[tw: description of tense family relationship, intense anger, and family fights]

If I had to pick one thing to resent my parents for, it would be the inherited anger issues. Well, that and leaving me the responsibility of being the only member of the family to actually work on those issues. 

For those who didn’t know me before college, I’d been known to have a short fuse, one hell of a temper, a mean streak, and a distinct lack of filter once I got going. In short, I had a reputation as a feisty little bitch. (And worse behind my back, I’m sure– this one is tame, almost fun.) At college, I’m a lot calmer. It’s an environment removed from my parents and brother where I can actually practice anger management techniques without someone doing their damnedest to escalate anyway, away from the three people on Earth who know how to get under my skin better than anything else. 

Disclaimer: I love my family (most of the time), and we are capable of getting along (better now than in years past, though quarantine is testing that claim); that said, I started working on anger management with my therapist in high school. My family has still not made any effort to do the same, so conflict resolution is very one sided and the imbalance makes it difficult to address a conflict without slipping into old patterns. 

The imbalance is kinda unfair, honestly, since they’re neurotypical and my ADHD comes with a healthy dose of emotional dysregulation, so I’m not only undoing learned behavior and thought patterns but also managing ADHD symptoms and overwriting the fact that my brain is wired to react to emotional stimuli in extremes. Basically, I’m doing twice the work while they ignore the problem. 

No, I cannot order my own food without shaking like a chihuahua. Yes, I did get into multiple verbal altercations in school, including with my freshman year Government teacher and a football player who I made cry. Still, while control was certainly lacking in those situations, the anger I felt then had nothing on the type of unhinged, disembodying, consuming anger my family manages to draw out. 

There are two main factors accounting for the extreme nature of the anger my family directs at each other, the first being reciprocal escalation– we know how to piss each other off beyond hope of reason and what will hurt the most. 

The second, arguably larger factor is that most of this fighting happens in the privacy of the home, so there is no social pressure to contain our reactions. We don’t have to manage the self for the comfort of others, so ear-piercing shrieks, red faced shouting, lashing out, slamming doors and books and whatever is in reach, and threats of physical violence are all on the table, no holds barred. 

There, taking up space, looking and acting completely deranged, and being loud are all excusable in the heat of the moment, whereas in society at large, as Kosut and Moore state in “Not Just the Reflexive Reflex,” summarizing the work of sociologist Erving Goffman, “any successful social ‘performance’ hinges on expressive control.” They elaborate that failure to “keep our bodies [and emotions] in check” in the public sphere is cause for social stigmatization.

Ultimately though, learning to manage my anger has allowed me to achieve a greater degree of bodily control. 

When my anger reaches a certain point, there is no longer cohesion between my body and mind; I have repeatedly found myself screaming things I didn’t want to but couldn’t stop myself from saying, caused harm that I did not intend– or, that the small, still rational part of my brain did not intend, but the reactive, emotional part of my brain most definitely did. 

(I never wanted to hurt you, except for when I did, because I felt hurt/ un-listened to/ angry and my body needed to do something with that, and screaming back and throwing things and becoming explosive was quick and much easier than finding an alternative.) 

The loss of bodily control is what I hate the most about my anger. It feels like the body takes over and chooses how to translate the emotions without my consent, often urging me to respond to conflict with physical violence (generally ignored, but my brother and I definitely used to beat the snot out of each other before he got freakishly strong); still, feeling the urge to injure someone in anger makes me nauseous, even as my own body sends the signal. Taking back the reins at that point is extremely difficult. However, with practice it has become easier to manage my anger, both by fostering healthy communication to prevent such overwhelming outbursts and by finding strategies to step back and regain control in the midst of a conflict. It is still a work in progress, and may always be, but I appreciate feeling like I (the brain) am in control of myself (the body) for the first time in a long time.