What's Your Boiling Point?

People in recovery often say that anger is their number one character defect. I know that it has been mine. And I know that anger has caused a lot of problems not only in my household, but also in the households of my friends and family. Often, that anger can revert to downright violence and the people involved don't really understand what happened. Years later, they still hold on to their feelings about those incidents.

It happened in my house just recently. A family member came home after a weekend with friends and told of a scenario where a young man became angry with his girlfriend for touching him inappropriately. They were at a dance place and while he was dancing with someone else, she nudged him with her foot. She claims it was done "playfully." But he lost his balance and fell to his knees on the dance floor, an embarrassment for both of them!

She immediately apologized, but he lost his temper and stormed out. When she tried to go after him to talk, they began arguing again. She tried to take her car keys away from him and when she pulled at the keys, she hit him again, by accident. He cold-cocked her right then and there in the parking lot. The young woman ended up in the emergency room that night.

Both of them had been drinking. Both of them are adult children who were raised in alcoholic families.

When I heard the story, it reminded me of many years ago before my spouse and I were in recovery and a similar thing happened. We had both been drinking the night before and were getting ready to go out on a hike. He was sitting in my living room on the couch, waiting for me to finish getting ready, reading a magazine. He was probably pretty hung over.

When I came downstairs, he didn't look up from his book, so I walked over and nudged the foot of his hiking boot with mine. He flew into a rage and began shouting at me, calling me names that made my face turn red. I had never seen him act like this in the two months I had been going out with him, and in the years before that I had known him as a friend.

I was terribly confused by what had happened. I apologized, but it didn't seem to do any good.

Guess what? Now over twenty years later, sixteen years of sobriety and all sorts of counseling including (for him) assertiveness training, he still gets angry when he thinks about that time. He still is defensive about the fact that I "kicked him in the shins" and that it hurt a lot.

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