The man sat in the corner of the bar and sipped his beer. He was waiting for his friends to arrive. They would hang out, drink, talk football and make crude passes at women. They were The Guys, the in-crowd. They thought they were pretty cool. But that wasn’t how other people saw them.
The man had grown up in a poor family, and he had not done well in school. His father had mocked him for his stupidity, and his mother had constantly nagged him and his father. When he had been a boy he had longed for the approval of his parents, but it never came. His mother had struggled to keep the family together with little money. His father was constantly trying to exert his authority over the family, despite the transparent lack of respect of his mother.
As a boy, he had tried to do better for a while. He wasn’t stupid. But his father’s dismissive manner towards him constantly belittled him. Eventually, he gave up trying, and then he could tell that his teachers lost hope too. The views of his teachers seemed to support his father’s attitude. When he got angry with his family, his father laughed. He was no match for his father’s strength, so he sunk into an internal world. His anger was constant, but there was only downside in letting it show, so he suppressed it.
Suppressing anger became systematic; then it became a habit; and eventually he forgot that he was doing it at all.
By the time he was in his teens, he regularly skipped school, and he dropped out as soon as he was able. The only jobs he could get were menial because he had no qualifications, but he had achieved what he thought was his primary aim in life: to be free of his parents. However, he discovered that this strategy did not bring freedom. He had escaped one degrading environment, only to replace it with another: employers of menial people see no reason to respect their workers, and anyway, menial people are easily replaced.
One might imagine that he would be able to work his way out of this rut by hard work and application. This was not possible because other people would never give him the necessary space. They wouldn’t permit it because they could see that there was something wrong. The man suppressed his anger, and so the conventional behaviour of anger was missing. However, although this suppression had become habit, there was an effort involved. The suppression had a cost that was observable to other people: his face carried the strain; it was never relaxed. Other people saw him as a coiled spring. The spring might never come uncoiled, but why should other people take a risk on him? He was like a pit bull that had never bitten anyone – menacing, but not actually dangerous. Could the man see the coiled spring in his face when he looked in the mirror? Of course not! This was how he always saw himself. This was just how he looked: tough, cool, streetwise. Other people were wary of him, but he was proud of what he was.
When other people are angry, we only see their behaviour. We do not see their feelings. When we are angry, we are aware of our feelings, but only vaguely aware of what our behaviour looks like to other people. When other people are angry and we see their behaviour, we recognise it and assume that person is angry. When we are angry and we are aware of our feelings, other people can recognise our behaviour and assume from it that we are angry. In this way, we are able to connect our feelings with the behaviour of others. The word ‘angry’ becomes part of our mechanism for connecting the feeling to the behaviour.
With the man, this mechanism is not working. Someone might look at the coiled spring in his face and ask why he is angry. He might then recognise that there is more than one way of identifying anger in a man. This could give him a mechanism for recognising his behavioural suppression and ultimately address the cause of his anger. However, why would anyone do this if they were worried that the spring might come uncoiled? The only person who might do this would be a therapist, but men with this background don’t have therapists.
As a child he suppressed his anger because it only brought further abuse from his father. He continued to suppress his anger because otherwise he would be fired. Once he had ceased to realise that he was suppressing his anger, the word became separated from the feeling. He had a word for anger, but in his language this word only represented a form of behaviour. However, he did not display this behaviour, so he was unaware that he was angry. You might think he would be aware of the feeling, but without the behaviour he could not identify it. He cannot know that other people don’t have that feeling, so why would he examine it? He doesn’t have a mechanism to compare his experience with the experience of others.
Anger is a mechanism for combating the negative impact of other people’s actions upon ourselves, but in the man this mechanism isn’t working. He is therefore unable to rectify his situation. It is rational for him to continue in this self-destructive way because he has no means of recognising it.