Book Summary

Recovery from Anger Addiction

John Bradshaw’s working definition for an addiction is An addiction is “a pathological relationship with a mood-altering experience that has life damaging consequences.” ¹ Using this definition, I have come to a new understanding of my anger or rage and its root causes in childhood issues, and I have put myself into recovery from anger and raging. The recovery method is a standard and simple method, and it is only hinted at for anger in many other books. This one gives a full treatment of that method. Anger as an addiction is opposed to most views of anger as being bad behavior. The addiction view leads to most anger or rage (except for mental illness and known pathogenic causes) as being an affliction or disease like alcoholism or codependence. This paradigm shift allows one to work to lessen his anger, past a manageable socially or personal acceptable level (the goal of conventional anger management) to a truly normal, functional, benign and healthy level. Thus one can work toward healing it in the recovery sense. Recovery has a more thorough and thus effective treatment result than has management. In recovery it may always be present as a potential problem, but can be guarded against much simpler than cumbersome and problematic anger management techniques of cognitive behavior strategies wherein the full anger may still be present, but it just boxed in, in the hope that it can be governed and controlled. I have found such governing and controlling of anger management techniques to be ineffective, unless one is willing to settle for a kit if residual anger, which must be constantly  and permanently guarded against. That seemed a sorry goal for me. In rejecting bad behavior as a root cause of anger, I advocate healing the core causes of anger, which for me I have found to be losses from childhood abuse, which led to pain carried throughout life. My pain originating in childhood abuse was amplified throughout life by similar appearing events, so that my anger grew as the pain increased up until I hit my “bottom” of my arrest for spousal abuse. In healing my pain I healed my anger down to reduce it to a very low level, like that of a healthy person. I came to this process after my life had just been characterized in the individual work part of a relationship addiction workshop as “A lifetime of losses and pain,” and with help in conventional therapy I somewhat accidently began to grieve all my losses and resultant pain. I did so as a solution to the pain of a divorce; little did I know how that process would at last lead to a solution to my anger. This was the start of my anger addiction recovery, although I did not yet recognize it as an addiction. Through grieving, the pain was resolved, (healed so as not to still hurt, but not forgotten), and then I relate how I was able to subsequently use rational means to manage and further lessen my anger whenever it arose. In other words, I moved into recovery, and can now claim to be a recovering angry person, or to be a recovering rage-aholic. I show the parallels of this condition to being a sober alcoholic and a functional codependent and a recovering love addict. The book is written as a memoir of my recovery from anger, and this involves recovery in turn from alcoholism, codependence, and relationship addiction. To recovery from anger required my recovery from the symptoms of those addictions, which were shame, low self- esteem, and the avoidance of my “drugs of choice.” For alcoholism the drug is obviously booze; for codependence the drug was reliance and/or control of other people in which my over reliance on them led to me losing my sense of self; for relationship, or love, addiction it was my dependence on a relationship—any relationship, no matter how bad. And for anger addiction, my drug of choice was dependence on rage, as I tried to exert power and control over others in seemingly (to me) helpless situations. For example, at the prospect of the loss of a love or wife, I would rage to fight off the feelings of abandonment or desolation. These feelings were immature feelings left over from the helpless feelings with my mother. Technically, such feelings were shame, so I tried to cure shame to cure my anger. Finally, with my eyes opened by the observation of “A lifetime of losses and pain,” I began to work on my pain from losses. Such pain and losses were generally rooted in my childhood and repeated throughout my adulthood, or so it seemed to my wounded inner childhood residual self. Almost by accident I began to grieve those losses and pain, and immediately felt relieved and less stressful. Soon I recognized what I was doing was truely grieving my childhood losses and pain, and lo and behold, my anger started to dissipate. As I continued my grieving over a few weeks, my anger went to a very low level as I finally resolved the pain, and I felt as if a great weight had been lifted off me. Eventually, my anger became normal, that is, healthy, and controllable by rational thought. Since I am a physicist, I try to understand how everything works. This wondering led me to an analysis that gives the book a firm theoretical explanation of my near miraculous recovery. I have included such analysis to all portions of the book, with copious references to authorities in the recovery field.

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