the people are very calm and nice to each other and to Tourists, it was a pleasure to travel around. It's a very safe place, crime and stealing is almost nonexistent. Disagreements are solved in a quite calm way.

You may have seen a tourist's version of the island, and have been fortunate enough to not encounter violence or theft. Both are very common. People are very quick to anger on the road. Theft and flouting rules are common. Don't get me wrong, we have many good qualities (for example, we're known for being helpful and hospitable), but calmness is not one of them!

I don't think anyone knows everything there is to know about being human. Who does? People often act as if they know everything or at least know better, even when they shouldn't.

But most people have okay coping skills as tragedy was common place for hundreds of thousands of years. Using the same strategies can re-victimize them. Think of PTSD. The problem with PTSD is an inability of the mind to let go--a person is always reliving the moment in terms of stressfulness, if not literal imagery and thoughts. Forcing someone to sit in a room and discuss a tragic experience whose memory of the experience has already, naturally begun to fade into the background is its own tragedy.

That's my $0.02. Maybe I'm just naive.

Welcome to the human condition!

In the list of intentional homicides Sri Lanka indeed ranks higher than I expected, rank 132 of 230: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_intention...

About being calm: I agree about the anger on roads. Except for that my impression was a calm and peaceful one -- maybe what you encounter as violent is still OK from my culturally distinct perspective? Do you think there are many 'fights'/arguments where people are shouting in the public, or would such a thing happen at home?

And what is your opinion about the high suicide rate?

There are many fights and tense situations, but more in places like inner city Colombo than in Kandy or Galle.

RE: suicide: hard to say. Our alcohol consumption and suicide stats are both extremely high. But even after living here all my life, it's hard to pin down a theory about why this is. My personal belief is that the average Sri Lankan's belief in Karma and astrological fate results in a defeatist attitude. We often hear the phrase "I/he/she probably did something in a past life to deserve this" in reference to tragedy, hardship or misfortune.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_intention...

As far as I understand, the best way to deal with anger is never to act on it and distract yourself till it passes.

The thing people talk about as suppressing anger is not actually suppressing. It's more like polishing it, sharpening, watering like a plant, fanning like a flame so it's ready for the time you will act on it. And that's definitely not healthy.

Acting on anger to provide outlet is also bad because it increases probability of getting angry and acting angry in the future.

The best way is actually suppressing anger. Observing, I'm angry. Deciding I'm never gonna act on this anger. So there's no point of holding onto it. Let's do something else till it extinguishes.

You need to acknowledge to yourself that you are angry but only for the purpose of making a decission not to act on it and possibly postpone actions that you being angry might influence adversely.

Talking it through will only increase likelyhood that the memory of being angry will stick with you.

Bottling up your feelings is the other thing I describe where you keep your anger instead of letting it dissolve.

For example, if you are dangerously cut off by someone on the highway and you speed ahead to yell at them, your blood is boiling with the expectation of a confrontation... until you stop at the next light and realize the person is having a seizure and actually needs help! In that moment your new understanding of the situation melts your anger away very very effectively.

In general, if you practice and train your mind to seek understanding of the circumstances surrounding the behavior that's making you angry, your anger will melt.

What I do is I try to keep myself from building larger narrative around it with malicious reckless idiot drivers as the villains.

Then each instance of anger lingers usually for roughly a day and then gets forgotten.

However, it's complicated because these studies generally focus on length of emotional response rather than complex, downstream effects. That is, they assume that the goal is to stop anger state; by that assumption, it's better to adopt a sort of distress tolerance approach than to act on it. But what about long-term effects on relationships and communication? Where does one draw the line? Stonewalling and cutting off communication is a strong predictor of relationship dissolution for example, even relative to intense expressive patterns. So if your response is to always approach your anger robotically and to shut it down, does it then lead to passive aggressive responses, which can be even worse?

There's also an important distinction between anger and aggression, which are different and have different associations empirically, even though people tend to conflate the two. This isn't unreasonable, because I'm not sure at what point you draw the line.

As a parent of a toddler, this article had me thinking a lot, and I'm not sure what I think. Lying to your child, for example, is manipulative. Is it better to express your anger or to lie to them and tell them a monster will bite off their fingers? Of course a child who's cognitively not developed enough to understand will become terrified, because they believe it. But is living in real fear of a disfiguring monster over a minor transgression really less aggressive than simply visibly expressing anger? Or is it just a manipulative aggressive response on the part of the parent?

I really don't know the answers to these types of questions. I wish I did.

[0]There's a good book on this subject called "Difficult Conversations": https://www.amazon.com/Difficult-Conversations-Discuss-What-...

When I am angry I am self aware enough to wait until the chemicals are gone in order to discuss things. I don't think this is unhealthy in any way. In fact, I usually don't like the feeling of anger and look forward with happiness to the calm that will follow. It is interesting that the original source of anger becomes resolved once the chemicals are gone. I found it interesting that the Inuits do the same thing.

You can't see it as a tourist there (at least I couldn't, but I didn't travel to north where most bad stuff happened). But generally this ancient mindset of 'not losing the face' can only lead to misery and desperation down the path, no matter the location. It seems its slowly dying which should be a net gain for societies still harboring it

Same for Cambodia with the Khmer Rouge.

Definetly the case for me. I was always proud of my kindness to others and almost complete inability to act in aggressive way — right until I finally went into therapy because of depression-like symptoms (I was never diagnosed with full-on clinical depression, so I abstain from using this term). Turns out, stopping your impulses because of your desire to be "nice" and please everyone around you is NOT the most emotionally healthy thing you could do! It's certainly good for others, but not for yourself.

So, now, in therapy, I re-learn exactly the things that these inuit children learn to avoid. At 30, I train to act out, to raise my voice, to listen to my emotions of anger and frustration and giving them a legitimate outlet, instead of pushing them down and letting them rot somewhere inside (often breaking out in awful passive-agressive ways that I don't even notice).

I don't think you're learning to express your anger the way a 2 year old impulsively would.

In case of the afore mentioned group of girls: they have a lot of pressure on them from family (basically to be "perfect" for some often arranged'ish marriage).

It’s comparable to Russia in crime statistics. It’s not exactly great, but not bad either. I think almost the entire norther Europe are far superior to Sri Lanka. But I guess it is much better than most of India.

Carl Sagan Dragon fallacy (1) reincarnation may be as real as not existing. Buddhism was mainly a way to solve India caste problem.

(1) Carl Sagan, The Demon Haunted World