I will say it as it is and yes I will stand on it, see, a bad temper is not a personality trait, it is not something you were born with that the rest of us are now obligated to work around, It is not a quirk,and it is not "just how they are." It is a pattern of behaviour that someone has chosen, repeatedly, to not address,and I refuse to keep giving it a pass just because we have normalised it.
We have all met this person, maybe we have even loved this person, the one who flips a table over something small and then says sorry after, like the sorry undoes what just happened, the one who raises their voice in public and then acts confused about why people are uncomfortable, the one who breaks things, says things, does things in the heat of the moment and then turns around with "you know I have a temper" like that sentence is supposed to close the matter. Like naming the problem is the same as fixing it.
Seriously it isn't.
Here's what I think about hot tempers
and I mean this genuinely, not to be harsh, everyone has emotions, E
everyone gets angry, that is human, the difference between a person who gets angry and a person with a "hot temper" isn't the feeling, it is the response to the feeling, and response is a choice, It might not feel like a choice in the moment, but it is, Because that same person who screams at their partner at home somehow manages to hold it together in front of their boss, that same person who throws things when frustrated doesn't do it in public where there are consequences, the control exists, It is just being selectively applied.
That tells you everything and what frustrates me most is how we as a society have turned hot tempers into something almost romantic in certain contexts, the passionate lover, the intense leader, the person who "cares so deeply they can't contain it." We have written songs and movies around this idea that explosive emotion is somehow a sign of depth, It isn't, Depth looks like someone who feels things intensely and has the discipline to process those feelings without making other people collateral damage.
The people around someone with an unmanaged temper pay a price that nobody talks about enough, the child who learns to read the room before they learn to read a book, the partner who monitors their words carefully to avoid triggering an episode, the colleague who stops sharing ideas because the last time didn't go well, These people are being quietly shaped by someone else's refusal to do the work on themselves, and that is not fair, that has never been fair.
Now, can people change? Yes, absolutely yes, anger management is real, therapy is real, self awareness is real, and I have seen people genuinely do the work and become better, that possibility is important and I do not want to close the door on it, But and this is the part people skip over the willingness to change has to come before the excuse stops working, you don't get to keep using your temper as a reason for your behaviour while also claiming you are working on it, at some point the grace period has to end.
As a society, we address this by stopping the excusing, By not laughing it off at family gatherings, by not telling the person on the receiving end to just understand them, by naming it clearly for what it is a problem that belongs to the person with the temper, not to everyone around them.
Temper is not character, and character is the one thing nobody gets to excuse their way out of.
