He Has A Blowout With His Daughter - Anger Understood

Hey GuyExpert,

I just had a blowout with my 17-year-old daughter. While I didn’t hit her, in a rage I did grab her wrists and shove her up against a wall. She is now afraid of me and my wife is threatening our 20-year marriage ending if I don’t get help for my ‘anger issue.’ My daughter provoked me and outside of this event, I’ve never done this before so I don’t think I have an issue – what do you think? O.S. Ottawa

Well, I think there’s something brewing inside of you and given the right strike point, provocation or trigger there’s a greater likelihood that you will use physical force to make your point. Read and re-read my first sentence O.S., because how you read it will determine whether you believe you have an issue with anger. I believe that once a person learns the most effective method for them to be heard, seen, or get their own way they will tend to use that way with greater frequency. It seems as though your method is becoming physical force.

Men have lots of confusing messages about anger with some using anger to empower their fear, blanket their sadness, or assert control in chaotic areas of their life. Still, many other men choke or swallow back any sign of their anger preferring to have it leak out in a multitude of numbing, self-sabotaging or avoidance behaviours. In all, I believe anger is getting a bad rap and taking the blame for what is really a lack of understanding, experience, and choice for most men. You see O.S., anger is not the problem – how you express anger is. Most men have never mastered a relationship to their own anger and so they are reactively angry rather than choosing to express anger responsibly. Responsible anger has a man be seen and heard, while reactive anger disconnects him from the world.

In my Anger Inc ^TM, workshop O.S., men learn all about their anger; it’s roots, the early physical warning signs, their ‘triggers’ and ‘buttons’, and several, highly-effective tactics for expressing anger responsibly. In my life learning how to be responsibly angry is a discipline that has helped me transform from a wounded, violent young man to a middle-aged man whose anger is expressed responsibly, when appropriate. Two important women in your life O.S. are telling you they’re scared and on the edge – are you man enough to hear them and shine a floodlight on this blind spot in your life, or will you ignore them and let this volcano simmer? I suspect that because you’ve taken the step of writing to me that you’re somewhat curious they might be right. Follow your impulse with courage O.S., and you will learn what anger is really all about.

Melancholy and Mourning and The Sixth Sense

One of the fundamental aspects of being human is that we are constantly in a state of change.  Transition and our response or reaction to change is our greatest teacher.  As I write this from my desk and in between sessions, I'm struck with how many men I help who are stuck in a process of change; meaning they're emotionally suspended as change is happening around them.  Typically I see men who present a variety of problems which are keeping them awake at night and when they do the work to look at what is driving these issues invariably what shows up is the place where they have been emotionally parked - a major life transition - that they just have not processed fully.  This state is melancholy and it comes with a sense of drifting, of a lack of deep engagement with anyone or anything, and most important an emotional palette which is limited or non-existent.  If you look around you can probably identify many guys you know who fit this bill; perhaps even it's you.  When I'm in melancholy, I'm never fully happy, never really excited, never fully in love, never truly ignited by living.  I'm a poltergeist locked in angst desperately trying to get away from where I am and wanting to cling onto anyone who can give me a way out or whose life energy I can suck to make me feel better.

Sounds horrible right?

So what's the answer?

Well, let's look at M. Night Shamalayan's breakthrough movie - Sixth Sense for a clue.    In the film, a young boy is visited by numerous 'ghosts,' who are seeking to end their drifting suffering.  The boy's function is to tell the truth about how these people died setting the record straight, righting any wrongs and thereby bringing closure and releasing the apparitions from their pain.  But he's deeply disturbed by what he sees and wants to escape the realities that visit him.  Bruce Willis, as a 'dead' psychiatrist enters to ease the boy's pain to make life less scary and in doing so, finds his own salvation.  Sixth Sense is about melancholy and the process by which we can exit melancholy which is mourning.  

Our culture has lost the willingness or the stomach to mourn fully and it is killing us.  Mourning, grieving are the processes by which humans naturally move through transition.  Mourning is how we move from attachment to detachment, to re-attachment.  Mourning requires us to tell the truth about what has happened, and feel all the emotions connected to the power of that truth.  Mourning brings us closure to our life's major changes as we move through the defined stages of Denial, Anger, Bargaining, Sadness and Acceptance.    Mourning requires us to feel.  Sadly, it seems our culture has lost the enormous value of this process by favouring a "Get On With Life" solutions-oriented approach which places greater importance on action over feeling.  Don't get me wrong.  Action is necessary for moving us forward lest we decide to roll around lost in the muck of our emotions, but action without feeling is empty and ultimately creates more pain and disorder because the pain is never fully healed.

Look around  - Isn't this what is affecting America right now.  Their take action approach to 911 truncated the nation's mourning and mis-directed all of that hurt into adversarial policies which have created alienation, mistrust, and economic woe.  America needs to grieve fully to have a hope of ever becoming a superpower again.  

Guest Post On HerKind

Well, it's 12:30p.m. and I'm typing this as I watch people chit chat and connect in my favourite coffee shop The Darkhorse, in Toronto. I hear through the grapevine that their coffee is from Intelligentsia in Chicago. Certainly it's great coffee, and sadly something I will be giving up in a few short days as I am participating in an exciting new fitness programme a colleague, Cherilee Garofano, has developed called Fuze Fitness. So, those of you who are fellow lovers of the bean, please empathize. The last time I gave up coffee, (and I only drink two cups a day), I had a hard time.

But, I digress. This week I was asked by another colleague and friend to 'guest post' on her blog HerKind. Carla Lucchetta, HerKind's creator and author has asked me to post on all things male; a subject dear to my heart. So, please visit the site. My first post as a guest is all about what boys need to successfully mature into men and, why women cannot 'father' boys towards manhood. Manhood requires men to be involved, engaged. My GuyTalk co-host Owen Williams, recently admitted to me that he is afraid of teenage boys - that in some scenarios they give off a dangerous energy, that is un-predictable.

Having been one of those 'lost boys,' equally afraid and un-predictable, angry and disappointed, lonely and insecure in belonging - I imagine I was frightening to many adults. Shame. I really needed a hand held out to me - someone to see through the emotional distress and powerful enough to bring me in from the cold.