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.This is the anger you might feel when someone takes you for granted,teases you unmercifully, takes advantage of your good nature, makesdemands as a matter of course or disregards your feelings.This is theanger you might feel, but will rarely express to the person at the time itis happening.If you ve been practising the suppression of anger since you were lit-tle, you ll be especially adept at hiding it as an adult.You swallow thehurts, turn away from the insults; you may even deny that you feel angryat all.Many people never show their anger, but nobody never gets angry.Restrained anger festers.The longer it festers, the bigger it grows; Not Nice/Not Nasty | 95and of course the bigger it grows, the more space it needs.Until finally,one day, there s no more room and all that suppression and sublimationgets knocked out of the way and the anger comes whooshing out. Where did that come from? you might say to yourself as this rage takescontrol and knocks you out of the way as well.Except that it s no longer as simple as saying, for instance, You know,I was really angry that you didn t include me in that strategy meetingyesterday; I feel it was really important for me to have been there.Instead, a swamp of resentment will froth out at some distant time inthe future, probably not even directed at the person who was the orig-inal cause of it.You get swept up in a tidal wave of emotion that causesyou to behave in ways you will later regret.I don t know what happened, something justcame over meJohn s story is a good example of what we mean.John is a very caring guy.Too caring.He ll do anything foranyone and appears to do it cheerfully.If Daniel, his lover,needs a shirt ironed at the last minute because he forgotto do one the night before, John will be late for his ownjob (he s a computer technician) to do it for him; if his par-ents ring him up at the last minute and ask him to takethem shopping, John will put his own plans aside anddrive over; if his brother mentions that he has no one togo with to watch his young nephew s football match onSaturday, John will go along even though he hates foot-ball; at work if there s a crash on someone s computer, hisfellow technicians all turn to John because he s so good ina crisis and off he goes to sort out the problem.Everyone knows what a good egg John is; he ll do any-thing for you, and he usually ends up doing just that.Because John never mentions to anyone that he doesn twant to iron the shirt, do the shopping, watch football orfix the blasted computer, he keeps getting asked.And themore he s asked, the more he resents it.He can t believe 96 | The Nice Factorthat people don t see how overworked he is and how he dlike someone to consider him for a change.But peopledeal with what he shows them which is that he likes to dothings for people.It wouldn t be so bad if he could say no every once in awhile, but he can t even do that, so the resentment justbuilds and builds without an outlet.Every now and then however, something happenswhich John can t figure out for the life of him.Heexplodes.He thinks he s fine, everything is going alongsmoothly and then he snaps.And always in the mostunexpected circumstances.Once he was in a shop buying some office supplies,the shop assistant wasn t being very helpful and Johnbecame enraged, spewing forth a terrible torrent of ver-bal abuse about her incompetence, how did she ever geta job in the first place, she has the IQ of a cucumber, andother words too impolite for this book.The tirade lastedfor about five minutes, he stomped out of the shop andthen it was over as quickly as it began, like a fierce tropi-cal storm.Walking down the street John felt awful, his head wasfilled with shameful thoughts: Should I go back and apol-ogise? Should I just go home and hide? I ll never be ableto show my face in there again. And of course, I don tknow what happened, something just came over me.Another time when he was feeling particularly harassed,he interrupted a job he was concentrating on to pick up apersistently ringing phone in his department.It was some-one from another department with an urgent computercrisis who needed someone to get up there right away.Without even thinking, John screamed, Fix your ownbloody computer! and slammed down the phone.Thenhe had to go back and proffer an abject, grovellingapology so that he wouldn t get the sack.And finally, John was preparing for a dinner party withDaniel when he realised that Daniel had bought the Not Nice/Not Nasty | 97wrong wine.That did it John was in a rage about thewine, he couldn t trust Daniel to do anything right, theone little thing he d asked him to do and he d managedto screw it up.But it didn t stop there.From out of nowhere Danielheard about every wrongdoing for the past six months,including the unironed shirts.He heard about all thetimes he was late home from work without phoning, hisbad driving, the fact that he ducked out of the Saturdayfootball matches and that he was never interested inJohn s day.Daniel reeled back from the onslaught but he also gotreeled into an argument which had no place to go butescalation, indignation and finally tears.And as usual, Johnended up apologising for what had come over him.John represents the kind of person who is religiously nice and alwaysaccommodating, right up until they can t take it any more and then outof nowhere all the stored resentment gets expressed in totally inappro-priate ways.Either an innocent bystander is the recipient or the guiltyparty is the recipient but over something completely unrelated to theincident that caused the anger in the first place.Nice people can stay nice for only so long before something has togive.If they keep all that anger bottled up the bottle will explode andsomeone (usually the Johns of this world) will get hurt.I never get angrySometimes the bottle can implode.By that we mean that the resent-ment and rage gets expressed inwardly instead of outwardly.The furyhappens inside you, not in the real world.This is when you seethe aboutwhat is happening to you, but the storehouse of rage-filled feelings stayslocked within you.You might plot revenge, torture or murder but nohint of that ever passes your lips.You suffer in total silence.Not even if you are severely provoked willyou let anyone know of the raging turmoil that s going on inside of you.All the dialogue is happening internally
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