What Are the Triggers?
Nothing in life is to be feared, it is only to be understood. Now is the time to understand more, so that we may fear less.
Widely attributed to Marie Curie
What is so baffling about suddenly “losing it” is that the eruption of anger and destruction is sometimes triggered by the slightest provocation. Ferocious anger erupts without forethought, unleashed automatically before or beyond the power of your rational mind can act to keep it in check. Sometimes the violent behavior is dangerous or even life-threatening. The aftermath is often regret and bewilderment.
The outcome of snapping in rage is often blatantly counterproductive: a broken dish now useless. One’s most cherished china or highly prized automobile can be sacrificed in a fit of purposeless rage, and sometimes it is not an inanimate object that is demolished but rather a relationship or a person. In the worst cases the results are cruel, tragic, or criminal. How does one explain shaken-baby syndrome, for example? With the perspective of hindsight, a fit of rage is likely to be seen as senseless by the person committing the act. Ray Young in the post office attack, Carmela dela Rosa throwing her granddaughter to her death, and the woman mentioned in chapter 1 who ran over another driver in a fit of rage all regretted their horrific violent actions shortly afterward. Some, such as Ray Young, went to prison apologizing for what he had done and still grappling to understand it, completely mystified about what had happened “to him.”
Such furious reactions can be conveniently dismissed as aberrations of flawed individuals, but these acts are epidemic in modern society. Consider the case of Oscar Pistorius, the South African double amputee dubbed “Blade Runner” who competed in track using carbon fiber prosthetic legs against able-bodied athletes in the 2012 Olympics. His rival and winner of the 400m championship, Kirani James of Grenada, traded numbers from his own jersey with Pistorius immediately after the race and embraced him. Every other member of the field joined in embracing Pistorius at the finish line in a public and powerful display of respect and admiration. Pistorius was beloved the world over as an inspiration. This all changed in a flash and soon he was on trial for murder. Did he shoot his beautiful girlfriend Reeva Steenkamp with a spray of bullets in a fit of rage or by mistake? The fact that this question can be raised at all reveals the universal implicit understanding that this beastly propensity toward rage is deeply ingrained in human nature, and that seemingly anyone can suffer a rage attack with a horribly remorseful outcome.
Staff Sgt. Robert Bales walked out of his army outpost in the Kandahar province of Afghanistan in the middle of the night and massacred innocent civilians. After shooting indiscriminately with an M4 rifle twenty-two men, women, and children—most of them in their homes—and then setting their bodies on fire, Bales was later as perplexed by his behavior as anyone. This model soldier, athlete, and past president of his high school class wept with sincere apology and regret at trial, where he was sentenced to life imprisonment after pleading guilty to the gruesome mass murder. Father of two, Bales apologized to the relatives of his victims at his trial, but he could not explain why he committed the killings. “I am truly, truly sorry to all the people whose family members I have taken away,” he said. “I have murdered their families.”
NFL star Marc Edwards, a childhood friend of Bales, played football with him on their high school team, and he later went on to earn a Super Bowl ring with the New England Patriots. Testifying on the stand as a character witness, Edwards said that he could not fathom how the young man he knew could become the killer of women and children in Afghanistan. “It didn’t make any sense to me,” he said.
Bales’s commander in Iraq said that he was a great leader and “stood out and had a real positive attitude.”
Bob Durham, who lived next door to Bales growing up in Nebraska, said Bales was like another member of the family. Durham broke down in tears on the stand describing Bales’s compassion and how, as a teenager, Bales helped him care for his developmentally disabled son.
Haji Naim, an elder in one of the two small villages Bales attacked, flew several thousand miles to appear in person in court and describe the murderous crimes. “This bastard stood right in front of me,” Naim said. “I wanted to ask him, what did I do? And he shot me [in the face].”
Afghan witnesses testified that Bales ignored their pleas for mercy, including boys and girls who shouted, “We are children!”
In considering mitigating circumstances that might aid his defense and help us understand the horror, the defense originally considered the possibility of PTSD, substance abuse, and potential brain trauma from repeated concussions. In the end, all of these “rational” explanations were dismissed and none of them were introduced at trial in Sergeant Bales’s defense. Explaining what had happened that night, defense attorney John Henry Browne concluded, “I don’t think anybody with a rational mind could say Bob Bales didn’t snap.”
Anyone immediately comprehends the explanation of “snapping” and committing a terrible rage attack, but this “explanation” provides no understanding at all. What are the mechanisms driving this explosive human behavior that causes a person to suddenly lose control in a brutal attack of violent rage?
These are extreme examples, and the Bales case is multilayered, but nearly all of us have lost it in a burst of rage triggered by some slight provocation, leaving us perplexed and regretful. Snapping can erupt in many ways: an angry outburst of profanity, banging a fist on the table, scolding a child out of proportion to the incident provoking the anger, or slamming a door in disgust. Even Jesus Christ snapped in a fit of rage when he saw the moneychangers desecrating his house of worship. Completely out of character, the man of peace violently upended the merchants’ tables and chairs, exclaiming, “My house shall be called the house of prayer, but you have made it a den of thieves!” (Matthew 21:13 KJV). Jesus grabbed some cords and physically whipped the moneychangers out of the temple (John 2:13–15 NIV). Sure, he had good cause, but ideally he might have gone about it another way and still achieved his worthy objective. “Know this, my beloved brothers: let every person be quick to hear, slow to speak, slow to anger, for the anger of man does not produce the righteousness of God” (James 1:19–20 ESV). Sometimes we get angry for good reason. Other times, anger gets us.
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Road rage is probably the most easily relatable example of “snapping” in this way. Some 30 percent of US drivers admit to experiencing road rage, but Leon James, professor of psychology at the University of Hawaii, says that he believes that everyone experiences it. Road rage ranges from belligerent horn honking, verbally assaulting another driver, and delivering insults with obscene hand gestures to aggressive high-speed vehicular jousting intended to induce a wreck or a collision by slamming on brakes, cutting lanes, running the other car off the road, pursuing another vehicle to threaten the driver, and, in the extreme, pulling a gun and just shooting the other driver.
What precipitates such sudden rage on the road? Frustration and anger accompany the actions, but they are not the reason for the violent behavior. This is why a “Sunday school” moralistic approach to preventing rage is so ineffectual. It is not the emotion itself that causes the behavior, so efforts directed at suppressing the emotions can be futile. Sure, stay calm, don’t lose your temper, love one another, treat everyone as you would like to be treated . . . perfectly rational and laudable principles of behavior, but rage does not erupt from the rational mind.
Dismissing rage attacks as the product of morally or mentally defective individuals is contrary to the preponderance of evidence, the frequency of the attacks, and the broad spectrum of people, some just like you, who experience them.
If attempting to understand and control the rage response by focusing on suppressing anger and frustration is ineffectual, what approach will bring insight? The emotions of anger and frustration, like hunger, fear, or sleepiness, are indeed powerful drivers of human behavior, but to understand and modify the behaviors it is necessary to identify why one is hungry, sleepy, angry, or frustrated. If we understand why these emotions erupt in specific situations, we can more readily recognize what is happening in ourselves and others and see the rage response for what it is—a deeply ingrained biological process, critical to our survival, that is entirely automated but can be influenced by the rational, conscious mind. Again, these impulses to undertake life-threatening violent action were once absolutely necessary for our survival. So too are the emotions of anger and frustration. It makes perfect sense that human beings, just as other animals, have these hardwired capabilities programmed in our unconscious mind. The conscious mind acts far too slowly when confronted by sudden danger or other situations where violent action is the necessary response.
Modern life is so alien to the environment and lifestyle human beings experienced in our distant past when our neural circuits evolved and were sharpened. The rage response equipped our ancestors to cope with survival in a threatening environment. But when these protective circuits misfire in modern society, irrational attacks on vehicles are made that were in some sense intended for mastodons. One of the most memorable scenes from the BBC television show Fawlty Towers has John Cleese in the role of Basil Fawlty going berserk and beating his uncooperative car with a tree branch, yelling, “I’m going to give you a damn good thrashing!”
If the trigger for a violent act is apparent and the violent reaction unleashed is obviously necessary for biological survival, the action will be seen as justified. In such cases the behavior is not identified as a rage response or “snapping,” it’s considered quick thinking. What makes road rage and other cases of rage attacks so perplexing is that the trigger is often hidden, and it can remain elusive even long after the act.
Consider the case of Trayvon Martin, the seventeen-year-old shot to death in February 2012 by George Zimmerman, who was patrolling his neighborhood with a handgun in search of potential vandals and robbers. What made deliberation so difficult for the jury was the trigger for the action. If Zimmerman’s actions were triggered in response to actions taken by Martin that placed Zimmerman’s life at risk in a mortal battle, a jury of Zimmerman’s peers would accept the action and the killing as regrettable but not criminal. On the other hand, if Zimmerman had pursued Martin and provoked the altercation, Martin would be judged as victim and Zimmerman the criminal. The question of whether the jury got it right in this difficult case we can set aside; the point is that the behavior itself is not at issue. What is at issue in characterizing a behavior as a sudden rage response or not is the specific trigger that unleashed that behavior.
The triggers can be very subtle. Consider that road rage erupts frequently even in professional racecar drivers. This seems peculiar because the things that set off road rage on the highways—cutting lanes, overtaking another driver, impeding the advance of a faster car trailing you—are the norm, the nuts and bolts of racing. Yet a professional racecar driver can be seen throwing off his helmet in a fit of anger, storming over to another car, and going fisticuffs with the driver who spun out in front of him, ruining his chances of winning.
“I remember one race in particular,” a professional racecar driver told me in relating a specific instance of road rage in competition:
My career had gone into the Dumpster. My credibility had been questioned. I was racing in a smaller league. I would be so angry at times when these other competitors weren’t doing what I thought they should be doing. My frustration with having to be back in that arena—the lesser arena—and that guy . . .
This one time it was night. We were doing a twenty-four-hour race and I had passed him. I think he came out of the pits and I was clearly faster, but maybe he was fresh and full of it, but I just could not shake him. I passed him and he just would not leave me alone and I just wanted to be in the rhythm. It was at night and I was in a good rhythm and running hard and this guy just wouldn’t let it go.
I remember myself just getting madder and madder and I think ultimately I pulled away from him but you know it took a long time. I’m thinking, I’m so much better than this guy and why is this guy . . . ?
Circumstances beyond present events on the road were compounding the situation. The driver who spoke to me had suffered a serious accident in competition with the best drivers in the United States and Europe, and the accident had been caused by a mechanical failure. Such a failure in the machine one trusts their life to, beyond one’s ability to prevent, will shake anyone’s confidence. At this elite level of racing where every competitor is pushing to the limit to win, even a fraction of a second’s hesitation or sliver of doubt may allow another person to pass. “It’s a hard thing to overcome. In time you overcome it,” he said, but the accident was still fresh. Moreover, he was dealing with health issues and physical pain, even some personality conflicts among his crew.
“I remember being frustrated with the world. I was falling back.”
I asked him if his road rage in this instance enabled him to increase his lead on the other driver. “Yeah, I think so, but it took its toll and I had an accident after that. It is embarrassing to admit, but it is true.”
Sound familiar?
The important point here is to identify what triggered the rage response and appreciate an important component in this volatile mix: a person’s internal state and external stresses change the threshold at which the trigger is tripped. The driver continued:
A lot of these times when you are in the middle of the event [road rage] it is too late. If you stood a hundred feet above and you looked down on yourself and you say, “Really? You are actually gonna pull a gun and shoot somebody because they got too close to you with their car?” I mean, there’s way more going on here. That’s not what made you mad. You are already flipped-out.
The whole world was unraveling and there wasn’t a damn thing—despite what felt like heroic efforts—it was just going to unravel. The cognizant, conscious mind when it is working correctly would go, “This one race is not a make-or-break thing. What is make-or-break is if you have another accident.” The cognizant mind would say, “Fix this problem. Stop, fix this problem.” It is a very difficult thing to admit.
If I had the kind of maturity I have now, I would have sought help. The smart thing would have been—“Like, OK, you’ve got to rehabilitate. You’ve got to get yourself one hundred percent.” But what I did is I went racing because I could. I hurt [after the injury], but I could get around . . . it was ridiculous.
It is interesting, in this respect, to recall how Ray Young, who was convicted of knifing a person for apparently cutting in line at the post office, was battling cancer. Similarly, my pickpocketing incident in Barcelona happened while my daughter and I were dealing with some chronic stresses, which I will describe later. But for now, let us focus on the immediate nine triggers.
The Nine Triggers
It would appear from the daily headlines that countless situations can provoke violent, often deadly, rage, making it impossible to know how such varied tragic events get triggered: “Man Shoots Girlfriend in Head, Then Kills Self in Southwest Houston,” “Disgruntled Employee Goes on Deadly Shooting Rampage at Lumber Company,” “Alleged Car Thieves Killed by Irate Mob,” “Texas Man Shoots Wife Dead and Wounds Her Lover after Catching Them in Bed,” “Mother Shoots, Kills Son’s Armed Attacker,” “Barroom Brawl Erupts over Insult” . . . there is no end to the headlines. They fill the daily newspapers and broadcast media. Similar altercations that do not make the news keep law enforcement officers busy. But it is not the case that these rage attacks are set off by so many different situations that they are incomprehensible. Setting aside cases of pathology, the normal human brain will not engage in violent behavior without very specific provocation. I propose that nearly all of the array of possible provocations can be reduced to only nine specific triggers.
These triggers of rage can be remembered by using this mnemonic: LIFEMORTS (“life/deaths”; “deaths,” in this case, in French). The triggers are listed briefly here and then analyzed in greater depth in chapter 6. The triggers could be lumped together and split apart in several ways, just as the infinite variety of colors can be reduced to only nine basic colors (red, orange, yellow, green, blue, purple, brown, black, and white) for the purposes of recognizing and categorizing. For the important purpose of being able to quickly identify the trigger in any provocative situation, I have collected these provocations of rage into nine major categories that can be recalled quickly with this LIFEMORTS mnemonic. Knowing this mnemonic can change your life. In a dangerous situation, it could save it.
If you learn to recognize these triggers you can understand why a person snapped in a specific situation. No matter how misguided the response might have been, it will no longer be a mystery beyond comprehension. If you can recognize which of these triggers is igniting your sudden rise in anger or frustration, you can quickly disarm the rage response. Sometimes it is fully appropriate to unleash “the beast within,” because fundamentally all of these triggers exist to release violent behavior to save your life. The trick is to rapidly identify the trigger or triggers in a fluid situation, and ask yourself if this is indeed a potentially life-or-death situation or whether the trigger designed for life in the jungle misfired in the modern world. When encountering potential rage in others, the ability to recognize the triggers will help you in understanding and reacting to it by avoiding inflaming the situation, and possibly defusing it. A lot of things can make a person angry, but if you perceive that the source of a person’s sudden anger springs from one of the LIFEMORTS triggers, you will instantly recognize that you are in a potentially violent, even deadly, situation.
Life-or-limb. Almost anyone, and most animals, will defend themselves in what is perceived as a life-or-death attack. If an individual is about to die—or merely suffer serious injury—fighting back immediately and vigorously makes perfect sense from a biological perspective. There is nothing left to lose if your life is truly on the line.
Insult. Insults will easily provoke a rage response. Perceived insults often precipitate barroom brawls. They underlie family feuds, and in the not-so-distant past insult instigated duels to the death between gentlemen. The reason for this can be illuminated by extrapolating insults between people to a broader biological perspective.
In the animal world, violent interactions are one of the most common ways of establishing dominance. Among many social species this violence can become standardized, such as head-butting between bighorn sheep or bloody battles between male elephant seals. Such battles can result in serious injury or death. The use of violence to establish dominance is widespread throughout the animal kingdom, from fish to chimps; even social invertebrates, such as insects and marine snails (the keyhole limpet, a few peaceful-looking inches in length!), use physical violence to establish dominance over other members of the species. So deeply ingrained is the quick use of violence to establish dominance and the willingness to snap into a deadly attack, the behavior persists even in domesticated dogs encountering an unfamiliar dog, and it persists in us. Verbal insults are the human equivalent of head-butting—a means of challenge and establishing dominance. Bear in mind that it is the perception of insult that triggers the rage, even if the action was not intended as an insult. A hardworking employee may feel insulted by being skipped over for a promotion. . . .
Family. Animals will protect their offspring and family members against attack or other threat. Evolutionary success is determined by passing on an individual’s genes to the next generation. Protecting offspring, and even siblings and parents who closely share your genes, increases the odds that your genes will be passed on. We see this in a mother bear protecting her cub or when people are killed when they come between an adult moose and her calf. What father or mother would not protect and willingly sacrifice their own life for their children? This is one of the most basic of all instincts in animals as well as people.
Environment. Most animals will protect their own environment, their territory and home. The reasons are clear: home and territory provide the basic necessity for survival. Many social animals—cats, dogs, birds of prey, and people—are fiercely territorial. They establish and patrol the borders of their territory relentlessly. The concept of private property, signs that say INTRUDERS WILL BE SHOT, or the right to kill a stranger invading one’s home all illustrate this fundamental right of people and other creatures to kill to protect their environment. Border disputes between neighbors are a common trigger for violent attacks that are instigated by such trivial matters as an encroaching tree or a shortcut across their property.
Mate. Violence to obtain and protect a mate is the rule of the jungle. Many species, such as wild horses and seals, use violence to acquire and maintain mates or even harems. The Darwinian drive to pass on genes from the fittest individuals is the bedrock underlying the ready willingness to fight to the death over mates. Think: “All is fair in love and war.” At the same time, violence between males and females frequently occurs within intimate sexual relationships. This is the trigger for violence in domestic disputes, infidelity, and attacks by jealous lovers.
Order in society. This drive exists among other social animals but it is highly developed in human beings, because our species is so utterly dependent on social order for its survival. The accepted use of violence to maintain social order differs from violence to establish dominance among individuals in a group. The orderly operation of society is the purpose of this trigger of rage—not dominance among rivals. Violence is used to enforce the rules of society, to assure fairness, and to correct transgressions. Imprisonment, fines, firing someone from a job, revoking a professional license are all modern practices of forcing people to comply with the rules of orderly society through violent action: the forceful removal of liberty and things of value with the intention to harm and punish the individual who transgresses. Rage attacks frequently break out in response to a perceived social injustice. This trigger often ignites mob violence.
Resources. Animals in the wild must fight for their food. Violence will be used to obtain it and to retain it against theft. Likewise, human beings are intolerant of theft and they will react with violence to prevent it. In human society, money and other forms of valuable property are equivalent to food, because these valuables can be transformed into food, housing, and territory.
Tribe. Humans, requiring a tight social structure for survival, will fiercely defend their own tribe. This altruistic behavior is much less common in the animal world, but it does exist. When prehistoric tribes of human beings assembled for their survival in nature, an encounter with another tribe was likely to result in competition, the loss of resources, or the triggering of any of the other LIFEMORTS events leading to violence. Thus human beings have always been wary of others. An us-versus-them imperative rules. Throughout history we see human beings divided by tribe, country, or religion attacking and defending against one another. The Great Wall of China, medieval castles, forts and stockades in the Western Frontier (“Indian country”), the remains of stone walls and moats in Italy, throughout Europe, and Japan, and the tight and clearly defined borders of modern countries that will be defended to the death in war are all derived from this requirement to protect the tribe that is an immutable characteristic of our species. Groups of individuals specialized for using violence to protect the tribe are formed as armies or militia in nearly all societies. Tribalism is what drives inner-city gangs, and tribalism is the basis for racism and war. Avoiding this trigger is essential for peace.
Stopped. Animals will struggle violently to escape restraint, even to the extent of gnawing off their paw if caught in a trap. Humans are no different. Backpacker Aron Ralston amputated his own right arm to free himself after falling into a crevice and getting it trapped under a rock in April 2003. The ordeal is captured in his book Between a Rock and a Hard Place and the film 127 Hours. In the right circumstance this is a rational and lifesaving response. Being restrained, cornered, imprisoned, or impeded from the liberty of pursuing one’s desires will trip this trigger of rage. The accompanying emotion is frustration. The Stopped trigger is what motivates individuals or groups to seek liberty through violent action, such as revolution and war. It also motivates revenge against those who are perceived as having impeded a person’s progress, as illustrated recently by the rogue Los Angeles police officer Christopher Dorner, who went on a shooting rampage after being fired. Struggling violently to escape impediment and restraint is natural, but artificial situations presented in the modern world that did not exist in the distant past can misfire the Stopped trigger of rage. The anger and frustration that builds in waiting in long lines (or when someone suddenly cuts in line) and similar situations in traffic on the road can set off this trigger.
This trigger can also result from a feeling of oppression, which is in effect the perception by an individual or groups of individuals that they are being prevented from enjoying their rightful benefits in society. Any circumstance that leads an individual to feel cornered falls into this category of trigger to violent rage, as can illness if it is perceived as limiting one’s right to enjoy and fully participate in their rightful place in society.
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Any one or more of these LIFEMORTS triggers can initiate an automatic rage response. Whether it does or doesn’t depends on additional factors specific to the situation, the individual’s state of mind, and other contributing stresses and influences. Frequently a situation will present multiple LIFEMORTS triggers simultaneously or cumulatively. This, not surprisingly, increases the likelihood of violence.
Take my reaction to the pickpocket in Barcelona as described in chapter 1; several LIFEMORTS triggers were pulled when the thief snatched my wallet, including Life-or-limb, Family, Environment, and Resources. The loss of resources was the prime trigger (Resource trigger). Without money for food, shelter, and a place to stay (Environment) my well-being was very much at stake. Add to this Family, as my daughter’s welfare was also threatened and she was dependent on my reaction to the situation. Finally, Life-or-limb: once the situation had exploded into a street fight, my life and limb were certainly in peril. It was him or me at that point. Had my daughter not been accompanying me, there would have been one less trigger, and that could have made all the difference in how I responded instinctively. Family is also what triggered my daughter to come to my aid, leaping through the air to intercept my wallet and recover my BlackBerry while I struggled with the thief.
Now consider why the gang of pickpockets reacted by chasing my daughter and me through Barcelona for the next two hours after I had defeated and nearly strangled their pickpocket and derailed their coordinated intentions to rob us. Insult: the pickpocket had been insulted by my beating him up, and indeed the gang’s credibility had been threatened. Tribe: tribalism, the essence of any gang, was then evoked to chase us down and seek revenge.
Now it is possible to understand why driving an automobile in traffic is such a potent instigator of people snapping violently. Driving sets off so many of these triggers. Several of them are, in reality, relics from the past that are mistakenly tripped by the artificial experience (in biological terms) of driving an automobile. We tend to view the area around our vehicle while driving as territory. When a vehicle cuts in front of us, this can pull the Environment trigger to defend that territory. Not allowing someone to pass is motivated by the same defense of territory. But when traveling in a car, it is time, not territory, that matters (assuming the other vehicle is not threatening our safety). Whether a vehicle is in front or in back of your car on the freeway makes no real difference in terms of the purpose of your activity in driving: to be transported to a destination rapidly. Either way, it amounts to a difference of a few seconds, which is of no real consequence. Yet if viewed as territory, it’s easier to see how road rage can provoke a shooting if another driver encroaches.
This irrational response arises because the brain circuits did not evolve at a time when we had motor vehicles. Back in the jungle, as is the case today, if a number of people are running, people do cut in and out and pass one another all the time and it provokes no angry reaction. The fastest person is free to run to the lead. In the case of a footrace, your brain perceives that you are running over territory, not with territory as is the virtual illusion when driving a car.
The triggers of road rage can include: Life-or-limb, when another driver commits some action that nearly causes you to have a car accident. Insult, such as flipping the bird, honking aggressively, swearing at another driver. Family, as an altercation on the road can be influenced positively or negatively by whether family members are in the car with you. If a driver feels that another driver’s action has nearly put his family in jeopardy, the first driver may be more inclined to seek revenge. Conversely, awareness that family is threatened can restrain a driver from acting in rage. How many cars have you seen with that BABY ON BOARD sticker or similar? Environment; “He cut into my lane!” Order in society, when someone fails to yield, cuts in line, passes around others who are patiently waiting to merge due to a lane closure. An individual is not following the rules, thus making him the target of righteous violence. Tribe, in which many road rage incidents are precipitated by particular makes of vehicles or loud music booming from another vehicle being considered obnoxious. These attributes identifying the vehicle’s driver as a member of a different group—redneck, hick, lowrider, tree hugger, rich guy, low-class—or member of a different race or nationality. Stopped, as obviously being bound in traffic is not much different from being bound by any other method that once physically restrained our early ancestors.
No wonder the artificial behavior of driving an automobile provokes people so easily to rage. Driving is a veritable complex booby trap of the nine triggers. There are additional important factors that enter into road rage because of the artificiality of the behavior—namely, inability to fully regard the automobile as another human being and the diminished ability to communicate nonverbally with the person in the other vehicle, in contrast to the rich unconscious vocabulary of body language. If people accidentally bump into each other on foot, instant apologies erupt, but on the road the same accidental bump provokes rage.
What triggered the rage described by the racecar driver during his twenty-four-hour race was primarily Stopped (but also perceived by the driver as Insult). The driver felt that his dominance was being challenged; he felt oppressed, cornered, and unable to sustain his rightful place in the world because of circumstances beyond his control, including restrictions imposed by health. The driver also simply felt his livelihood was being stolen. This is a common trigger of the rage reaction in many different situations. His rage had little to do with the car pressing on his tail—that’s what a race is.
All of the triggers of road rage—passing, cutting in lane, following closely, and so on—are encountered routinely by professional racecar drivers in competition. If professional drivers responded to them with sudden rage as happens on the highway, all road races would degenerate into destruction derbies. Professional racers adjust their response to these triggers of rage so that they are not tripped, but circumstances in racers’ internal and external environment can lower that threshold, allowing the triggers to be tripped.
Interestingly, the external circumstances that modify the threshold for pulling the triggers are the same LIFEMORTS triggers of the sudden rage attack, only experienced over a prolonged period of time rather than suddenly by a specific event. This cocks the trigger and sets it off with the slightest provocation when it is hit again suddenly in a later encounter. Consider the racecar driver recounting the contributing pressures that lowered his threshold for road rage in competition:
So here I am in this race, but here I am as my career is going downhill. But I am physically and mentally not right and totally frustrated because I have tasted it [success of being world champion] and I know I have the ability . . . I mean, when I was on track nobody could touch me.
Any major-league batter struck by a fastball confronts the brain’s strong protective response, making him gun-shy the next few times at bat, and his batting average is likely to dip. While getting beaned by a hardball hurled at 95 mph by a professional pitcher must really hurt, it is rarely fatal.
“First of all,” the racecar driver explained, “it really almost took me [the serious crash on the racetrack], and that feeling of one minute you’re doing something and in the next minute (pause) . . . When that car left the ground I knew this was a serious thing—and it was. I was lucky to survive it. That car was just demolished. It left the ground at a hundred and eighty-five miles an hour. It flew. It shouldn’t have failed. It shouldn’t have failed like that.”
These stresses of personal injury and loss of confidence, as difficult as they are to grapple with, were compounded by others. “I had to fight through so many things. Little things, but they added up,” he said, speaking about simultaneously dealing with difficulties within his team of coworkers and with personal stresses in his family.
The evidence suggests that ongoing stresses were weighing on Sergeant Bales’s life too. Bales told the jury that he had struggled with anger issues that worsened after his third military deployment to the Middle East. He said trivial things like dirty dishes in the sink would make him angry, and that he was “mad at myself for being mad.” He said he started flying off the handle when soldiers made small mistakes. He also started taking steroids and drank alcohol at times in the looser environment that prevailed at the Special Forces outpost. Bales said the fear was constant: “In my mind, I saw threats everywhere.” Bales was struggling with family stresses and financial difficulty at home, telling his superior that he had “bad kids, an ugly wife, and was not anxious to make it back home to see them.”
Recognizing the nine triggers of rage and understanding the compounding circumstances that press on them helps us comprehend how someone can snap and commit a violent crime, but it does not excuse the actions any more than understanding that a bank robber commits his crime for financial gain, but it does help illuminate why these perplexing crimes occur. Acting on that understanding could help prevent them. I would like to think that if Bales (and his superiors) understood why he was “mad at [himself] for being mad,” a model soldier, father, and past president of his high school would not be spending the rest of his life in a prison cell, and twenty-two innocent people would be unharmed and living out their lives in Afghanistan.
If the LIFEMORTS triggers can be recognized, tragedy can be averted.
These extreme examples show that snapping violently over minor provocations is the cause of much violence and even murder, but more often snapping in everyday life leads to angry and thoughtless verbal outbursts. The angry outbursts and actions can have lasting and regrettable consequences on relationships, damaging or destroying professional or family connections. Almost everyone snaps at one time or another, with the possible exception of the late Mr. Fred Rogers of infinite patience on the public television children’s show Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood. Even Pope Francis admits to snapping.
“It’s true that we can’t react violently,” the pontiff says, “but, for example if Dr. Gasbarri here, a great friend of mine, says a curse word against my mother, then a punch awaits him. It is normal. It is normal.”
The pope was speaking in the immediate aftermath of the 2014 murders by Islamic extremists in Paris in response to the controversial cartoons of the Prophet Muhammad published in the satirical French magazine Charlie Hebdo (in this case, Insult being the trigger to violence).
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Professional and amateur sports is an excellent place to witness this unconscious neurocircuitry of rage working for and against athletes. “Players when they get frustrated can hijack themselves and end up doing something that they didn’t want to do. Whether that is throwing at a batter, whether that’s going into the dugout after they strike out and throwing a Gatorade container down, kicking a water cooler, breaking a bat—whatever it is, those kind of immediate responses do happen. Typically players will see that as something that they shouldn’t have done. They will wind up apologizing for it and move on,” Cleveland Indians team psychiatrist Charlie Maher explained to me. But these same neurocircuits of rapid response are crucial to athletic performance, enabling players to operate instantaneously and appropriately in the stressful arena of competition.
We are in the fifth inning, July 6, 2012, and the Cleveland Indians are in deep trouble. The score is 6–2 with the Tampa Bay Rays at bat facing Indians pitcher Justin Masterson, with only one out. The Indians send left-handed relief pitcher Nick Hagadone to the mound. Hagadone has a 95-mph fastball and he started the season strong. Recently, though, he has fallen into a slump, giving up fifteen runs in the last seven games. This opportunity on the mound will bring Hagadone’s ugly streak to a sudden end, but not in the way anyone could have imagined. By the time the inning was mercifully ended, the Rays had increased their lead to bury the Indians 10–2.
Hagadone left the pitcher’s mound frustrated. Reaching the clubhouse he slammed his fist into the door, fracturing his pitching arm. The injury required surgery to insert a metal screw to mend the broken bones, and at least eight months to heal. His season was over. The Indians immediately optioned him to the minor leagues, and placed him on the minor-league disqualification list so that they would not have to pay him while he was sidelined. Hagadone’s major-league contract worth $480,500 was immediately sliced to $78,250 in the minor league.
Indians manager Manny Acta said, “I think Nick learned his lesson. A big part of this game is learning how to control your emotions.”
Hagadone suffered embarrassment and indignity, but everyone can relate to him. People gripped by frustration frequently suffer sudden, self-inflicted, unintended injury to their toes or fists in an explosion of aggression taken out on an inanimate object.
“I think we all shared Nick’s frustration, and we’re certainly disappointed with the reaction,” Indians general manager Chris Antonetti said. “We wish he would have handled it differently. But he’s very remorseful, he’s sorry that it happened, and he’s been very accountable for it.”
I asked the Cleveland Indians team psychologist, Charlie Maher, if Hagadone might be one of those hotheaded athletes with anger-management issues. Not in the least, he said: “Actually, this was very, very surprising, because of how he is. This player is someone who I know very, very well. He is someone who would at home be very laid back, very easygoing.
“That was a situation that happened in a game. He snapped, so to speak. He’s a perfectionist. He wants everything to be right. When he is locked into the moment, this guy is very, very good. He can pitch. He can move on to the next pitch. He doesn’t think about it.”
These are the rare qualities required of a relief pitcher. Someone who can step into the game at the most stressful moment and extract the team from their dire state with a precision performance under pressure.
“He got too caught up in what other people were thinking about him, and he let that get to him,” Maher continued. “He is more of a controlled kind of individual, and he’s very good. When he is ready to pitch he’ll do a good job. Here, he just snapped.”
I mentioned to Dr. Maher that if this player did not care intensely about doing well, this never would have happened. In a world where it sometimes seems that many people don’t care very much about much of anything, Hagadone needs to appreciate how his intense passion to excel is extraordinary, and this is one of the keys to his success as a professional athlete. Maher agreed: Hagadone snapped as a result of activating the Insult trigger of rage, in this case from feeling his personal status diminished in the eyes of his colleagues and fans. The Stopped trigger was also a contributor. “He was, like, trapped,” Maher said, expressing how he believes Hagadone must have felt, “and that’s how he got out of the trap.”
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Setting aside the extremes of rage murders and terrorists and high-performing athletes, let’s consider this rage circuitry at work in the brains of everyday people in everyday life. Most parents have experienced abrupt rises in anger toward their own children, whom they love dearly and desire to raise properly, and a parent may lash out verbally or even physically in ways that they immediately regret. Married couples, coworkers, shopkeepers, or anyone who deals with the general public, and many others in daily life understand what snapping is and that it needs to be avoided in most cases. But the “anger management” approach is frequently not sufficient. Consider the following comments posted on various websites or printed in magazine articles on subjects ranging from parenting to marital relations to anger-management services.
“I have a bad temper and my son is very stubborn and very jealous, lately every time he behaves wrong I just start yelling at him which makes me feel bad later. Will that have a deep impact on him? Time outs doesn’t seems [sic] to work with him, he just won’t listen to me.”
This concerned mother was not only worried about her snapping but was more deeply troubled that her angry reactions could have long-term harmful effects on her son. The moderator’s reply confirmed that her angry responses were indeed harming her son’s development. The mother likely already knew this. Her question was cloaking a deeper one: How do I stop snapping at my child?
A father posting on the same website: “When I come home from work, I find myself snapping at my son. How can I stop doing it?” He signs himself “Too Tired Dad.”
The moderator confirmed what the father (and most of us) already know: It is easy to bring the stresses of work home and have anger released on family members over trivial incidents.
Professional advisers typically respond with the following helpful advice to parents:
All of these are helpful suggestions. The problem is that most of them can be ineffective in the moment of snapping. Such advice tips are really just restatements of what snapping is, and further elaboration on why snapping should be suppressed. The problem is that this rational approach does not disrupt the rage circuitry effectively. The concerned father and mother are already well aware of the problem. Their strong desire to avoid these behavioral responses is why these people went to the trouble to bare their souls online seeking help.
As helpful as anger-management advice can be, there is a need for a supplemental approach to these practical techniques in order to suppress anger. On a PBS news report, a veteran standing in court charged with committing a violent crime after returning to civilian life shot back at the judge, “Even me being in anger management . . . what good is that? Because I snapped!”
“In the moments where I feel like I’m going to snap, as much as I feel like I need help, I don’t really need advice,” observes Ann, who writes the blog PhD in Parenting. “I do not need someone telling me how great time outs are. I do not need someone telling me that I was disrespectful to my child and that if I just focused better on connecting with her that these problems would not arise. I do not need someone saying that I expect too much of myself or that I expect too much of my children. I do not need someone telling me that we need strict consequences for misbehaviour. I need a hug. I need empathy. I need help. I need a break. I need space. I need time to think. Once I’ve had that, I need one-on-one time with the kids to reconnect with them and I need a few days of calm for us to get back to normal and leave our stresses behind.”
What people really want is to understand why they snap. What is it? A husband named Chris posts online seeking to understand why he snaps at his wife:
It seems like I snap at her at times and she gets upset and starts crying. Why do I do this? I don’t “mean” to do it. Today I was restless as my mom died a week ago. I wasn’t happy doing anything. She wanted to take me to the movies but I didn’t want to go. Then I snapped at her about some silly thing and she got upset and left in the car. I don’t know what to do.
Chris clearly grasps that underlying stresses are part of the snapping response, but he wants to understand how and why. Understanding is the first step to managing anything.
This concerned wife is asking the same question as the others seeking help with snapping:
I snapped out on my husband this morning. I did it last week, too. Needless to say I’m disappointed with myself. This morning I was bugged because we missed the recycling truck. Yes, it’s his job (so to speak). He normally takes it out in the morning. His schedule has changed so he missed it. I bugged out about it; yelled, had a fit, etc. But why should I give a flying fig? If it’s so darn important I should take it out myself the night before. Another thing, last night I dumped my bag out all over the living-room floor. I was looking for my keys and I had too much cr*p in my bag, so I dumped it and walked out the door to go get whatever bologna I wanted to go get.
Normally, I’d point to hormones, being tired, etc. If I’m chemically off I can feel it. The thing is there wasn’t any emotion that made sense to me. Sure, there’s anger involved I guess, but I question that because it didn’t linger . . . at all. I can’t even recall it. It seems like anger on the surface and just a pile of numb underneath.
On top of everything our anniversary is tomorrow. Meh, who knows. My cousin is getting married this Sat and he plans to have a special dedication for my brother. Maybe this is some weird grief thing I’m not in touch with.
So, what do you do when your spouse snaps out on you (if they ever do) and what do they do with your snap outs (if you ever snap)? Then, how can it be made up to the snappee?
The current behavioral counseling approach does not provide an answer. What she wants to know is, what is the biology underpinning this odd and undesirable automatic behavior?
She has perceptively pinpointed two of the factors, stress and hormones, and she is trying to identify the triggers. Why did her husband’s failure to take out the recycling set her off? It makes no sense to her.
Another woman asks:
It seems like lately whenever i am with my husband i am snappy and short with him. I raise my voice and become really irritated very easily which is very unusual. I have gone over everything in my head which could contribute: He is working alot, i am responsible for EVERYTHING at home, i have switched birth control twice in the past 3 months, i am on phentermine to lose weight, it is getting close to when i am supposed to start my period, just stress in general, our son is teething so therefore very fussy. I don’t know what is really the cause but i want to stop doing it. I feel terrible when i do and it has been pushing him away which is not good. Does anybody have some advice for me?
What this woman and the others are seeking is an understanding of the brain’s unconscious and automated circuits of rage, and the LIFEMORTS triggers that instantly engage them. A common misconception is that snapping behavior is caused by anger. In fact, anger is an emotional response, and a lifesaving one in the right situation, provoked by the brain’s threat-detection circuitry.
In an article entitled “Men and Anger Management” published on WebMD, an expert writes, “Anger is a very powerful emotion that can stem from feelings of frustration, hurt, annoyance, or disappointment. It is a normal human emotion that can range from slight irritation to strong rage.”
The problem with this perspective is that from a neuroscience view it mixes up the triggers of rage with the response of rage. The emotions—anger, disappointment, annoyance, hurt, frustration, jealousy—are the responses evoked in the brain by specific situations or circumstances (triggers) that communicate beyond conscious words. These powerful feelings motivate behavior to address an immediate threat in your environment. These emotions are the result, not the cause, of snapping. This is why advice to suppress anger and the other emotional responses is often ineffective. The horse is already out of the barn, so to speak.
Applying techniques to manage emotional responses is the present approach to addressing snapping, as in this example from an anger-management resource:
Practice these techniques daily. Learn to use them automatically when you’re in a tense situation.
Again, these are all very useful techniques, but still, they are predicated on an approach that might be likened to “putting out the fire, rather than preventing fires by understanding what starts them.” The longing for this missing insight is what comes through loudly in all of the experiences shared by the people crying out for help through advice columns and websites.
All the wife wanted to know is why she felt a sudden rise of anger because her husband forgot to take out the recycling. In the context of the brain’s automated circuitry of sudden aggression and anger, her husband’s action threatened her dominance—the Insult trigger of aggression. If she could perceive this, she would see that this was clearly a neurological misfire of a normally very important brain function. Her husband meant no insult. The emotion of anger is useless in this instance, as there is no need for any aggressive response.
If we think back to the quote earlier from Pope Francis, we see how he fully recognized, and he was trying to teach others, that insult is a powerful provocation to violence. It is necessarily a part of being human. Some insults are more likely to cause a violent response than others, such as insulting a person’s mother or their religion. In the LIFEMORTS context, disrespecting one’s mother or a person’s religion pushes two rage buttons simultaneously with the Insult button: Family and Tribe. It does not matter at all if the insult is unintentional. If a trigger is pulled, the violent response is released.
Likewise, in many of the previous incidents, additional factors made the person unusually touchy, causing them to erupt in rage at seemingly trivial incidents, for example, chronic stress, being tired, or hormonal, dietary, or pharmaceutical factors. It is helpful to understand why, in the biological sense, the triggers of rage need to be on a hair trigger under these situations. The lowering of the threshold for a snap response is an important component of the mechanism. Consider that people commonly become irritable when they are hungry. Low blood sugar is the result of inadequate food, which in the primal sense is an immediate threat to survival. Facilitating aggression during hunger in our hunter-gatherer days would have promoted survival by boosting a person’s ability to act aggressively to hunt down and kill prey. That neurological relic of our past can be counterproductive in the modern world of fast-food restaurants, but we are stuck with it. It is helpful to understand this, however, if you are a waiter. You should not delay serving bread and drinks to hungry diners as soon as they are seated.
Stress Pressing on Triggers
The incident of Cleveland Indians pitcher Nick Hagadone suddenly snapping and slamming his fist into the clubhouse door is less bewildering if you are aware that he had been laboring under the chronic stress of enduring a seven-game slump in his performance leading up to the incident. Chronic stresses affect many people in modern life. Work-related stress, for example, frequently increases volatile reactions, sometimes with career-changing consequences that are as sudden and debilitating as Hagadone’s fractured pitching arm. Today one’s career has replaced hunting and gathering as the means of putting bread on the table, but the same threat-detection brain circuits are at work providing for ourselves and family in our career today as were operating in the brains of our hunting and gathering ancestors of prehistoric times.
“Yes, I have seen firsthand the effects of chronic stress on whistleblowers,” says attorney Jason Zuckerman, principal of Zuckerman Law, a Washington, DC, firm that represents whistleblowers nationwide. Whistleblowers are people who reveal wrongdoing within a government agency or private enterprise. Whistleblowers are glamorized in movies, but the reality is much different. They typically suffer unrelenting threats and reprisals from their employer. Most whistleblowers end up broke, out of a job, emotionally destroyed, and often psychologically or physically ill from enduring the chronic stress and battling the injustice of their employer’s actions against them.
I interviewed one employee in a government agency who was stripped of all resources and personnel and sent to an isolated room in the basement of the multistory building. I found him alone in a windowless room with yellow-painted cinder-block walls, sitting at a metal desk with a black telephone and a computer monitor. There was nothing else in the room. He no longer had any job function, and no interaction with other employees. He talked about the difficult struggle to withstand the constant stress of isolation and injustice. He was consumed by the fight to get his old job back, by his legal expenses, and with devising legal strategies to defend himself from the abuse. “I’m still waiting for a reply from my congressman,” he said, turning to look at some text on his computer screen. In a tone of voice conveying deep misery he told me of a colleague who had suffered a similar fate and had died recently at an early age as a result of a sudden heart attack brought on by the prolonged stress.
“A whistleblower feels vulnerable and under attack, and the stress can become unbearable,” Zuckerman says. “In one instance, a client slapped her boss and was terminated as a result thereof. She lost control momentarily after suffering months of retaliation. This client had a perfect performance record for twenty years, but the stress caused her to act in a manner that gave the employer a sound justification to terminate her employment.”
Zuckerman continues. “In other cases I have handled, chronic stress has caused my clients to have verbal outbursts that resulted in disciplinary action. But it is unfair to look at the outbursts in isolation. Those outbursts stem from my clients feeling under assault for doing the right thing. Whistleblowing often results in isolation and alienation from colleagues, and feelings that everything is on the line. For example, the whistleblower fears that he will lose his reputation, livelihood, financial stability, et cetera. This stress takes a terrible toll on my clients.”
Acute stress stimulates the body, but chronic stress can be damaging or even deadly. Chronic stress impairs the immune system and taxes the cardiovascular system. Memory is stimulated by acute stress, but chronic stress weakens cognitive function and memory, because it disrupts the normal neurocircuitry in the brain; it even kills neurons. Glucocorticoids (such as corticosterone) are stress hormones that are released by the adrenal glands. These have powerful, wide-ranging effects on the body’s metabolism, cardiovascular system, immune system, and cognitive function. The release of glucocorticoids is stimulated by the hypothalamus acting on the anterior pituitary in the brain, which releases hormones into the blood that stimulate the adrenal glands.
Interestingly, glucocorticoids fluctuate on a twenty-four-hour cycle, rising during the day and ebbing at night. This daily rise of stress hormones helps the brain and body operate at peak performance during the day, but it is essential that levels recover during rest. Lack of sleep causes debilitating stress in part because sleep deprivation does not allow stress hormones to return to low levels.
Neuroscientists Conor Liston, Wen-Biao Gan, and colleagues observed how neurons and synapses are affected by stress hormones by surgically installing a glass window in the skulls of mice. Then they placed the anesthetized mice under a powerful microscope that used bursts of titanium-sapphire laser illumination to penetrate into the brain for them to see what was happening. Twenty minutes after they injected corticosterone into the mouse, they saw new synapses begin to form on dendrites of neurons, and existing synapses started to disappear. Behavior tests on these mice showed that acute stress (single corticosterone injections) improved learning, and that improved performance in learning tests correlated directly with the increased rate of sprouting new synapses. Thus, the stress hormone stimulates active rewiring of synaptic connections in the cerebral cortex.
The boosted rate of forming and eliminating synapses remains in balance during acute stress (single injections of corticosterone), but chronic stress (multiple injections over a longer period) upsets the balance and causes a net loss of synaptic connections over time. The reason for this is that once new synapses form, stress hormone must return to normal levels for those new synapses to survive. Interestingly, the researchers discovered that sleep was necessary for synapse survival: The drop in stress hormone levels at night is essential to prevent them from withering away.
“Jail is one of the most incredibly stressful environments,” says David Connell, who has taught a stress-management class to inmates at the Arlington County Jail in Virginia for the past fifteen years. “Because they [inmates] don’t have control over hardly anything in jail.”
One of the big stressors in jail is some of the guards. Some of them have issues—some of them are great, some of them aren’t—and they just want to sort of poke at the inmates.
Or thinking about their court case is a huge stressor. Most of them have really stressful stories and lives. A lot of it comes from childhood, and addiction is a big one.
There are a lot of people in there because of this [snapping] response. You know, I recall there was one gentlemen; he was six foot eight, three hundred and fifty pounds. He said that when he would get angry he would almost black out, and he would wake up and realize what he’d done. I mean, someone that big who didn’t have control over his physical reactions and stress—he really would hurt a few people.
“What kind of things would set him off?” I ask.
“Someone saying something—disrespecting him. Or emotionally charged family relationships, a girlfriend or that kind of thing.”
Connell says he teaches several techniques in his anger-management classes to lower stress. “Physical exercise, diet, mindfulness, meditation, and visualization,” he says, listing them. “Breathing, a deep abdominal breathing technique,” he says, helps reduce stress and is especially useful in helping inmates go to sleep. “What you put in your body affects your mind as well,” he notes, for example, caffeine, alcohol, sugar, or drugs.
“Long-term stresses will kill you, literally,” he says. That is a fact, but it is also a fact that stress (both acute and long-term) greatly increases a person’s likelihood of snapping verbally or physically in response to seemingly trivial incidents.
Chronic stress places the LIFEMORTS triggers on high alert because the stress indicates that a heightened state of threat exists in one’s environment and this requires greater vigilance. Stress, like anger, is a bodily sensation conveyed through emotional feelings that alerts us that we are in danger, and this in turn motivates aggressive physical behaviors. Trying to understand the reasons for the underlying stress is not going to be as helpful as simply understanding that, as a biological necessity, stress will make a person more likely to snap. New research is increasing our understanding of the neurocircuitry and hormonal factors that accomplish this mental state we call stress, and identifying how these stress responses act on the triggers. Some stresses in life are avoidable, such as being late and, as a consequence, rushing to work on the highway. In this stressful situation you are more apt to experience a road rage incident because of the biology of your brain, not because of your weak morals. You may be powerless to lower the stress, but recognizing that being under stress is going to cock the LIFEMORTS triggers, so to speak, can make you more careful to avoid a misfire. Most serious life stresses are not under one’s control, such as poor health, a death in the family, financial trouble, moving house, and many others. Even though such stresses cannot be controlled, it must be understood that in a state of chronic stress you are at risk of the LIFEMORTS triggers misfiring. Likewise it is important to recognize that the risk of another person snapping increases when you are dealing with someone, even a stranger, who is apparently under stress, and you are in a situation where the LIFEMORTS triggers are present.
Everyone knows what stress feels like, even if they have not fully realized all of the underlying causes of it. While trying to identify and correct these causes of stress, a person needs to recognize the fact that, for whatever reason, they are feeling under stress. Knowing that stress will put their brain circuitry for snapping on a hair trigger, extra vigilance must be taken. This recognition will engage the prefrontal cortex, as will be discussed in chapters 8 and 12, to proactively put the brakes on the rage response.
To make use of this newfound knowledge about the neuroscience of rage, it is necessary to develop the skill of identifying the specific LIFEMORTS trigger at work in any threatening situation. Not only will this make what seem to be incomprehensible rage attacks in the news and in our daily lives more comprehensible, developing this skill will enable you to better control this neurocircuitry of sudden violence and aggression that resides in us all.