Goddamn, I hate fighting.

I sincerely dislike how fights affect me, how they make me feel, how they ruin my day, give me the shakes, fill me with fear for my life and my body. Today, at work, an altercation broke out between four people - two at the top of the company, one ex-employee and his employee brother. Pushing, shoving, shouting, death threats, slagging-off of wives, me on the phone to 999 while all this is going on around me and the boss's son, a young boy of 7 or 8 seemingly oblivious to all the aggression going on around him.

I'm writing because I'm interested in how this confrontation severely affected my mood. I felt variously like crying, running away, hiding, fighting, exploding and taking the whole area down with me. It's the fear and escape I'm interested in, simply because they definitely feel like they hark back to when my ex and I argued.

I often tried to get away when we fought. I'd try to leave, to give us both a chance to calm down, to escape the nightmare and get away from all this unneeded aggression. I often wondered why the hell we were fighting; did I do something wrong, some unknown provocation that caused her to flare up? Two times, when I tried to leave, she stopped me. The situations got out of hand and ended up getting physical as described a few paragraphs down here. I think part of my reaction to modern aggression is tied to these two events, to my desire to run away. Even deeper, I think it's tied to growing up seeing my dad often very angry, angry enough to shout, to make my mum cringe and cry, to cause tension and...

God. I can feel it now, that tension, adrenaline on the cusp of release, the flight instinct a hair-trigger away. I can put myself back in that place; young, maybe five or six, hearing my dad shouting and screaming at my mum, feeling the fear that maybe I'd be struck, maybe the family would break apart again, a lot of uncertainty...

Oooh, uncertainty. That sounds strikingly familiar. I haven't got time to explore this now, but that link is important, certainly a discovery that links to many other things and worth looking into in depth soon.