Drop It
I'm sure I've written about this in my Me Manual before, but it is apparently time to write about it again. Besides, I'm so verbose, that it's difficult for ME to find things in my journal, let alone other people. I have a bad temper. No, it's true! I do! Seriously, though, I've had this problem since I was a child, and it used to be worse. I used to break things.
One time I got so pissed off that I slammed the refrigerator door hard enough that the shelves inside broke. Another time, I systematically walked around the house and turned every piece of furniture I could lift or leverage upside down, including the hidabed sofa (I think I weighed about 80 lbs at the time). Once, I poked my head into my sister's room to tell her something (and I can't remember if I thought it was important so she shouldn't have been a bitch, or if it was something minor, so she shouldn't have been such a bitch) and she got mad at me for interrupting her. So I turned on my heel to leave in a huff, and she yelled after me to shut her door behind me. So I walked back and deliberately slammed the door open, actually pushing the door partway through the wall behind it.
As a teen, I begged my parents to get me a full size punching bag for the garage or the shed so I would have something constructive, or at least not destructive, to take my anger out on. My mom's answer to that was "you just need to learn how to not get angry". So the breaking continued. Until I learned how to hurt with my words.
Now, most people who know me primarly online think that I'm that angry all the time. And I can see why they might think that, if the only view they have of me is when I'm angry. But that's like meeting someone at a bar and only ever seeing them at a bar and thinking that they're drunk all the time. But I do have a temper.
There's a disorder called Intermittent Explosive Disorder. I haven't been formally diagnosed, primarily because I haven't had health insurance since I was a teenager, and even then, our health insurance didn't cover much in the way of psycological health. But if you run down the checklist, it's pretty much me. There are some characteristic build-up signs that distinguish it from other people who feel anger. But this means that I have some warning when I'm about to lose my shit.
As the name implies, sometimes my temper just explodes before I can reign it in. But most of what I show online is deliberate. I allow my anger a place to run here for a few reasons. One is because I want someplace that I can express it, and typing angry blog posts or insulting strangers on the internet is less destructive than the other options. Another is because I want to punish people for their behaviour. A lot of people get away with being jerks because there isn't anyone to stand up to them, no one to show them how much hurt they're causing, and no social penalties for being jerks. If I'm going to have a temper, I can at least direct it where it might do some good. I am that social penalty.
I had a boyfriend, once, who used get physically expressive towards other drivers on the road. When they did something he didn't like, he would shout, flip his middle finger up, shake his fist, and basically let it be known how pissed off he was. I tried explaining how, first of all, they couldn't hear him so he's only shouting at me, and, second, it was rude to act that way since he didn't know why the other driver did what he did - maybe that guy who cut him off is racing to the hospital or something. Also, it was dangerous.
I grew up in gang-ridden California. It wasn't East L.A., but we had our share of gang violence. We were also the state to first coin the term "road rage". It started around the time some guy got into an altercation with a little old lady on the freeway (no idea if she cut him off or there was an accident or what) and he reached into her car, pulled out her poodle, and threw it into the traffic, where it promptly got run over. So acting angry in the car was just a bad idea.
Anyway, my then-boyfriend didn't care & he continued to act like a jackass on the road. Until one day he flipped off those gangbangers I was worried about. First they cut him off & slammed on the brakes. But my boyfriend was a race car driver, so he handled that well. Next they pulled up beside him & swerved into him, trying to run him off the road. Well, he handled that OK too, but now he was really pissed. Then one of the guys leaned out of the car and aimed a gun at him. That finally got him off the freeway and onto the shoulder. He stopped flipping people off on the road after that. As much as I hate being the gangbangers in this analogy, at least I'm not going to put a cap in your ass, I'm just going to yell at you for being a jerk. But my boyfriend had no way to see how much his behaviour was hurting or angering other drivers, until someone with enough balls to show it finally did.
In a more general sense, most of our culture has changed in the direction of more tolerance simply because it became no longer "cool" to be an asshole. When one's peers disapprove of one being a jerk, or there is a chance someone will go off on one for behaving in a certain way, one tends to, over time, stop doing those things that carry a social penalty. So I deliberately direct my temper at the internet to serve as a cautionary tale - "Dude, don't say that! Joreth'll come in here & harsh everyone's mellow!" "That chick be crazy, yo! I better read the profiles to make sure I don't get another one like that!" These people don't tend to see what happens behind the scenes, or inside the heads, of the people they're being jerks to. I take away that veil & show them how their behaviour affects other people & I make them damned uncomfortable for having done it. And I give a voice to people who wish there was some karmic retribution for those sorts of jerks, but who, for whatever reason, can't stand up for themselves.
So, people who know me online think I'm angry often. But in real life, with face-to-face interactions and people I care about, or at least people I want to be social with, I'm actually quite conflict-averse. I really don't like conflict. I don't like losing my temper. It's a very uncomfortable feeling, not just emotionally, but physically. One of the signs of IED that differentiates it from regular anger is a shakey, jittery, unstable sort of feeling. Kind of like getting way too much caffeine.
I also don't like hurting people. I'm a sympathetic crier - I tend to reflect the emotions of people around me, so when someone is hurting, my empathy kicks in and I feel hurt too. I don't like seeing people in pain and it takes effort to dampen that response enough to function sometimes. Just writing that anecdote about the poodle had me crying before the sentence was over because of how distraught I would be if anything happened to my pets, or hell, just the thought of the fear of that poor dog & the anguish of the little old lady was enough. And there I go, tearing up again. My intense feelings of empathy for people who have been hurt are pretty much the impetus behind my anger in the first place. I'm angry because someone has been harmed, and if you're not also angry about that, there's something wrong with you.
But I tend to avoid conflict whenever I can. The reason why this doesn't seem true is because I don't think discomfort, by itself, is reason enough to avoid something, and if the goal is worthy, I'll get into the conflict over the discomfort. But if I could get through life without going through the conflict, I would. It's kind of like how I end up in charge of things. I hate being in charge, but if shit ain't getting done, I'll step up just to get shit done.
Whenever I get into arguments online, if the argument goes on for any length of time, I start to dread the email notification sound, or seeing the (1) in the tab to indicate a response on Twitter or Facebook. It causes such anxiety for me that I have trouble sleeping, and if it goes on for long enough, I'll start avoiding my computer entirely. That's how I ended up with 1,500 unread emails in my inbox currently (down from 2,000 last week) - I got into an email exchange that made me upset & the anxiety made me avoid my inbox until the sheer number of unread emails made it too overwhelming to dive back in, so I continued to avoid it.
The best coping mechanism I have found so far is to notice the warning signs that I'm about to go off, and to leave the situation immediately. In person, this means that I'll turn and walk out of the room. Sometimes mid-sentence. Sometimes in the middle of my sentence. Usually, the person I'm arguing with hates this. But I guarantee they'll hate it when I stay even more. All I need is to be removed from the tension and almost right away, the IED drops away. The act of going through a doorway has some pretty strong psychological effects, not just for my anger, but for people in general. There have been interesting studies on the effects of walking through doorways on memory & mood, but I digress.
In the last couple of years, I have found that even a metaphorical "leaving" can work, but that requires the assistance of the person I'm in the argument with. See, when I leave in a huff, I do not do the cliche "I'm going to give you 5 seconds to come chase me, and then I'll be pissed off at you for that on top of whatever made me leave". When I leave, you better fucking let me leave. But I discovered that I can be prevented from leaving without getting pissed off that you just ignored my explicit wishes if you ask me to stay and just change the situation. That means you have to make a joke, change the subject, turn on the TV, you offer to leave, whatever, just stop the argument right there and put me in a different situation than the one I am trying to leave. This means that you don't get the last word and we don't find a resolution. Just fucking stop.
When I walk out of an argument like that, it's because I recognize that I am about to lose my temper and I will say something that we will both regret. So the person I'm arguing with really needs to let me walk out of an argument if he wants to salvage the relationship. But I can be persueded to "walk out" in a symbolic or metaphorical sense and not physically. Now that the internet has gone almost exclusively to social networking, & static webpages are practically things of the past, learning how to metaphorically "walk out" of an argument is my best defense against my anger turning on people I know & care about while online.
Because I have come to think of the internet as the place where I am allowed to lose my temper, it can be particularly touchy to get into difficult conversations with me online and particularly important to let me "walk out" on a disagreement. But people seem to have a really hard time letting go. Everyone wants to have the last word, everyone wants to defend their point of view, everyone wants to show how the other person is wrong. Yes, I know, "everyone" was hyperbole, don't tell me that you're not one of those people in the comments. I don't care.
I'm especially known on Twitter for my ugly flame wars, but if anyone actually were to follow the thread, a lot of the time you'll see a point at which I tell the other person to drop the subject. I say that I'm done arguing, or I warn them that they really don't want to go down that road with me, or I say to just stop now before they dig too deep, or something along those lines. And, every time I do that, the other person has to say one more motherfucking thing. I'm not asking for an apology or an explanation - I said stop. But the person I'm talking always seems to have to get in one last thing. Sometimes it's a "well fine, if you're going to be that way", or sometimes it's a "I didn't mean to say that, I was trying to say this...", or sometimes it's a "see? Just like a [fill in a demographic category here], can't defend her side/avoid getting emotional/take a joke/discuss this calmly/whatever". And then that's where I go off the deep end.
But it seems that no one can hear "don't go there" or "I'm done with this conversation" or "fuck off" and actually stop talking. I don't care if the person saying "leave me alone" is wrong. When someone says they need to end a conversation, then just end the goddamn conversation. If they are doing that stupid "I'm leaving, but you better chase me" bullshit, don't fucking chase them - teach them to ask for what they want and to stop fucking things up for the rest of us who do actually say what we mean and mean what we say.
One thing in particular can tip me over into the red zone. That's when I feel like I'm repeating myself, like I've had that conversation before and there has been no progress made. Now, most of the time, it's with the same person, so it's reasonable to become frustrated at butting heads & never getting anywhere. But sometimes it's just because I keep hearing the same stupid shit over and over again, and at some point I think "oh for fuck's sake, this isn't new anymore, don't you people read?" I get tired of defending myself or my positions when it has already been done.
With the internet, this should hardly ever happen. But it happens all the time. Instead of Googling or reading one of the many books I've referenced on the subject, I get posed questions as if the questioner has thought up something brilliant that has never been asked before. So sometimes I just say "look, this has been covered before. Go do some reading by people who are actually experts in this field & don't pester me about it until you understand what the subject is." There are a lot of subjects that I understood well enough when listening to form an opinion about it, but not so well that I can teach someone else about it. Not everyone is good at debate and defense, but that doesn't mean that I haven't thought out my positions very carefully or that I don't understand how I arrived at those positions. But it might mean that you shouldn't judge my positions on my ability to defend them - you should, instead, go to the same places I went to learn how I got here. And sometimes it just feels like reinventing the wheel when someone else has already said what I want to say, so I just point people towards that to save myself some time and energy.
I once dated a guy who was all into the woo, only I didn't quite understand how deep into the woo he was when we started dating, and my stance on woo turned radically against in between the time when we started dating, and the couple of years after we broke up when we had the following conversation...
We had discovered that there were certain topics that we just could not discuss because I would get too upset and too pissed off, and the effort it took to keep from causing a scene usually resulted in me crying & unable to talk. Once we broke up, that shouldn't have been a problem, but we were also coworkers & we kept running into each other at work. After a while, the post-breakup emotions faded, but not our differences of non-relationship-stuff opinions. He tried to rebuild an actual friendship, not just an amicable working relationsip, but we still could not discuss these topics. Personally, I see no problem with coworkers agreeing to not discuss non-work topics. It's not like we always have a choice in who are coworkers are, and as long as the job gets done and no one is making things hard on anyone else, we don't have to like each other.
So anyway, he sat down next to me at lunch one day and said he thought he found a solution to our problem. He wanted to be friends, but didn't see how he could be friends with someone that he couldn't talk to about things that were important to him. Well, no disagreement here, but then I didn't really care if we became "friends" again, so long as we were "friendly" and he stopped interfering with my work. So he suggested that I read something or hear him out on something, or, I don't really remember what, but it required me to actually listen to his nonsense. I told him that I had no interest in hearing what he had to say in support of woo. Naturally, he accused me of being close-minded.
So I said "I've heard all the arguments from all the 'best thinkers' your side has to offer - people who have dedicated their lives to studying & defending your position. I feel pretty safe in saying that I don't think you can come up with any argument that I haven't already heard by smarter people than you, arguments that I've heard, thought about, and rejected. So there is no further need to continue to put myself in arguments with you that don't go anywhere & only piss me off."
Thankfully, he simply got up & left without another word. We didn't really talk again for at least another year, at which point he immediately apologized to me for being an asshole, and has continued to apologize to me for being a jerk all those years. He says that he has changed his position on a lot of the things we used to argue about. But I don't ask him for details and he doesn't bring up those specific subjects anymore. I can finally relax around him & work with him is no longer stressful.
My point with this story is that all our debates had already been had by other people. Everything he had come up with, other people had also come up with & other people had already addressed. We were not a couple of brilliant philosophers or experts in some field of science who were thinking up brand new possibilities & philosophies and questions. We were muddling through arguments that smarter people had come up with before us, over and over again. I didn't want to have the same debates that other people had already had.
Every point he had in favor of his woo, some scientist had addressed why it was unlikely or impossible or mistaken and some psychologist or magician or other expert had an explanation for why people came up with that unlikely or impossible or mistaken conclusion. And I was just fucking tired of having the same argument over and over again. It's not that I don't want to hear opposing opinions, it's that I don't want to hear bullshit that has been addressed already as if it's brand new or some smoking gun that'll shoot holes in my opinions, because my opinions were formed already knowing that tidbit, and already having found the response to it. It's tiresome & a waste of energy to engage in debates that have already happened elsewhere. And wasting my time is a really good way to piss me off, so just fucking stop.
So, the tl;dr summary is: I have a bad temper that, when I lose it, I can't always control what I say. I am aware of this, and the way I cope to avoid saying unnecessarily hurtful things to the people I care about is to recognize the warning signs that I'm about to lose my temper and to end the argument immediately. Which means that I don't want you to try and have the last word. If I say I don't want to talk about it, accept that as truth and drop the subject. Even if you're right, even if I'm clearly wrong, even if you think it's unfair that you didn't get your say, even if you have the magic bullet & smoking gun for your side. Just stop and let me back out so I can avoid being a bitch and saying something mean to you.
One time I got so pissed off that I slammed the refrigerator door hard enough that the shelves inside broke. Another time, I systematically walked around the house and turned every piece of furniture I could lift or leverage upside down, including the hidabed sofa (I think I weighed about 80 lbs at the time). Once, I poked my head into my sister's room to tell her something (and I can't remember if I thought it was important so she shouldn't have been a bitch, or if it was something minor, so she shouldn't have been such a bitch) and she got mad at me for interrupting her. So I turned on my heel to leave in a huff, and she yelled after me to shut her door behind me. So I walked back and deliberately slammed the door open, actually pushing the door partway through the wall behind it.
As a teen, I begged my parents to get me a full size punching bag for the garage or the shed so I would have something constructive, or at least not destructive, to take my anger out on. My mom's answer to that was "you just need to learn how to not get angry". So the breaking continued. Until I learned how to hurt with my words.
Now, most people who know me primarly online think that I'm that angry all the time. And I can see why they might think that, if the only view they have of me is when I'm angry. But that's like meeting someone at a bar and only ever seeing them at a bar and thinking that they're drunk all the time. But I do have a temper.
There's a disorder called Intermittent Explosive Disorder. I haven't been formally diagnosed, primarily because I haven't had health insurance since I was a teenager, and even then, our health insurance didn't cover much in the way of psycological health. But if you run down the checklist, it's pretty much me. There are some characteristic build-up signs that distinguish it from other people who feel anger. But this means that I have some warning when I'm about to lose my shit.
As the name implies, sometimes my temper just explodes before I can reign it in. But most of what I show online is deliberate. I allow my anger a place to run here for a few reasons. One is because I want someplace that I can express it, and typing angry blog posts or insulting strangers on the internet is less destructive than the other options. Another is because I want to punish people for their behaviour. A lot of people get away with being jerks because there isn't anyone to stand up to them, no one to show them how much hurt they're causing, and no social penalties for being jerks. If I'm going to have a temper, I can at least direct it where it might do some good. I am that social penalty.
I had a boyfriend, once, who used get physically expressive towards other drivers on the road. When they did something he didn't like, he would shout, flip his middle finger up, shake his fist, and basically let it be known how pissed off he was. I tried explaining how, first of all, they couldn't hear him so he's only shouting at me, and, second, it was rude to act that way since he didn't know why the other driver did what he did - maybe that guy who cut him off is racing to the hospital or something. Also, it was dangerous.
I grew up in gang-ridden California. It wasn't East L.A., but we had our share of gang violence. We were also the state to first coin the term "road rage". It started around the time some guy got into an altercation with a little old lady on the freeway (no idea if she cut him off or there was an accident or what) and he reached into her car, pulled out her poodle, and threw it into the traffic, where it promptly got run over. So acting angry in the car was just a bad idea.
Anyway, my then-boyfriend didn't care & he continued to act like a jackass on the road. Until one day he flipped off those gangbangers I was worried about. First they cut him off & slammed on the brakes. But my boyfriend was a race car driver, so he handled that well. Next they pulled up beside him & swerved into him, trying to run him off the road. Well, he handled that OK too, but now he was really pissed. Then one of the guys leaned out of the car and aimed a gun at him. That finally got him off the freeway and onto the shoulder. He stopped flipping people off on the road after that. As much as I hate being the gangbangers in this analogy, at least I'm not going to put a cap in your ass, I'm just going to yell at you for being a jerk. But my boyfriend had no way to see how much his behaviour was hurting or angering other drivers, until someone with enough balls to show it finally did.
In a more general sense, most of our culture has changed in the direction of more tolerance simply because it became no longer "cool" to be an asshole. When one's peers disapprove of one being a jerk, or there is a chance someone will go off on one for behaving in a certain way, one tends to, over time, stop doing those things that carry a social penalty. So I deliberately direct my temper at the internet to serve as a cautionary tale - "Dude, don't say that! Joreth'll come in here & harsh everyone's mellow!" "That chick be crazy, yo! I better read the profiles to make sure I don't get another one like that!" These people don't tend to see what happens behind the scenes, or inside the heads, of the people they're being jerks to. I take away that veil & show them how their behaviour affects other people & I make them damned uncomfortable for having done it. And I give a voice to people who wish there was some karmic retribution for those sorts of jerks, but who, for whatever reason, can't stand up for themselves.
So, people who know me online think I'm angry often. But in real life, with face-to-face interactions and people I care about, or at least people I want to be social with, I'm actually quite conflict-averse. I really don't like conflict. I don't like losing my temper. It's a very uncomfortable feeling, not just emotionally, but physically. One of the signs of IED that differentiates it from regular anger is a shakey, jittery, unstable sort of feeling. Kind of like getting way too much caffeine.
I also don't like hurting people. I'm a sympathetic crier - I tend to reflect the emotions of people around me, so when someone is hurting, my empathy kicks in and I feel hurt too. I don't like seeing people in pain and it takes effort to dampen that response enough to function sometimes. Just writing that anecdote about the poodle had me crying before the sentence was over because of how distraught I would be if anything happened to my pets, or hell, just the thought of the fear of that poor dog & the anguish of the little old lady was enough. And there I go, tearing up again. My intense feelings of empathy for people who have been hurt are pretty much the impetus behind my anger in the first place. I'm angry because someone has been harmed, and if you're not also angry about that, there's something wrong with you.
But I tend to avoid conflict whenever I can. The reason why this doesn't seem true is because I don't think discomfort, by itself, is reason enough to avoid something, and if the goal is worthy, I'll get into the conflict over the discomfort. But if I could get through life without going through the conflict, I would. It's kind of like how I end up in charge of things. I hate being in charge, but if shit ain't getting done, I'll step up just to get shit done.
Whenever I get into arguments online, if the argument goes on for any length of time, I start to dread the email notification sound, or seeing the (1) in the tab to indicate a response on Twitter or Facebook. It causes such anxiety for me that I have trouble sleeping, and if it goes on for long enough, I'll start avoiding my computer entirely. That's how I ended up with 1,500 unread emails in my inbox currently (down from 2,000 last week) - I got into an email exchange that made me upset & the anxiety made me avoid my inbox until the sheer number of unread emails made it too overwhelming to dive back in, so I continued to avoid it.
The best coping mechanism I have found so far is to notice the warning signs that I'm about to go off, and to leave the situation immediately. In person, this means that I'll turn and walk out of the room. Sometimes mid-sentence. Sometimes in the middle of my sentence. Usually, the person I'm arguing with hates this. But I guarantee they'll hate it when I stay even more. All I need is to be removed from the tension and almost right away, the IED drops away. The act of going through a doorway has some pretty strong psychological effects, not just for my anger, but for people in general. There have been interesting studies on the effects of walking through doorways on memory & mood, but I digress.
In the last couple of years, I have found that even a metaphorical "leaving" can work, but that requires the assistance of the person I'm in the argument with. See, when I leave in a huff, I do not do the cliche "I'm going to give you 5 seconds to come chase me, and then I'll be pissed off at you for that on top of whatever made me leave". When I leave, you better fucking let me leave. But I discovered that I can be prevented from leaving without getting pissed off that you just ignored my explicit wishes if you ask me to stay and just change the situation. That means you have to make a joke, change the subject, turn on the TV, you offer to leave, whatever, just stop the argument right there and put me in a different situation than the one I am trying to leave. This means that you don't get the last word and we don't find a resolution. Just fucking stop.
When I walk out of an argument like that, it's because I recognize that I am about to lose my temper and I will say something that we will both regret. So the person I'm arguing with really needs to let me walk out of an argument if he wants to salvage the relationship. But I can be persueded to "walk out" in a symbolic or metaphorical sense and not physically. Now that the internet has gone almost exclusively to social networking, & static webpages are practically things of the past, learning how to metaphorically "walk out" of an argument is my best defense against my anger turning on people I know & care about while online.
Because I have come to think of the internet as the place where I am allowed to lose my temper, it can be particularly touchy to get into difficult conversations with me online and particularly important to let me "walk out" on a disagreement. But people seem to have a really hard time letting go. Everyone wants to have the last word, everyone wants to defend their point of view, everyone wants to show how the other person is wrong. Yes, I know, "everyone" was hyperbole, don't tell me that you're not one of those people in the comments. I don't care.
I'm especially known on Twitter for my ugly flame wars, but if anyone actually were to follow the thread, a lot of the time you'll see a point at which I tell the other person to drop the subject. I say that I'm done arguing, or I warn them that they really don't want to go down that road with me, or I say to just stop now before they dig too deep, or something along those lines. And, every time I do that, the other person has to say one more motherfucking thing. I'm not asking for an apology or an explanation - I said stop. But the person I'm talking always seems to have to get in one last thing. Sometimes it's a "well fine, if you're going to be that way", or sometimes it's a "I didn't mean to say that, I was trying to say this...", or sometimes it's a "see? Just like a [fill in a demographic category here], can't defend her side/avoid getting emotional/take a joke/discuss this calmly/whatever". And then that's where I go off the deep end.
But it seems that no one can hear "don't go there" or "I'm done with this conversation" or "fuck off" and actually stop talking. I don't care if the person saying "leave me alone" is wrong. When someone says they need to end a conversation, then just end the goddamn conversation. If they are doing that stupid "I'm leaving, but you better chase me" bullshit, don't fucking chase them - teach them to ask for what they want and to stop fucking things up for the rest of us who do actually say what we mean and mean what we say.
One thing in particular can tip me over into the red zone. That's when I feel like I'm repeating myself, like I've had that conversation before and there has been no progress made. Now, most of the time, it's with the same person, so it's reasonable to become frustrated at butting heads & never getting anywhere. But sometimes it's just because I keep hearing the same stupid shit over and over again, and at some point I think "oh for fuck's sake, this isn't new anymore, don't you people read?" I get tired of defending myself or my positions when it has already been done.
With the internet, this should hardly ever happen. But it happens all the time. Instead of Googling or reading one of the many books I've referenced on the subject, I get posed questions as if the questioner has thought up something brilliant that has never been asked before. So sometimes I just say "look, this has been covered before. Go do some reading by people who are actually experts in this field & don't pester me about it until you understand what the subject is." There are a lot of subjects that I understood well enough when listening to form an opinion about it, but not so well that I can teach someone else about it. Not everyone is good at debate and defense, but that doesn't mean that I haven't thought out my positions very carefully or that I don't understand how I arrived at those positions. But it might mean that you shouldn't judge my positions on my ability to defend them - you should, instead, go to the same places I went to learn how I got here. And sometimes it just feels like reinventing the wheel when someone else has already said what I want to say, so I just point people towards that to save myself some time and energy.
I once dated a guy who was all into the woo, only I didn't quite understand how deep into the woo he was when we started dating, and my stance on woo turned radically against in between the time when we started dating, and the couple of years after we broke up when we had the following conversation...
We had discovered that there were certain topics that we just could not discuss because I would get too upset and too pissed off, and the effort it took to keep from causing a scene usually resulted in me crying & unable to talk. Once we broke up, that shouldn't have been a problem, but we were also coworkers & we kept running into each other at work. After a while, the post-breakup emotions faded, but not our differences of non-relationship-stuff opinions. He tried to rebuild an actual friendship, not just an amicable working relationsip, but we still could not discuss these topics. Personally, I see no problem with coworkers agreeing to not discuss non-work topics. It's not like we always have a choice in who are coworkers are, and as long as the job gets done and no one is making things hard on anyone else, we don't have to like each other.
So anyway, he sat down next to me at lunch one day and said he thought he found a solution to our problem. He wanted to be friends, but didn't see how he could be friends with someone that he couldn't talk to about things that were important to him. Well, no disagreement here, but then I didn't really care if we became "friends" again, so long as we were "friendly" and he stopped interfering with my work. So he suggested that I read something or hear him out on something, or, I don't really remember what, but it required me to actually listen to his nonsense. I told him that I had no interest in hearing what he had to say in support of woo. Naturally, he accused me of being close-minded.
So I said "I've heard all the arguments from all the 'best thinkers' your side has to offer - people who have dedicated their lives to studying & defending your position. I feel pretty safe in saying that I don't think you can come up with any argument that I haven't already heard by smarter people than you, arguments that I've heard, thought about, and rejected. So there is no further need to continue to put myself in arguments with you that don't go anywhere & only piss me off."
Thankfully, he simply got up & left without another word. We didn't really talk again for at least another year, at which point he immediately apologized to me for being an asshole, and has continued to apologize to me for being a jerk all those years. He says that he has changed his position on a lot of the things we used to argue about. But I don't ask him for details and he doesn't bring up those specific subjects anymore. I can finally relax around him & work with him is no longer stressful.
My point with this story is that all our debates had already been had by other people. Everything he had come up with, other people had also come up with & other people had already addressed. We were not a couple of brilliant philosophers or experts in some field of science who were thinking up brand new possibilities & philosophies and questions. We were muddling through arguments that smarter people had come up with before us, over and over again. I didn't want to have the same debates that other people had already had.
Every point he had in favor of his woo, some scientist had addressed why it was unlikely or impossible or mistaken and some psychologist or magician or other expert had an explanation for why people came up with that unlikely or impossible or mistaken conclusion. And I was just fucking tired of having the same argument over and over again. It's not that I don't want to hear opposing opinions, it's that I don't want to hear bullshit that has been addressed already as if it's brand new or some smoking gun that'll shoot holes in my opinions, because my opinions were formed already knowing that tidbit, and already having found the response to it. It's tiresome & a waste of energy to engage in debates that have already happened elsewhere. And wasting my time is a really good way to piss me off, so just fucking stop.
So, the tl;dr summary is: I have a bad temper that, when I lose it, I can't always control what I say. I am aware of this, and the way I cope to avoid saying unnecessarily hurtful things to the people I care about is to recognize the warning signs that I'm about to lose my temper and to end the argument immediately. Which means that I don't want you to try and have the last word. If I say I don't want to talk about it, accept that as truth and drop the subject. Even if you're right, even if I'm clearly wrong, even if you think it's unfair that you didn't get your say, even if you have the magic bullet & smoking gun for your side. Just stop and let me back out so I can avoid being a bitch and saying something mean to you.