Anger Mismanagement
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It is a hot boiling fire welling up behind your eyes and there is nothing on planet earth that you can do to stop it.
Take a guy who gets so angry, when he's been stood up by a girl he likes, that he goes to the basement and punches with all his might over and over and over again into the coarse brick wall until his knuckles are badly bleeding. He is a boiling, burning, flaming, seething, fearsome machine. His wrath has overtaken him, and nothing anyone does can keep him from venting it.
Many kids - and indeed many people generally - have severe anger management problems. They absolutely must act out their rage in a violent, demonstrative way. They must expend their wrathful energy. While they may suffer assaults for a period of time without showing any emotion whatsoever, there comes a point when they cannot keep it in any longer. They must explode, and explode they do.
Kids' are taught how to "behave", sometimes in extraordinarily inappropriate ways. What they are taught less often is how to deal internally with assaults and insults against their person and their character. Behaving means putting on a show. It may mean bottling up your urges to express what you feel in the way you want to express it. It may mean keeping your feelings to yourself, and letting others see only the face that is socially presentable.
But boiling bottles explode.
A child has a breaking point. He may demonstrate a low-flash-point temper while at other times showing remarkable self-control when in the presence of other adults. The signs may be clear that he has wrathful thoughts to express. He may talk of violence in a detached way, betraying the thoughts that brew underneath the surface. What if he talks of shooting up a school and then turning the gun self-wards? Doesn't even the most innocent reference to such thoughts indicate an underlying tension and a brewing fury for the intended victims?
What makes a kid steam? Discipline can do it. Grounding can do it. Being deprived of something you really really want can do it. Teasing can do it. Suffering violence can do it. Poor marks can do it. Taunts and barbs and humiliation and open rebukes can do it. Homework can do it. Exams can do it. A broken heart can do it. A lost game can do it. Lower status on the team can do it. Wounded pride can do it. Knowing you made a fool of yourself can do it.
Kids have so many things to make them angry. It's wonder any of them hold it in.
Don't you remember kids at school who really got on your nerves. Perhaps they pestered you time and again until you couldn't look at them for fear of losing it altogether. In your secret thoughts, when you reflected on these schoolmates, perhaps you saw yourself vanquishing them, beating them to a pulp, and putting an end to their bullcrap once and for all.
Can you imagine the impact of constant teasing on a kid? What if a kid is teased about his size, or his hair color, or his parents' profession, or his name, or his performance in school? Maybe his way of trying to avoid direct confrontation is to make a joke out of it. But for how many kids is self-reproaching laughter not heartfelt? How many only pretend it doesn't hurt when in reality the barbs cut to the core?
As you cultivate your secret wishes of revenge in the only place you can get away with cultivating them - your private thoughts - you get carried away in fantasy. Perhaps you will line them up, tie them down, beat them black and blue, slash their faces, mock their cries of agony, and mow them down. And the thoughts may be disturbingly delicious because there is so much pent-up anger to release on the bastards. The thoughts may bring relief; but unfortunately, they also reinforce themselves - so the next time you're taunted, what comes to mind first is the fantasy of revenge.
And pretty soon, revenge is the dominant thought in your mind.
People preoccupied with the fantasy of revenge may let it slip more and more: in stories to friends, in hints to classmates, in sketches, in movie choices, in TV-show picks, in musical taste. Everything feeds the fantasy, which eats up energy as a way to eliminate the pain.
And pretty soon, it doesn't take much at all to set you off. The least little ribbing, and what flashes to mind is the entire fantasy of revenge that you've built up in your mind. You've cultivated the fantasy so well that you imagine yourself more and more capable of acting it out in real life. Your character in the story has become more and more invincible as the fantasy has progressed. All you need is the slightest excuse, and you will spring into action.
In fact, the more you feed the fantasy with increasingly explicit reinforcers for the fantasy - more-violent movies, more-violent sounds - the more you need to find an even more potent experience to reinforce the fantasy of effective revenge. And pretty soon, the only experience you can see to do the trick is a real-life experience: actual revenge.
The angry young child wears his attitude like a chip on his shoulder. He has been wronged. He has cultivated his memories of suffering. It is not water off a duck's back. It is water in a steadily-filling balloon, pressing more and more and more against the sides until the balloon can't hold it anymore.
Picture the one who has cultivated his self-pity so well that you just know he is a timebomb waiting to explode. His talk betrays the fact that he is storing the memories of every little insult. He forgets nothing. Every little incident is another reason to get even with the world. And one day you see him explode. Perhaps he is given a relatively moderate insult from a passer-by, or perhaps a punch in the nose, and that's all it takes to let loose the demon that's been hibernating underneath for so long. He punches the other fellow so hard and so often and so rapidly that you begin to fear what he might do. There is much blood from the other kid, and yet the punching does not stop. Finally, the bloodied one gets away and the exploded timebomb is left standing in a daze, breathing hard, looking ashen, cursing and muttering against the other one, obviously in a completely altered state of consciousness. His emotions are so close to the surface that he is on the brink of tears - tears of frustration or anger or self-reproach or hatred or what, you can't say. But it is wild!
What if he had killed the fellow? What if he had chased him down and shot him? What if he had killed him unintentionally and felt so angry with the fellow for dying and with himself for killing and with the world for being the way it is and with fate for ruining his life so absolutely, that he went into a state of stupor, striking out robotically at the fellow and the world and himself in no particular direction, simply acting out remotely all the thoughts and dreams and fantasies he had ever thought or experienced or seen on TV or read about? Could it not be argued that there was a fundamental breach inside him between his usual self and the force that is controlling him? Does Fate take over inside the mind and lead the person through a downward spiral of barely-conscious acts until there is simply no more energy to expend?
We usually think of a burst of rage being able to precipitate only a short period of uncontrolled acts. But what if rage, once expressed in a deadly way, becomes its own engine and cuts off the normal thought process that usually governs behavior? Anger mismanagement may then lie at the root of a more sustained set of behaviors that is nevertheless beyond the individual's capacity to control it.
Bursts of rage are able to end because the events feeding the rage cease. The boy punching the brick wall is getting no feedback from the wall, except the normal pain in his hands that he is just starting to feel. There is no further aggravation because he is in a controlled environment. The boy beating up the other fellow finds that the other fellow is too weak to put up an adequate fight and finally runs away altogether - and this lack of sustained stimulation of rage allows him to calm down. The fuel feeding the fire is cut off, and the fire starts to burn itself out.
But what if the perpetrator realizes he's committed a serious, irreparable crime in the process of venting his rage? His heart is up in his mouth because he knows what he's done. The fear of punishment starts to grow. The system points an accusing finger at him in his mind, and once again he stands singled-out, accused, maligned, guilty. The guilt and fear serve to feed the rage and push him into a deeper trance than the one that accompanied the original act. And since this guilt and these fears cannot be assuaged, there is nothing to unfeed the fuel. There is no exit from his altered state of consciousness. The world is spinning around him. He is not thinking straight, and he is not capable of getting a grip on himself. All the moments of fantasy and fear and wrath that have filled his life now come shooting back through his mind in a blazing whirlwind without sequence or rationality or mercy. He is not, at this moment, sane.
Does this explain how a good kid, who perhaps has some anger management difficulties, can perpetrate such a hideous crime? And doesn't it also give us a way of approaching him with understanding and an opportunity for restoration? We cannot condone what he did. We cannot undo what he did. We cannot deaden the pain of the consequences of what he did. But we can make a deliberate decision to honor the victims' memory by redeeming the boy and seeking ways to address anger mismanagement problems in others. The ultimate solution to anger is neutralization - and anger is neutralized by kindness.
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