Anger Management Bi-Weekly

Or is that SEMI-weekly? I can never figure that out! Well, whichever one is twice a month, that's the one I'm shooting for. Excuse me... AIMING for.

And that's also what I'm aiming for in my now VOLUNTARY anger management meeting. It needs a new name, though... what we do there is so much more than management of anger. We console the sorrowful. We congratulate the triumphant. We encourage the effort. We suggest alternate strategies to better deal with stress. We repair friendships and massage relationships.

We are the New Age woo-woo fix-it crew!

And don't think all the handyman work is coming from the facilitators... the therapists... the psychologists... oh, whatever name you give them! Nu-uh! Much of the good advice is uttered from one Angry Managed to the other. We have much to learn, but we also have much to teach.

My first lesson-- when someone has an altercation of some kind and is forcefully encouraged to come to a 52 week anger management session, the person he had the altercation with has to attend a 52 week session as well! Sound extreme? Hear me out.

The number of angry people who actively seek out angry encounters is pretty small. Far larger is the number of people who are walking around, outwardly calm, but on the inside are just ready to snap and awaiting some kind of impetus. While it's true that a smiling, friendly person just MIGHT cause that breaking point, it is far more likely that an encounter happened because TWO angry people who were ready to snap bumped into each other. Wrong time, wrong place.

Whoever hits or hollers first, loses.

Unfortunately, while the arrested and punished party receives emotional help for his issues (via 52 weeks of anger management therapy), the other one receives nothing... nothing but the black eye, that is. And a bruised ocular region will not help the person with their own anger issues.

So yeah... whenever there's a fight, BOTH people gotta go to AM classes. And that can happen in the PM as well (tee-hee). It's good for both of you.

It's like castor oil for the emotions.

You see, there's no such thing as an innocent party (for the most part-- no absolutes in this blog please!). If there's a dispute, it's rarely between someone with one strong opinion and another with NO opinion whatsoever-- no, violence happens when TWO people are angry (once again, MOST of the time).

I realize that the reader can imagine scenarios where one person is just an evil bully, picking on innocents left and right, leaving a wake of hurt and damaged people in his path... and like I say, I'm certain that occasionally happens. OCCASIONALLY. The far more likely scenario is that there is a buildup of frustration and other emotions within the violent person that BURSTS out at moments of heightened emotion, usually followed by immediate regret.

Regret, you say? Don't you mean regret at the punishment about to be meted out by the criminal justice system?

Well, sure... but that's not the only kind, nor the most important. Most violent people are GOOD people pushed to do BAD things. That is a valuable fact, and it goes a long way to preventing a permanent label from being affixed to the violent person. 

As it turns out, most violent encounters end with sincere regret at the violent person's own inability to control their emotions, regret at the physical damage to the person they have just caused, regret at the emotional damaging of the relationship with that person and about a dozen other feelings of personal failure. The violent person is going over and over the last few moments of the encounter in their heads, trying to analyze the failures in their emotional armor, what caused the outburst and how to prevent future ones. There is no more fragile, sorrowful person than the violent one who has just had an outburst.

And that's a good thing. That tells us that despite the physical outcome, the outburst was an emotional pressure valve releasing, allowing the pain to dissipate before some truly horrific, rifle-in-the-bell-tower event came to pass. There may be a black eye or a busted bone, and while that is not in any way a good thing, it is way better than making funeral arrangements from a jail cell.

Don't get confused, dear reader. I'm not advocating violence. I hope to see violence disappear off Planet Earth in my lifetime. That's not going to happen, but it is my HOPE. What I am pointing out is the slim silver lining of a minor outburst. It is something we are resilient enough to bounce back from-- not only the person who committed the violence, but the unfortunate who was the victim-- and hopefully learn from our mistakes so that we may never repeat them. 

An incident where everyone is still alive at the end of it is extremely hopeful, because you can't come back from an encounter which involves someone's death. And sure, there are degrees of non-death injury, including the kind where everyone is wringing their hands for 18 hours in the emergency room before getting the relieving news that their loved one is going to make it... and that is a terrible thing to have to experience (I would imagine)... but at the end of it you have your loved one back.

And don't think I'm suggesting that the person who committed such grievous violence should just walk back into the life of the person they hurt so badly... I am NOT. The emotional wounds from such an event can be incredibly deep and pervasive. I'm just saying that the person is alive to experience new emotions, and that in itself is a blessing. No, if the degree of damage is such that it requires an extensive hospital stay, then the violent person needs to feel, on some level, the pain of their victim, and there's probably no better way than a limited prison sentence living among society's most violent aggressors. 

Well, there's one 'better' way, but eye-for-an-eye is a sentence which is no longer meted out. Not that there hasn't been extensive discussion on the emotional healing which might come from being locked in a room for twenty minutes with a baseball bat and the guy who nearly killed  your daughter, but the overall emotional damage to society might not be worth it.

It all comes back around to society. We've built our social system around laws rather than around logic, which is why it always seems to be on the edge of spinning wildly out of control. Logically we should design life so that we are all as content as possible. Instead we've designed it so that we can all be as free as possible. But that's not happening either, because with unrestricted freedom comes unfortunate side effects, so laws are put in place. "You can be free, but not TOO free."  So we end up with a society which allows people to be selfish and greedy and cold and uncaring. When those behaviors are allowed to spread and flower into the majority of the population, we all suffer as a result.

How can we re-structure society to eliminate, or at least vasty reduce, the number of emotion-producing-events that drive violence in our people? Since we're not likely to re-structure our biological response system, at least not in the short term, what other way is there to keep people from getting emotionally bottled up and ultimately exploding?

Now is a good time to mention my OTHER blog, the one which seeks to address that very question. It's called 'Finding The Perfect World' and can be found at:

 findingtheperfectworld.blogspot.com

I'm not going to praise the virtues of that blog-- I'll let you do that. It is simply a collection of ideas which, when implemented together, will likely create a place for us all to live which is by many definitions 'perfect'... not like heaven, just designed perfectly for us humans with all our foibles to live in contentedly in peace and prosperity.

But the overview is this: Eliminate the fear in life and you eliminate most of the 'evil' which feeds on fear. People who are afraid of poverty, starvation, sickness and death will do whatever it takes to prevent those things from happening to THEMSELVES and THEIR LOVED ONES (and screw everyone else). While it seems huge and immutable, the laws which guide how we live are subject to modification. Change enough of them and society as a whole merges into a different 'operating system'.

The next post I write will incorporate every change I mention in the other blog, so it's time to get you up to speed. Read it. You will be quizzed. 

Okay... you will probably not be quizzed. BUT, you will be enlightened, and really, that's all I'm hoping for in this leg of the Perfect World Theory. The next generation of humans will do much better than us, and the generation after that will do better than THEM, and so on. I predict if we follow this plan we'll be living within a perfect Earth society in less than 200 years. 

Right about the time that aliens from the planet Zorgon attack.