Why do I get "anger flinches"? How do I fix it?

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I have this weird thing that I call "anger flinches". I'm wondering if other people here have them or know more about it.

Basically, whenever I think about something that makes me angry, embarrassed, humiliated, or ashamed, I suddenly get a short burst of anger, and my body flinches. Usually within 1 second I do something like slam the table, yell out a curse word, raise my arms up and down, or clap my hands loudly. But after that's done, I act like nothing happened and think about something else. This is a huge problem, cause I sometimes do this in public and I startle people really bad.

The only way for me to prevent this is if I don't think about anything negative at all, but it's still hard sometimes because my train of thought unconsciously thinks back to a bad memory, and an anger flinch happens.

The silly thing is, a lot of these "bad memories" are just little mishaps like that moment in middle school when I spilt my drink all over a classmate's clothes, or that moment in high school where I said something really stupid in class. These mistakes are considered forgivable by many, but the problem is I'm very overly-critical of myself, and I still can't forgive myself for these moments. It's hard for me to forget those negative emotions I felt even though it happened years ago and everyone else forgot about it.

So anyone know how I can stop this from happening? I'd also like to hear other people's experience of it.

Thinking back to years ago, I remembered I actually asked this question to other aspies on Gamefaqs.



So yeah, apparently I'm not the only one who has this quirk. I feel like this is a quirk that any neurotypical can have, except my autism makes me more sensitive to it.

Sorry if this all sounds strange, but I really want to understand what's going on, cause I feel like it's getting worse and worse lately.

You answered it yourself, forgive yourself.

Secondly train yourself to do the flinch response that is not going to startle or harm or break things. Slamming is not one of those things.

Thirdly, which is tied to the first thing, the anger is not seemingly so much about the event but your reaction to the event. Forgiving yourself or someone else is a good way to deal with it, but before you get there, recognize that you are no longer in that situation and it does not matter anymore. Bringing yourself back to the present before you do the flinch might be viable. Whatever is one of your stronger senses, vision, sound, choose something in your current environment to focus on. This will hopefully give you more time between the anger and the flinch so that the anger may go away naturally.
The anger you described is actually a secondary emotion. The primary emotion to the event you are recalling might be anger, but your further anger is about your actions. That makes it secondary. Secondary emotions arise from judgements, and judgements are thoughts, and thoughts you can control. Practice letting go of judgements you have, (and you'll have them all the time), at any given point in time, explicitly not when you are angry to the point of flinching. That way you will naturally learn to know what judgements you often have and how to control them in 'easy' situations.

Lastly, but perhaps most importantly, you might only be perceiving the icing on the cake. Like, whenever you think about an angering thing, will that same thought, without fail, cause a flinch? I doubt it. If you are like me, you walk around unaware of your own emotions and body state until the emotion is overwhelming. This is a huge issue for me because once I notice say, anger, it has often grown beyond a point where control of it is easy or sometimes possible. But if I notice when I'm mildly annoyed instead, I can then make use of lots and lots of techniques to prevent the anger from growing. Like judgement diffusion I mentioned above; it's easy when my emotions aren't strong.
Basically, work on noticing first when you are mildly annoyed so that you know you need to take steps to prevent feeling out of control.

The very fact that you say the anger diffuses so quickly could itself be a sign that you just do not recognize milder forms of it.

My 2 cents from my dbt class.