I used to teach Anger Management at a close custody facility for male inmates in the Department of Corrections.  I was not employed by the prison; I just visited their campus to teach that course and various other life management skills courses.  Since I wasn’t a part of the system, I could detach and observe.  One thing that became apparent to me was that the whole system is misnamed; it’s not about corrections or rehabilitation for the most part; it’s about destroying spirit and tearing down individuals.  No wonder so many who leave the prisons, soon return.  The recidivism rate is extremely high.  So, I saw my classes that I taught as not only educational, but also ministerial.

One other thing I also observed: if anyone had a need for an anger management class, it was these men.  They were angry and had been angry for years, some of them for their whole lives.  As I told them, there is nothing wrong with being angry about something or angry with someone.  Anger is a natural, God-given emotion.  The problem comes when our natural anger festers and becomes rage, which is not a natural emotion at all; it’s very destructive to ourselves and to those around us.  So, we began with the study of the anger cycle.

The first stage of the anger cycle is a betrayal of our expectations.  There is nothing wrong with having expectations of certain situations and of certain people.  We all do.  For example, when we are driving down a busy street, we expect others to obey the laws and to be courteous to other drivers.  But when someone cuts us off, that is a betrayal of our expectations.  And then we have the first step of the anger cycle in motion.

Just a betrayal of expectations is not the end of the cycle, though.  The next stage after this is the interpretation of the action that betrayed our expectations.  If someone cuts us off in traffic, and we observe that, and we unemotionally comment to ourselves, “Wow!  That person cut us off!  That’s not what we expected!” and then just move on and go back to singing along with the radio, we don’t have an anger issue.  What we tend to do, however, is to interpret the betrayal of expectations in some negative way:  “That person is a fool!  That person is stupid!  That person is out to get us!”  And that last statement, when we take the action as something personally against us, then we’ve taken it to the next stage.

Now, we have a bruised ego.  Whenever our ego is bruised, we feel bad.  Just like any bruise, it hurts.  So, now we have a feeling of pity for ourselves.  We say to ourselves, “We’ve been hurt by that unexpected action.  The person cutting us off intended to hurt us.”  We feel bruised in our spirit, and this ego bruise continues to feel bad because we continue to dwell on it.  We continue to hurt ourselves by repeating it over and over in our minds.  Do you know that psychologists say that any emotion that occurs as a reaction to something outside ourselves only lasts about 30 seconds?  But we can make it last longer, a few minutes, a few days, a few years, or the rest of our lives, if we choose to keep replaying it.

So, now we have an ego bruise that has grown into an intolerable feeling.  The more we dwell on it, the more intolerable it becomes.  The more intolerable it becomes, the more we dwell on it.  If we work at it hard enough and long enough, we can work past the final stage, the anger, and all the way into a debilitating rage.  If we could just let it go at anger, we’d be okay.  It’s still a natural feeling then.  So, if someone cuts us off in traffic, and we say to ourselves, “What an idiot!  He meant to do that!  He meant to injure us!” and we feel really bad about it, our ego terribly bruised, and we say to ourselves, “Okay, so he is an idiot and he hurt us, but it’s time to move on and feel okay again,” we will be okay.  We’ll have felt the anger and let it pass.  And in feeling the anger, we have become more alert to not only that driver that cut us off, but also other drivers that might do something unexpected.  However, if we keep replaying the moment of the cutoff, and we keep reliving the bad feeling we got from it, and we dwell on it to the point that the feeling is so big and intolerable, we want revenge because we’re no longer thinking individuals, but raging lunatics, then we might try to seek revenge and cut him off, or try to cause an accident in which he will get hurt, or if we have one available, pull a gun out and shoot him!  This last scenario is exactly the kind of thing that gets us arrested and perhaps even sent to prison.

Of course, most of the men who I encountered at the “correctional” facility were not in prison because they got cut off in traffic.  The betrayals of expectation were huge, such as one man who expected his wife to be faithful to him, and she was not, and he ended up going after the man she slept with and killing him.  Or the man I met who killed his wife because she betrayed him at every turn:  she was unfaithful, she stole from him, she was verbally abusive to him, and sometimes, she was even physically abusive to him.  This man never got out of the constant anger and rage cycle until one day, he went out and bought a gun and came home and shot her through the head and the chest and the abdomen and in her private parts.  Then he kept her in the apartment until some of the neighbors began to complain about the smell, and the apartment superintendent unlocked the door and found her decaying body.  When this man told me this, he added, “I did it.  I’m glad I did it.  She was evil.  She deserved to be dead.  I would do it again today if I could.”  And in his very serious, gleaming eyes, I could see that the rage was still fresh and hot.  He had killed her and he had been found guilty and locked up for over 20 years, and it was as if it had just happened.  I knew there was no need at that point to even ask the question I had wanted to ask previously:  “Why didn’t you just leave her?”

So, how do we stop the anger before it turns into rage?  We learn how to stop it.  The first step is to be able to recognize the anger cycle: the betrayal of expectations, the interpretation, the ego bruise, the intolerable feeling, and the anger.  If we can recognize it, then we have a chance at stopping it.  But as GI Joe used to say in his cartoons, “Knowing is half the battle.”  The other half is application.  We have to want to stop the cycle, and we have to make a conscious choice to stop it.  Yes, that’s right.  It’s all about making a conscious choice.  That may be the hardest part for people who have lived their lives in one constant anger cycle.  They’re living unconsciously, just caught up in the whirlwind of anger.  Role playing, therapy, and intelligent discussion can help someone break this unconscious cyclone and start to make better choices, choices that benefit instead of debilitate.  We may not be perfect at this new way of thinking and behaving at first, but hopefully with time and practice, a new way of handling anger can be learned.

One final story to illustrate this:  One day I came to class, and one of my students was not present.  After asking about his whereabouts, I discovered that he was “in the hole”; in other words, he had been locked up in solitary as punishment for assaulting a correctional officer.  The previous day, we had all talked about how some of the officers, as a game, would “bait” the inmates to see if they could get a reaction out of them.  Not all of the officers played that game, thankfully, but some did, and it was a well-known fact that they did.  So, in our roleplaying, one of the men acted the part of the officer and one acted the part of the inmate.  The “officer” proceeded to entrap the inmate by provoking him.  In the roleplay, the inmate was able to comment to the class, “Yeah, I see what he’s doing.  I’m not playing this game with him.  I’m not biting the bait.”  And everyone laughed and learned how it could work.  But in the real world, later that afternoon, when the bait was tossed out, the inmate bought it, hook, line, and sinker.  And just that quickly, he attacked, and he got slammed in “the hole.”  Too easy.  A week later when he returned to class, the student who had spent the week in solitary confinement, said to me, “I saw him do it.  I recognized exactly what he was doing when it first started.”  “So, why did you let him win?” I asked.  “Because I got mad,” he said, “but I knew what was going on the whole time.”  I congratulated him on recognizing it even though he didn’t make the conscious choice to stop it.  I told him that perhaps the next time he recognized the game, he would choose not to play.