The Forever Decision by Paul Quinnett   Chapter 9

ANGRY ENOUGH TO KILL YOURSELF?

When you were a little kid and were angry with your parents, did you ever threaten to hold your breath until you died? Or did you threaten to run away and never come back knowing, as best a little kid can, that one way to get people to say they love you is to threaten to leave them.

Looking back on it now, holding our breath until we died or threatening to run away from those we love may seem childish and foolish but, I will ask you, couldn't a suicide threat be an adult version of the same thing? Couldn't we, when we are angry and frustrated with the people around us, begin to feel the same way - that if we just upped and left them, once and for all and forever and ever, that they would be sorry. And I don't mean sorry; I mean sorry!!!

I think we could. In another place I will talk about how we may try to control others by threatening to end our lives, but in this chapter I want to talk with you about anger - maybe help you understand that anger can be your ally, not your enemy.

It is quite possible that right now you may not see yourself as angry. You may be perturbed, pessimistic, bitter, annoyed, aggravated, irritated, or, as one client told me, "I'm too depressed to be angry.”

Anger takes many forms and has many names. But by any name, the effects of anger can be harmful to us, especially if we turn our anger on ourselves. Therefore, it is important to know about our anger; its source, what it does to us and how it affects the way we think and feel.

Maybe you have never thought of yourself as an angry person. Maybe you can say, "I never get mad." But my guess is that if you can say this of yourself, you may not be in touch with what is troubling you. It is even possible that you may not even know what is making you angry. Or, if you do know, you may be ignoring or minimizing or playing down those obstacles and roadblocks or people that stand between you and your dreams. Since we learn how to express our anger at an early age, maybe it was not okay to get mad in your family.

Over the years I have met many people who said, "We were not permitted to lose our temper at home. It just wasn't allowed." If this was your situation as a child, then maybe you are out of touch with your anger. Like many others, maybe you do not even realize how angry you are. And, since suicide is often an angry act generated out of frustration and burning resentment, it is, I think, important that you come to grips with the possibility that you may be mad enough to kill yourself.

Ask yourself this: "Is any part of my wish to die because I am frustrated with the way things are going?" If your answer is yes, then you may be a lot more angry than you think. So let's talk about anger.

Of all the emotions, anger is maybe the least complicated. It is part of our biological makeup and a necessary part of living. Unless everything goes smoothly for you every single day and you never break so much as a shoelace, then you must experience frustration. And if you experience frustration, then you must experience anger - even though you may call it something else.

Here's what happens inside us when we become frustrated and begin to feel anger: our heart beats faster, our blood pressure rises, sugar is released into our blood stream, our muscles tense, and our bodies get ready for physical combat. Biologically, we are preparing to deal with some pain or threat or fear and, though we may try to stop a rush of anger, there isn't really much we can do to override the reaction. Or at least it seems that way.

I have met many people who do not even know when they are angry. They say they are "upset." Or they say they are "down." Or they say they would just as soon be left alone. Even though they are experiencing a strong emotion (and you can see it by the way the veins in their necks bulge or their faces turn red or they clench their fists or jaws), they will smile and say, "No, of course I'm not angry. I'm just fine.”

They may be denying their anger or simply don't know what to call it. It doesn't matter much for our purposes right now, except to illustrate that many angry people don't know what's going on inside them or, if they do, they attempt to deny the feeling.

How you come to know your anger has a lot to do with the way you were raised. In some families, expressions of anger are simply not permitted. In others, anger is not only permitted, but encouraged. In families where anger is understood as natural and, therefore, accepted and channeled into healthy communication, anger is not an enemy. But where children are raised to fear their anger as if it were some kind of raging beast that, once released, would run amok and kill everything in sight, anger can become an enemy. To experience anger in such a family is to be taught that your angry feelings don't exist or, if they do, something must be wrong with you.

Over the years I have met many people who thought feeling angry was the same thing as being crazy. When they were extremely angry, they often felt they were about to lose control and maybe do something terrible and awful. Not infrequently, what they thought to do was to hurt themselves.

Anger and Culture
If you look to your society for guidance about the meaning of anger and how it should be expressed, things may get suddenly confused. It is okay for a football player to get angry in a game and try to "kill" the guy on the other team but it is not okay for the fans to do this to the visiting fans.

It is okay for our heroes on TV to punch, gouge, knife, and shoot just about anyone who deserves it; it is not okay for those of us watching the show to do this to equally deserving bad guys we know.

Our governments preach peace, but if we get angry enough we launch retaliatory "air strikes" and drop huge bombs on those who are frustrating us. You might even say that too many of our leaders teach peace but practice vengeance.

For what it is worth, I think there is something crazy going on here. What I think is crazy is that many of us are convinced that once we become angry we have to do something aggressive. We say we hate violence, but we love it in our sports, our movies, and our TV shows. We believe that once we are angry enough, we are justified in doing something destructive. If someone makes us mad enough, we seem to take the position that, "Okay, now you've done it. You'd better watch out!"

Our religious leaders try to talk us out of our frustration+anger+aggression habits but, just between you and me, I think they've got their hands full. It seems that hardly anyone "turns the other cheek" these days.

So what, you are probably asking, has all this to do with thinking about suicide?

Let's suppose for the moment that you, like many others, do not know your own anger very well - how it feels, where it comes from, and what to do with it when you feel it. Let's suppose that when a rush of anger comes over you, you begin to get more and more upset until, at the peak of it, you feel like you are going out of control. You are mad as hell about something and, before this fit of anger is finished, someone or something is going to pay.

But who should pay? The person you're mad at? No, you can't punch a teacher, the boss, a husband or wife or a brother or a sister. Hit a friend and you buy loneliness. Besides, we're not supposed to strike out at others. So, all dressed up with no place to go, what will become of your anger? Where does it go?

If anger always leads to aggression, how can anger ever be your friend? I personally don't think raw, pure, unadulterated anger can ever be anyone's friend.

Runaway anger is always an enemy. Anger with no place to go can lead to suicide.

So what can you do? You can do what Charlie, a client of mine, used to do when he became uncontrollably angry. "I just double up my fist and punch the wall,” he said. "How often do you do that?" I asked. “A couple of times a week,” he said.

"It's better than hitting people. Besides, it's plasterboard and most times my fist goes right through. But sometimes I hit a stud.”

Charlie had broken the bones in his hands so many times he'd lost track, and he laughed when I said it was a good thing he didn't live in a brick house. Anger was not Charlie's friend.

Or you can learn the art of cutting people down with sarcasm. You can learn to say mean and nasty things to people to make them feel bad. Verbal aggression, though physically less harmful, is still harmful and, if you use it, you will end up short of friends and not liking yourself very much. Of all the things people do to hurt each other, sarcasm leaves the deepest scars. And, again, anger is not your friend.

Or you can hold all your anger in until, one day, you may develop high blood pressure or headaches or ulcers or some other illness that the researchers say may be the result of constant tension built up by unspent anger. Working slowly over time, such anger may one day make you sick.

But the worst way in which anger is our enemy is when we turn it on ourselves, when we become so frustrated in our desire to get back at someone that, finding no one else to hurt, we start looking in the mirror for a victim. This is why, even though I do not like the term, suicide is sometimes referred to as self-murder -the assumption being that the suicide was an act of destruction directed at the self.

Options for Anger
Now let me suggest something to you. What if I told you that just because you're angry, you don't have the right to go around breaking things or calling people names or hitting them or, for that matter, hurting yourself?

What if I told you that just because you are mad as hell, it doesn't mean you automatically, like some robot, have to blow your stack and lose control of yourself?

What if I told you that, no matter what you've read or heard about how good it is to "get your anger out" that, in fact, letting your anger out was the most stupid thing you could do? Especially if you should attempt kill yourself in the process?

Well, I'm saying all of that. Despite what was once believed about anger, research is showing that once you explode and lose control of your anger, you are more likely to do it again. Research is showing that the way we express our anger is a learned habit, just as we learn to read or ride a bike. If you learned how to express your anger in ways that make anger your enemy then, as I see it, you can unlearn the old ways and learn new ones.

I can hear you thinking, "Ho. Ho. Ho. He doesn't know my anger. My anger is different!"

If you were sitting in my office right now and said this, you would have an argument on your hands. I would argue that since you are from the same galaxy, the same planet, and the same species, that you are no different in the anger department from me or from anyone else. You learned how to express and handle your anger just the way the rest of us learned how to express and handle our anger. The lesson may have been different, but the process was the same. And, since you've a large and generally useful brain perched up there on your shoulders, you can probably do something intelligent about your anger. You can learn to handle it differently, maybe learn to manage it in useful and productive ways.

If you are willing to accept the idea that the way in which you express your anger is not automatic and out of your control, then I think there is a good chance you can change. You can turn an enemy into a friend. I can't do this for you in a book like this, but I know professional help is available. In some cities agencies even offer what are called anger management workshops. And there are several good self-help books on the subject. The point is: you don't have to go on being stuck in the frustration+anger+aggression formula.

The basics of learning to know and use your anger well are as follows:

1. Learn to identify your anger quickly. If you feel a sudden bit of tension, or a flush come to your face or you find yourself clenching your jaws or thinking, "Damn, that makes me mad!" then say to yourself, “Ah ha! This is the first sign of anger. I know you.”

2. Next, say to yourself, THINK! When we are angry, our brains switch off and our glands run the show. Given where anger can sometimes go, this is just plain stupid. When you have a runaway freight train, you don't tell the engineer to kindly leave the train. No, you ask him to stay on board and try to get the brakes working. Thinking is to anger what brakes are to a runaway train.

3. Now ask yourself why you are feeling angry. Try to identify just who or what is making you bristle. Ask yourself: Am I frightened? Am I threatened? Has someone just said something to hurt me? How am I being frustrated? Answers to these questions will help you enormously because you will at least begin to understand whence your anger arises. And it will lead you to the next question.

4. What is it I want and what will I do with all this power? Anger is a powerful emotion and, when you are feeling it, you are feeling strong. What, you should ask, can I do with all this power and strength? How can I direct it to benefit me and those around me?

Admittedly, this is the tough part of knowing how to use our anger and requires the greatest creativity. Pretending that nothing is wrong, or exploding, or turning the anger inward and against yourself produces nothing and benefits no one -least of all the angry person. What we need when we become angry is to set a goal, something to aim for. We need to know what is making us angry and what, in the short and the long run, we want to change.

When you have identified that you are angry, know who or what it is that is making you feel that way, and have instructed yourself to THINK, then that is exactly what you should do. Step back, count to ten, and start to think.

Thinking while angry is difficult, but not impossible. And some wonderful things begin to happen when angry people start to think instead of going on being angry. Remember, it was because of his anger over racial discrimination that Martin Luther King Jr. thought to change a nation and, maybe one day, a world. Martin Luther King Jr. did not lose his temper. No, he knew his anger, he knew the face of it, and the source of it and knew that aggression and violence need not automatically follow from anger. He did not strike others. He did not burn things. He did not get sick and die from his anger. And he did not turn it on himself. No, Martin Luther King Jr. put anger to work for a great good. And, in so doing, his was a wonderful anger. It is a sad irony that a man who could not manage his own anger assassinated one of the greatest men who could.

But back to you.

Since your anger is as natural as your breathing, you might as well get to know it. You might as well just walk up and shake hands. Anger is a great source of power and a great teacher of what we like and don't like in this world. From our anger we can grow. From our anger we can set goals and do good things for ourselves and others. Once we have come to know and master our anger we can have a strong and trustworthy friend. We do not need to be anger's slaves. Most importantly, we need never be its victims.

So, if we can come to know and name our anger and learn who or what it is that is making us feel this powerful emotion, we need not be frightened by it and we need not be controlled by it. Rather, we can stop, think, set a goal, and plan a move that will change our situation for the better.

Please remember: To be angry is natural. To be angry at ourselves and others is normal. But to be so angry at another that you turn this awesome aggressive power on yourself is neither natural nor normal. It is, rather, an expression of the formula that frustration leads to anger leads to aggression. And, if you are not careful and smarter than the average bear, you may become a victim of it.

So before you kill yourself to "show" someone just how mad you are at them consider that, should you succeed, your suicide will have created nothing, contributed nothing, and changed nothing. True, you will have made a statement about how angry you were, but ask yourself, "Do I have to say it this way?"

I hope not.