“That’s My Secret, Captain; I’m Always Angry”
-The Avengers (2012)
“Anger is an emotion characterized by antagonism toward someone or something you feel has deliberately wronged you.”
-some internet definition
I was raised by a woman who openly told others she didn't want me and didn't abort me simply to force my dad to come around sometimes. I was angry.
I was the son of a man who could never get my name right, only showed up when I'd get into trouble just so he could tell me I was getting into trouble the wrong way, and didn't want me being around his “actual children”. I was angry.
I grew up in a neighborhood where every day was a struggle to get a fraction of the respect the other kids received simply by being born the correct race. I was angry.
Juvie trip after juvie trip, frequent school expulsions, periodic homelessness, an asylum commitment, universal abandonment, countless hospitalizations, flawless neglect, variety-pack abuses (pick your flavor), and those are just the easy bullet-point things.
Yes, I was fucking angry.
I was so filled with rage and anger since before I could even form memories that I was actually unable to recognize feeling it. Because I had never known a moment without it scorching my every thought and feeling, I had nothing to contrast it against. This was just what living felt like.
I wanted to hurt people, I wanted them to hurt me, I wanted to hurt myself. Not because any of those made me feel better but rather because that's simply what living meant. That's what life was.
Not only that, but I was addicted to it. Like a heroin addicts baby I was born with that affliction. I'm not using creative language there. The way Heroin works is it causes your brains receptors to become overwhelmed. Your brain then responds by producing less dopamine or eliminating dopamine receptors altogether. Making the fix necessary to function and sometimes survive. Now stay with me. Selective blockers of Norepinephrine, the anger chemical in your brain, inhibit dopamine uptake in the prefrontal cortex. The chemical that allows feelings of pleasure, satisfaction and motivation, the thing that basically controls the development of my memory, mood, sleep, learning, concentration, movement and other body functions, was compromised in my brain. Replaced by something else.
Persistent anger is fundamentally no different than a heroin addiction in this sense and I was an absolute junky. I literally needed it to function.
And just like any recovering addict, I still crave the thing that was killing me, and those around me, both figuratively and literally, to this very day. I miss it. I miss the adrenaline, the rush, the undeserved feeling of righteousness and invulnerability. I miss being that destructive force of nature. I miss being what happened to the world around me rather than the world happening to me.
But that had to end. That had to become my own victim so that what's left of me could move on into a life where that didn't belong.
Am I sufficiently qualified to discuss this?
Stop typing, it was rhetorical.
Sad sob stories aren't my thing so let's get to the real meat of this article. What do we do about being a rage-aholic? How in the Hell did I get from A to B on this one? The whole point of this is to use my experience to suggest a way out for anyone who's ever felt as I have.
The largest hurdle is that the established methods, the few that do exist, are completely useless. Programs and systems written by psychologists to address a problem they've never personally experienced. We’re not talking about just being mad or feeling irritation here. I have over a decade of mandatory investment into a variety of these anger-management programs and all any of them accomplished was making me angry.
Below are five actual steps advised by one of these moronic anger “experts”:
• Admit that you are angry, to yourself and/or to someone else.
• Believe you can control your anger. Tell yourself that you can!
• Calm down. Control your emotions. ...
• Decide how to solve the problem. This step only works once you are calm.
• Express yourself assertively. Ask for what you need.
Imagine the quack telling me this garbage.
“But why are you angry?”
“I'm not angry.”
“You're angry right now”
“How the fuck you gon’ to be tellin’ me what I feel?! How ‘bout you tell me where the fuck you learnt to read minds with your Grimace lookin’ ass?”
I legitimately didn't believe I was angry. This grade school psychotherapy nonsense was for bitchy housewives and nerds without girlfriends. It does absolutely nothing to address criminal levels of anger. “Believe you can control it”, what it are you even talking about? “Calm down”? Who do you think you're talking to? “Decide to solve the problem?” Bitch, you're my problem. The whole thing is based on some ridiculous notion that it's all as simple as some off-switch I didn't notice on the wall.
“Have you tried not being sad?” he says to the manic depressive.
All of these assume that a person is on fire and is able to stop, place a finger on their chin and think, “hmmm, gee golly, I wonder why I'm on fire?” It's a complete disconnect from the reality of the experience.
You're not going to intellectualize a solution to this problem. Its nature is too combustible and irrational and taking deep breaths isn't an option that could possibly occur to the one experiencing it no matter how often people say it. They showed me evidence for year after year after year and nothing stuck. They were the problem, not me.
But if none of that works, then what does?
The real first step is traumatic sadness. Deep, wounding sorrow is the bane of anger. It's the antithesis to rage. It's the energy draining from your body until you're hollow.
Unfortunately it's not something you can force or intentionally create. Like any emotional state, it has to happen organically on its own or not at all. The trick is being able and willing to act when such an opportunity presents itself. It won't last. While temporarily debilitated, addictive anger quickly recovers and brings back the mental fog which obscures it from the host. You have to make breakthroughs before it returns.
I know that's not as clean as most of you would like, however you can't nerd everything into a box with steps and bullet points and conclusions. Not every condition is Pavlov's dog where you can simply train the animal part of your brain to do human stuff.
Which brings us to one of the steps to address this problem whenever the opportunity presents itself. You have to acknowledge you're a monkey. A super smart and highly evolved one, but a monkey nonetheless. If you can't accept that your emotions come from an animal's chemical brain makeup, then there's no sense in reading beyond this point. You're not being honest with the root of the problem which is why intellectuals can only come up with ways to address the symptoms.
When you're able, you also have to accept something else. Total ownership of your life. I've ranted about this before in relation to victimhood but it's a key component to this as well. Like NyQuil, it addresses more than just one issue.
Everything that's ever happened to you is your fault. Everything. Go back to all of the examples I opened up with and understand that I accepted it was all my fault end to end bar nothing. I don't care about your logic and reasoning or any other nonsense you have in telling me it's not. It doesn't matter. Being right is wrong in this instance and you need to get over yourself and that crushing need to be correct. If the pain belongs to me then I own it and if I own it then that means I'm in control. You have to take the emotional blame for everything. You can't put the pain away if the cause doesn't belong to you. Cut off the source and all that's left is addressing what remains.
The next thing was for me personally though I highly believe it applies more universally. Because anger comes from fear as much as from pain, you have to cut off that source as well. Learning how to effectively be violent, self defense, is building a dam in the river. The stronger and more confident you become, the less that fearful river flows. Then, one day, there isn't any left.
Another benefit is the physical fitness aspect. While having a six pack is fun all by itself, that's not actually the point. Exercise releases endorphins which inadvertently inhibit the stimulation-evoked norepinephrine release that keeps your anger fueled. You can't just cut out the bad, something has to fill the void. You're essentially replacing one addiction with another. Keep in mind, you're not learning a new intellectual idea, you're reworking a chemical compound. Just as only a new idea can swap out an old one, so can only new feelings succeed old ones. You can't replace a car's engine with a book about car engines.
A hurdle you'll face though is that it'll never completely go away. You're going to have to learn how to feed what's left to keep it docile. I personally have a heavy bag I work until my shoulders catch fire. Others write the rage out of their system and rip up or delete the finished product. I knew a man who found solace in ripping apart old books he'd bought specifically for that purpose. The point is, once you're far enough along that you can actually see it, it's necessary to manage it without fail. Find your own means and make it a religious doctrine.
Lastly, be the butt of the joke. Now there is a canyon wide difference between a dweeb who uses self-deprecating humor to hide insecurities and a man who doesn't care if you're laughing with him or at him, so long as it's funny. This is the last nail in the coffin. When you can confidently be the punchline and not only be free from suffering negative side effects, but are able to join in and laugh as well, it's over.
I miss it, I'll admit that. Every now and again I'll feel that rush of heat and involuntarily lean into it as if I caught the scent of a favorite dish I haven't enjoyed in years. But that's just something that's always going to be there like muscle memory. The difference is that I can see it now rather than it seeing me.
There's no cure for the human condition, only ways to manage it. That's the secret Captain, we're always angry.
“The whole thing is based on some ridiculous notion that it's all as simple as some off-switch I didn't notice on the wall.”
Absofuckinglutely.
From one recovering rage-aholic to another - you nailed it.
I spent the last few years of a corporate career fuelled by anger.
It was better than caffeine, but caffeine made it worse, and alcohol made it persistent.
Now, with 5 years of sobriety and exercise behind me, I can actually manage my anxiety to a point where I might live past 50.
Fucked up people who know it and accept it AND have have the intelligent wiring to shapeshift it , are the change agents on this planet….