I’m going to focus on a topic that has been one of great confusion to me for my entire life. Some of this I have learned from my siblings and some from my father plus what I have experienced myselves. I plan to make this the theme for the next few posts. Some of it may have been covered in previous posts; but I trust some of it will be new as well.

I suppose my issues with anger really stem back to before I was born. My father had a violent temper before I was born and for the first few years of my life. I don’t have very many personal memories of my father’s temper being out-of-control, but older siblings do. The first I became aware of it was when my father wrote a letter to my psychiatrist in which he raised the possibility that my need for psychiatric care now might be related to or stemmed from his explosive temper. In that letter he described an incident that happened when I was an infant. I had been crying for hours and was inconsolable. In a fit of anger he grabbed a pillow and covered my head with it, forcing me to stop crying. My memories of that trauma include a severe ear ache in my left ear; but of course my father had no way of knowing that was why I had been crying so long. When he realized what he had come extremely close to doing to me because of his anger, he made God and himself a promise to never loose control of his temper again. Anger became his number one enemy, and he remained determined to wipe it out of his life and the lives of his children from that time on. My older siblings and I remember images of Dad pacing the floor in extreme frustrations and yelling, “I’m not angry at you! I’m angry at me for being angry at you!!!” I remember my tendency to hold my breath in fear whenever he said those words.