The family theory when I was little was that I had a particularly bad temper. I believed it. (I no longer do.) I spent over a decade trying and trying to get a grip on it until, when my father had died and there was no one in the house strong enough to stop me, I was afraid I might kill my younger sister in a blind rage. Afraid enough that I thought of an odd emergency measure* that turned out to work very well. I could slow down and make choices just so long as I noticed when I was starting to get angry.

Going on from there, I got an even better collar on getting angry by deciding that I was never allowed to be angry with anything done to me. That took a long time to get better from, once, decades later, I noticed it wasn't a great thing. I still don't get angry often, though, and I still very much dislike the sensation. So/but I can treat anger as an important messenger now.

* I could slow down by imagining I was a cow, largely because I thought it was pretty funny. My sister was very dissatisfied when I ceased to be manipulable into anger: she'd received huge recompensatory payments when I had been, from our mother and from me.