Tag: temper | A Banana Peeled

Me and my temper, part seven

Posted on March 22, 2026 by Minna Hong • 0 Comments

I’m back to talk more about anger and my difficulty in controlling it since my medical crisis. I do have to consider that some of it is purely biological. As I’ve mentioned, I’ve found out that it’s a common side effect of having as stroke. And the war I had in my brain and body the last time I was arguing with my mother felt almost physically impossible to stop. I wrote about it at length in my last post, but I want to talk more about it in this one.

When you’re a weirdo as I am (neurodivergent), it’s difficult to know what is a flaw and what is just partof my personality and does not need to be changed.

For example. When I was younger, I had a really hard time going anywhere because I felt like all my senses were being assaulted all the time. Smells, sounds, and sights that I couldn’t just mute. If someone had told me that I wasn’t being oversensitive or too fussy, but that my brain was just wired differently, that would have helped a great deal. I got scolded often by my mother when I would protest about my environment.

She told me a story about how when I was two or three and my brother was five or six and upwards, she would take us to the State Fair every year. She told me I would be crying and screaming, and I asked why she continued to do it. She said because my brother loved it, and she could not afford a babysitter.

That was my standing in the family in a nutshell. My brother was always more important than I was for several reasons. The first and biggest reason is beacuse he’s the son. Boys were much better than girls. girls were less than useless, and their only worth was to be married off to procreate. Oh, and in my case, to be my mother’s therapist. That’s it. I had no use as a person in and of myself, and I was treated accordingly.

Two. My brother was/is on the spectrum. He was never diagnosed with it (hell, it was barely acknowledged back in the eighties), but he has the classic symptoms. I was the one who clued him into the fact that he was on the spectrum, and this was a few months before I had my medical crisis. He said it changed his life, and it made so many things make sense. My only regret was that I didn’t tell him earlier because I knew decades earlier. It’s just that he displayed such stereotypical behavior for an autistic person, and he knew his son was autistic that I assumed he knew it about himself.

One of the most strenuous arguments K and I have ever (and it was really mild, but we don’t argue0 was about how talking about mental health was so much more open now than when we were younger. Neither of us was saying we should go back to the old days of not talking about it at all, but she was concerned that there was too heavy a reliance on medication. But, also, was there a need to label everything? Both she and her husband deal/have dealt with mental health issues. She pointed out that they got through it with some therapy, yes (on her part), but that was it.

Taming the anger inside, part three

Posted on March 18, 2026 by Minna Hong • 0 Comments

Let’s talk more about rage. I could soften it and talk about it in the socially polite way. “I was having difficulty reining in my anger, and I needed to focus on my breathing to do so.” Here is my post from yesterday in which I discuss all my struggles with my temper. I had it under control for the first twenty years of my life because I had to. It was psychological damaging, but I did what I had to do to get through it.

I had less of a grip on it through my thirties, and Taiji hepled me tap into my anger. Not in a bad way, but in a healthy way. It’s not healthy to hold back your temper to the point where you’re dead inside. Believe me, it isn’t.

For the majority of my life, I was numb. I could feel emotions way down deep, but they were very subdued–as if I was feeling them through a thick layer or twenty of gauze. This was positive emotions as well as negative ones–though I will admit that there were ten times the latter than the former.

I will point out that it’s also probably because I’m neuroatypical, which means I don’t feel things in the same way that other people do. However, I know it was more because of the emotional abuse I got whenever I showed any negative emotion in my family (I’ve mentioned more than once that only my parents were allowed to show their displeasure in any way).

Still. I felt I had a decent handle on it. With my parents, it was avoiding any topic that had the chance to go really wrong, and I could usually spot those within seconds. In general, I’m pretty good at spotting the pitfalls that will out me as a weirdo, alien, and/or freak. Or in the case of my family, just someone who’s completely wrong. Wrong at what? Everything. My mother wanted a daughter-shaped person who embodied the feminine ideals (even though she hated them herself) in order to repair her fractured relationship with her mother (don’t ask).

Somewhere in myy forties, I gave up on my relationship with my mother. (I knew there was no hope with my father and didn’t care at a much earlier age.) I knew that she was not going to change, and I knew that I wasn’t going to ever be the person she wanted me to be.

Side note: My father has dementia. It’s gotten progressively worse (as dementia does). When it first started, I was in a very difficult place with my parents. I have struggled with my relationship with them all my life. I did not know what to do. I mean, Taiji helped me a lot when I first started studying it, but there were limits to it.

Trying to tame the rage inside

Posted on March 16, 2026 by Minna Hong • 0 Comments

I’ve always had a temper; it’s just in my younger years, I was really good at reining it in. Like, inhumanly good. I had to be beacuse I was punished for not doing so. Not physically, but emotionally shamed/chastised for it. I was not allowed to show any negative emotion. If I did, I would be screamed at by my father or my mother would give me the “I’m eating a very sour lemon” face while drawing her lips tight.

Only my parents were allowed to show their displeasure. My father either by shouting or being silent for hours whereas my mother would either cry or pull faces while she complained to me about my father (her marriage). It was during these times that I learned to keep a tight lid on my emotions and all my reactions.

It was so bad, that I had to unlearn a lot of coping mechanisms later in life. In Taiji, my teacher taught us chin-na (joint locks) techniques. We would practice them on each other and tap out when the pain was too much. Except, because I had such control over my reactions, I did not react to the techniques. At all. Now, I’m sure you can see why this might be a problem. The chin-na did not do permanent damage if you let go quickly or before you went past the point of reasonable.

Since I could not tell what that point was, I was in danger of having something broken. I wasn’t trying to be tough or to flex; I truly did not feel anything. There’s one where you grab the thumb and jerk it downwards toward the wrist. I can already almost touch my wrist with my thumb, and I would not notice if someone pushed it a few inches further.

My teacher declared that I could only do it with her and even then she had to tell me to tap out when I thought it was a reasonable point of pain.

Additionally, when I got my tattoos, I would fall asleep much of the time. Or I would find it erotic. The only time the pain was more prevalent was when the tattooist was doing my collarbone. That was excruciating. The rest though? Not a problem. I have four tats. One large one on my left boob. One small one above my stomach. One band of thorns and flames on my left forearm. One rather large band of waves and flames around my right upper arm–with a yin-yang as the medallion joining the two sides.

I want to get another, but the tattooist I used to go to left the state a few decades ago. I’m not sure I want to go through the trouble of finding another one. I don’t go out much because of my incredibly shitty immune system, and I’m not sure I really want another tattoo. Or rather, I do, but I’m not sure I want to go through the bother to get one.

Learning to Bite My Tongue

Posted on August 9, 2017 by Minna Hong • 0 Comments

Remember when you were a kid and your mom told you to count to ten before saying anything when you were angry? Or maybe she was a ‘think before you speak’ kind of woman, instead. Basically the same thing. If you’re like me, you probably scoffed it off as trite. Well, it is trite, but I’m finding value in it these days. Sort of. I’ll explain.

In the past, my relationship with my parents consisted of them saying something and me immediately snapping back defensively. It didn’t matter what they said–I would take it as an attack and respond accordingly. It’s partly because my family is highly critical is the way we talk to each other (me included), so there is a sense of being on the defensive baked into any conversation between any of us. In addition, I have PTSD for several reasons, so I’m prone to lashing out, anyway.

The basis of taiji is to respond to any action with an appropriate reaction, using just enough force to repel the attack and nothing more. It’s called the lazy martial arts because you want to expel the least amount of energy possible for the biggest result. It’s not something I consciously dwell on, but after eight or nine years of study, I’ve soaked it in. In the past, I was near suicidal when one or both of my parents would come visit. You might think it hyperbole, but it isn’t. I couldn’t sleep for days before they came*, and I thought about killing myself to get out of it. I was tense the whole time, and I felt as if I had no control over my anger. I would tell myself to be chill, and next thing I knew, I’d be flying off the handle over the stupidest thing. That would make me feel worse about myself, and I would quickly spiral downwards into the abyss.

Now, I’m tense before they come, but not to the point of wanting to kill myself. It’s more because I really, really, REALLY like to be alone. I’m a happy single, which is one reason I never want to cohabitate with someone, not even a partner. Come to think of it, especially not a partner. A friend, maybe, but not a romantic partner–hell no!

The thing is, I’ve noticed that while I still get irritated by my parents, I’m not flying off the handle nearly as much. I may snap at them one out of ten times, but that’s better than ten out of ten. Half the time, I can give them a calm and reasonable response, and the other forty-percent is filled with a terse, but not angry answer. I find that after they say something, my brain automatically tells me just to digest it a second without saying anything. I’m not consciously telling myself to count to ten or to think before I speak–I’m just automatically doing it. It’s one thing I’ve learned about the way I learn things. I think/work hard about/on it for years, and then it just ‘suddenly’ takes. I don’t consciously decide to do it–it just becomes a part of me.

Same with my interactions with my parents. I’m more able to be calm and to give a reasoned response. Even when I’m upset about something, I’m mostly able to talk about it without shouting. I’m using my words finally! It’s easier with my mother because she’s a psychologist and I was a psych major. We speak the same language, even if it’s her third language and not her first. We can talk about projection and codependency and shit without having to explain the terms. It really is easier when you have the jargon in common.

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