Whence anger?

I had been working to help a young man, age 20, with his anger and “short fuse” problem. He had one of those “character armor” know-it-all-attitude faces that will, on a bad day, bring out the sissy inner child in me. That led me to sometimes produce stumbling lectures that grew more airily meaningless as they went along. But we both seemed to know what to focus on: His father had been a sarcastic, demeaning jerk to him for the first eleven years of his life, until the parents split up, after which a very decent stepfather came in and stayed.

My client had recently lost his girlfriend because of his demeaning attacks. He’d be contemptuous of different absent-minded actions or her failure to know something that should be known. Once he had melted her with a ridicule harangue when she couldn’t name the make of her family’s car, another time when she had “straightened up” the room and put his wallet in a place he never looked.

We reviewed, with emotion, the hurtful and harassing putdowns his father had scoured him with all his young years. We knew that these injuries had stuck, had bent him with grief that froze over with anger. I talked to him about regressive pain and rage process – Daddy, don’t hurt me – but ruled it out because he was, pert mood aside, still too young, dependent and tender to give way to his tenderer child. But I felt there was no other way to work into the compressed coil of grief and tension. I recommended “tying himself to the mast” whenever the short fuse caught fire, literally sit down and let the deeper complexity of feeling (hurt-burnt-needy-frustrated rage is complicated) swamp him with the past, and express it through a boy’s words. Therapists know, or should know, that when a self-medication – whether alcohol or binge-eating or tic behaviors or a rage act-out – is suppressed, a result with be the percolating up of historical buried pain.

This all seemed as right as I was able to get. There was no way that, starting his adult life with a bent back and bleeding wounds, he could just put on a “strength-based” suit of cognitive and action processes and sally forth.

But then the deus ex machina appeared, which derailed me.

“My mother,” he said, “infuriates me with the way she’s always done things.” He described, beautifully, actions of hers that seemed trivial or mundane, but hearing them, I felt an absolutely certain, crazy-made rage. She would remove an almost-empty roll of toilet paper from the bathroom but not replace it with a new one. There he was – six years old – with no necessary supply. She would throw out his old toothbrush and leave the holder empty. She would mop the kitchen floor, using such a great amount of water that the place became a flood zone. It couldn’t dry – it had to evaporate over time! Meanwhile he’d be squishing and splashing to get a snack. I felt a craziness in these behaviors, but the reason they felt crazy was not obvious and I strove, cautiously and haltingly, to understand for both of us. Didn’t she know her little boy had needs? And more, that he had a need for the predictable to be delivered, predictably? And still more: Her failure to be a normal mother who finished things and didn’t do nonsense was crazy. And even deeply more and essentially: Her vacuous obliviousness to his upset was crazy. She always acted as if his frustration did not exist: She couldn’t hear it; it didn’t register in her self-enclosed mind. She’d fix the problem in a simple workaday fashion.

Here’s what we saw: One parent shamed him, whittled him down. And then there was his pleasant mother, the idiosyncratic solipsist, blithely destroying sensible reality for him. He and I realized, through a mind experiment, that had he somehow passively bought into his mother’s existential illogic, he might be impaired now in the most peculiar ways. Possibly gutted, fey or un-masculine, with no sense of the completion of goals. Maybe a felt philosophy of the rightness of not doing, or the completeness of the incomplete. But to his salvation, he had and kept his puzzlement; he never let it slip. It grew and “devolved” into anger, an intolerance of absurd ignorance, of the failure of competence. Anywhere these flaws happened, such as his girlfriend’s forgetting the fucking obvious, made him the un-mothered child, brought back to crazy. And that was an opportunistic injury, allowing the shaming to come marauding in.

The recipe: Confront your mother. Be eloquent with a razor. “That, mother: crazy! That thing you would do, crazy! Nuts, impossible, insane. You gave me a two-plus-two-is-seven childhood. You gave me a ground where a mother doesn’t know she has a son with needs, where a half-circle is closed. You were off in your own world, and I had no one. Feel this now, what I’m telling you. Blow away the clouds that sit between your eyes and your brain.”

That was a session.