One of the most important things you can do for yourself is to improve your emotional intelligence and actively engage in self-awareness.
I personally struggle with uncontrolled anger and continue to seek assistance in managing my anger to this day. Most people do not think of uncontrolled anger as a segment of mental illness. As a matter of fact, there is a common notion that anger issues stem solely from a lack of self-control or selfishness that affects the victim, not the individual who dished it out. Therefore, people who suffer from uncontrollable anger have a different process in gaining support for managing anger issues than other mental illnesses. Anger has a way of scaring people away and antagonizing love ones to a point of apathy, which ironically increases and fuels the internal anger an individual like myself ends up suffering from.
Let me first take the opportunity to explain my story before I go further. I am 28 years old and have struggled with my anger for as long as I can remember. Unfortunately, I did nothing seriously about it until mid-summer 2016. However, I only took the initiative because I was at the lowest point of my life at the time. I grew up in very structured home and had a very stable background. I excelled in anything academia related, participated in church, and tried to honor my parents as best I could. But I struggled with a lot of insecurities at an early age and I didn’t have the support I needed from home to manage those insecurities. It was very difficult for me to acquiesce to people not accepting me for who I was. I got teased a lot in school for my physical health issues, the clothes I wore, etc. These were experiences everyone had during the adolescent year’s right? Well it wasn’t that simple for me. I was subjected to slander and hate that no one should go through at any age. I won’t go into all the specific details because I’m not intending to initiate a sob story or get anyone to feel sorry for me. However, I wanted to highlight how those insecurities and troubled times cultivated itself into a rage that was festering inside my heart over the years.
Believe it or not, what made it worse was going home after school to this /structured home I spoke of before. How can I come from a decent background but not be able to deal with those typical adolescent experiences? Because my home wasn’t a free space to articulate those feelings and insecurities. My parents had great expectations for me growing up, especially my father. My father was very hard on my brother and I. There were many situations where my father crossed that thin line of discipline and abuse. I used to be so abnormally fearful of my father that I dreaded being in the home alone with him at times. My father himself struggled so much with anger and control issues that he didn’t know how to reconcile his feelings, or effectively interact with me as his son, not an inmate. For years these abusive experiences shaped my life in a way that made me hyper sensitive and very defensive.
As I grew older, I internalized my parents’ high expectations, discipline methods, and my insecurities such that I became a human ticking time bomb. If you crossed me in any way, I made sure to tear you down verbally. I made it a point to intimidate people and force individuals to respect me at all cost, and to a certain extent, it worked. Certain people in high school, college, work colleagues, and even my now current fiancé learned to tread lightly around me (just like I did around my father). But this was obviously toxic and God was not at all please with me! My anger was so out of control that it led to getting released from two jobs during my high school and college years. My relationship with my fiancé has been soiled because of my anger. My relationship with my brother is not ideal due to not being able to manage my emotions. Sadly, it wasn’t until I became an adult that I realized that all these issues stemmed from the home I grew up in and the fact that I neglected God’s presence as I got older.
Now let’s be clear, I am not blaming my father or anyone in my family at all for MY mistakes. I actually love my family with all my heart. I’m not even blaming my plight as a black man being stigmatized in America for my uncontrolled anger. I am just highlighting the factors that have contributed to my mental suffering over the last 20 years of my life. But it doesn’t give me or anyone else a pass to not self-improve and fix the issues. The blame game will never help and all you’ll be doing is setting yourself up to fail if you continue to point the finger at everyone else except yourself. That’s why emotional intelligence and self-awareness is imperative to conquer mental illness. You must understand the root cause of an issue before treating the sickness, but you also must realize that you cannot do that by yourself. I will preface this next comment by explaining that I am a Christian so everything I say below is through the Grace of God and having a clear understanding of Jesus’ commandments about loving God and loving others as yourself (Matthew 22: 37-40). With that being said, if anyone suffers from out of controlled anger like myself, you must seek help that is Christian based and surround yourself with a Christian based community group who will keep you accountable in the healing process. This isn’t to say family and friends can’t help or support because it’s essential to have them in your corner! But you also want someone removed from your history who can be objective and frank with you such as a counselor. Anger management must be dealt with head on and be diligently accessed as much as possible. It’s no different than a drug addict trying to become sober, the process is painful and you will undoubtedly have slip ups. God knows I still have outburst and have punched countless holes in walls out of anger while going through counseling. But God has all power and He has provided us with amazing men, women, and platforms such as Uplift4Men to continue conquering these mental illnesses that prevents us from being the best version of ourselves.
FYI: I would like to recommend The Anger Workbook, written by Les Carter, Ph.D. and Frank Minirth, Ph.D.