Are you an angry person?

I’ve done my fair amount of shouting in my life. Yelling at the kids, snapping at the wife, shouting to the sky and cursing the gods. You know, the regular stuff. Everyone does it. Some people, usually guys, do it more than normal.

Psychologists tell us that men often process depression through anger, and that’s probably true, but why is that? And what can we do about it?

Well…I’m not sure. If I knew, I’d be doing it, right? But I had a weird thought to share. You’ve heard of the phrase “spectrum of emotion,” and that got be to think about light and color.

Why is a blue object blue?

Physics tells us that it’s not blue. In fact, blue is the one trait in the whole universe we know it doesn’t possess. Anything we see in our world is nothing more than light bouncing off the object and into our eyes. Light is composed of a spectrum of stuff, and one of those is color. When white light hits an object, it’s bombarded by red, orange, yellow, green, blue, indigo, and violet wavelengths. Objects either absorb or reflect these wavelengths. When they’re all reflected back to our eyes, the object appears white. When they’re all absorbed, the object appears black. And when, for instance, they’re all absorbed except for blue, and blue is reflected back at us, we see the object as blue.

But it’s not blue. It doesn’t absorb blue. It absorbed all the other colors within it. Those other color wavelengths are, in a sense, a part of the object. Except blue. Blue was rejected and expelled.

Does emotion work the same way?

What if, rather than color, we’re bombarded with emotional wavelengths? Happy, Sad, Angry, Envy, Disgust, etc. And most of us can absorb most of these wavelengths most of the time. We can absorb them, and process them. But some emotions we can’t all absorb. Some emotions we bounce back.

Is an angry person angry? Do they generate and radiate anger? Or can they just not absorb anger, so they end up rejecting it, and bouncing it back. Like the blue object, others would view them as an angry person. But in reality, angry might be the one thing they’re not, on the inside. They’re not built to process anger. It’s a foreign body and they reject it.

This could be a dumb idea. I’ve had a lot of those. But consider it. What if the person you think is an angry person isn’t angry. And the happy person isn’t happy. And the sad person isn’t sad. They just reflect instead of absorb. Maybe we should approach these people differently. And we can send them wavelengths they can absorb and process, rather than playing a game of Pong between you.

Just a thought.