him in the pages I’d stapled, and again insisted that he was being kind and empathetic to me. I told him to stop telling me that and instead show it, to which he replied that he did not take orders from students in his office. So I asked him to show his empathy by reading the paper I’d attached with an open mind, try to understand things from my perspective. He ignored the fact that I’d asked and once again told me that he didn’t take orders from students in his office, and then said that he might read it if I asked—even though I had just asked. So I asked him again, and he said, “You see? Simple!” and then I said, “Yeah that’s why I did it the first time.”

So he read a few sentences and asked if he could reply to it point by point. I shrugged, but before I could give a real answer he replied to the part about him turning on the music at the beginning. His reply was a mess of “your interpretation” and “35 other students” again as though all the students would not be able to learn without the music, as though I’d asked him to turn it off when I specifically hadn’t and was trying to be considerate and LESS selfish by covering my ears, as though the fact that sensory defensiveness was a part of my disability and he’d breached its boundaries didn’t matter.

I felt like I was banging my head against a brick wall by this point, and I think it showed. He said he could see that I was very frustrated but he would not admit any guilt. I told him that I felt that he had disrespected me, and he said that he had not. I told him that I couldn’t believe he wasn’t going to take any blame or apologize at all, and he said, “I’m sorry that you’re angry about your interpretation of what I said.”

He told me that I couldn’t expect everything in life to go my way. I replied, “You don’t need to tell me that, I hate everything about my life.” He said “I’m very sorry to hear that,” and I said, “BS!”

With tears in my voice I told him, “I’m the one with the disability preventing me from having empathy, but I still put myself in your shoes and apologized to you! I admitted that I had disrupted the class and had been rude! I admitted it even though I hadn’t realized I’d been rude at the time, and I tried to get you to understand—”

He said, “And I accepted your apology.”

And I said, “No you didn’t! You accused me of trying to start an argument!”

What followed more or less repeated a lot of what was above, with him completely refusing to admit his hypocrisy. He thought if he told me that I was being disrespectful even though I felt I wasn’t, it was my fault and thus it was totally fine to yell at me in front of the entire class about it; but if I felt disrespected by something he said that he didn’t feel was disrespectful, then he was not at fault because it’s just my interpretation.

I could barely believe it. Did he really think that he wasn’t to blame for anything? Did he really think that telling me that he wasn’t disrespectful to me, when I clearly felt so disrespected, was a way to get through to me? Was he such a hypocrite that he could say that if I felt something he said was disrespectful it wasn’t his fault, but if I didn’t feel that something I said was disrespectful but he did then it was my fault, and was legitimate reason to yell at me an insult me? Was he so absentminded that he could really think that he’d been nothing but respectful to me and that the things he’d said weren’t disrespectful? I’m the one with Asperger’s, I’m the one who has empathy issues, but I was still able to put myself in his shoes and apologize to him. He could not do that for me and he doesn’t have any social disability, except his arrogant, unflinching confidence in his communication skills. In other words, he had less empathy than someone who had a lack of empathy as part of their freaking disability!

Eventually I did blow up, having a total meltdown. My voice cracked and I screeched out, “f**k YOU [NAME WITHHELD]! f**k YOU YOU f*****g PRICK!” He told me then that it was time I left his office. I calmed down rather quickly by my standards and said, “I’m sorry.” He said that he accepted my apology and that he would contact his superiors about what to do about the form, since he didn’t agree with my reasoning (even though he still hadn’t read all of it). I repeated that I was sorry and told him to read it with an open mind. To his credit he still had calm composure even when I exploded, but again, that almost made it feel worse, because it showed how little he cared about my feelings.

The very next morning I found out that he had reported me to the campus security. I got a letter from the University Coordinator for Student Judicial Affairs. I was unsurprised; it wasn’t like I’d felt guilt, though it did irk me that he’d claimed to accept my apology. Outbursts like that one are far from a common thing for me, and considering that I am socially handicapped due to asperger's and don't have a moment of peace due to sensory defensiveness, I hoped that Judicial Affairs would understand.

Thankfully, they did. I’d prepared this whole big “I’m sorry” speech, expecting to not be able to blame him at all for my behavior. But when I got there I was asked for my opinion of what happened that day, so I told them. The woman was very understanding and simply gave me a warning, saying that it was okay as long as it didn't happen again. But if it did, there would be problems.

My contact with the Disabled Students Department saw the teacher and got his side of the story. She said that whether or not what he said was true he said it in a way that made it all seem reasonable so it'd probably be hard for me to win a case against him; I can understand this, especially since I'm too passionate for my own good, and would likely get too angry as soon as it came. She told me some of his responses to it all; most of it was BS. What stuck out was that he'd changed his story again for the "I think you need help" thing: he told her that he'd meant that I needed help understanding why these stories were important to study. This was, of course, complete and utter bunk; he’d had two opportunities to tell me so if that was what he meant, including the day he’d said it in the first place, when I'd specifically asked him what kind of help he meant. He'd said, "I just think you need help." Then when I’d tried to get his signature weeks later, if you remember, he'd said that he'd meant, "You need help, I need help, everyone in the world needs help," which of course was also BS, for if that was the case why say it in the first place, and why say it then (right after I'd confessed to not liking any of the stories much), and why say it like "IF you don't like these stories, you need help"? Apparently he'd realized that this was obviously BS and had tried to repair this by changing his story again, but by now he's contradicted himself so many times that it was obvious he's just trying to cover his ass.

Still, I had decided I was not going to try to get him reprimanded. Why? First of all, I was afraid of blowing up again, and that would be very bad news indeed. The second reason was that I honestly just want to forget about it. I was still very angry, but I did not want to exert any more emotion of it. I felt that it would have been lovely if he were to apologize, or if he were to be punished, or if he were to someway be forced to understand that what he said was not acceptable. But I honestly just wanted to move on.

I wish I knew how to stop. How do you guys stop obsessing over what makes you angry?

I think the most difficult thing for us to move on in this situations is that we know we are being logical and the other person has been illogical and it creates a kind of "cognitive dissidence"<--not sure if that is the right word.

Cognitive dissonance is a psychological state that describes the uncomfortable feeling when a person begins to understand that something the person believes to be true is, in fact, not true.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cognitive_dissonance



Not sure if that's what you meant or not.

I obsess about something else. My feeling is that if I've got time to obsess about past events, I'm not busy enough in the present. So I force myself to do something else. When I was in college, I used to walk laps around the campus at night. Eventually I chose a particular tunnel under one of the buildings and forced myself to end the obsession by the time I emerged from the far side.

Also, I'd stop quoting/referring/etc your original post. It's just feeding the obsession as would any further responses by forum members to the original event.

Despite this though, the anger is diminishing. My doctor put me on antipsychotics, which really did help with the anger which was consuming me last autumn - doesnt take it away completely, but makes it much more bearable. I wouldnt necessarily suggest this route though. I will also be moving away in a few months time, so after that I shouldnt have to see them again and hopefully can make a new life and try to forget about it.

I found RET helpful for me in this regaurd. I had to repeat some truths to myself and learn to except them into my reality. People are not always nice and many of them are insane. Society often rewards these behaviors and reinforces the kinds of insanity(like materialism, need for others constant approval,status and need to constantly socialize on a superficial level). Not ALL people are like this...I try and keep that in mind too.

One thing I would like to do is to describe what I feel you could have done better in the situation. It would be okay for you to get angry at me as I do this - that actually would be the point. It might help you work out your anger at a safe person, who won't get upset if you attack her. It might also help you figure out how to prevent a similar situation in the future.

If I were to do this, it would be perfectly okay for you to disagree with me, and tell me that I don't understand something or that I'm wrong. I'm simply an observer - I really don't know all the circumstances, so of course my judgements may be incorrect. But this still might help you vent your anger in a safe place.

I'd want your permission before I started doing this though. I'd also want you to know that I'll stop if you ask me to, and would like you to do the same for me. Would you be comfortable with this?

Hmm, for me, intense anger is usually a subsitute for another intense emotion that I don't want to feel. It might be fear over the incomprehensibility and powerlessness of your situation in the class. It could be self-doubt and/or guilt over your actions. It could be disappointment over your inability to succeed in a course you enjoyed and felt you were good at because you couldn't navigate the social aspects. It could be feelings of hurt and betrayal from your teacher's actions (at one point did you admire this teacher?).

One thing I would like to do is to describe what I feel you could have done better in the situation. It would be okay for you to get angry at me as I do this - that actually would be the point. It might help you work out your anger at a safe person, who won't get upset if you attack her. It might also help you figure out how to prevent a similar situation in the future.

If I were to do this, it would be perfectly okay for you to disagree with me, and tell me that I don't understand something or that I'm wrong. I'm simply an observer - I really don't know all the circumstances, so of course my judgements may be incorrect. But this still might help you vent your anger in a safe place.

I'd want your permission before I started doing this though. I'd also want you to know that I'll stop if you ask me to, and would like you to do the same for me. Would you be comfortable with this?