Behavior modification as practiced in modern psychiatry deals only with the symptoms and surface behavior rather than the underlying problem. The cause of violence in men, or even women for that matter, is the loss of sovereignty and self-control due to childhood trauma and daily stress. One of the most fundamental causes of anger lies in the many forms of injustice we see all around us. Frustrated by outrage and caught in unreasonable situations, we lose control. Perhaps it is a manipulative spouse playing mind games, spinning everything you say, making what he or she did wrong your fault.
That kind of unreasonable scenario can cause anyone to blow a fuse. Intimidation compels an escalation by the victim in an attempt to out-provoke the intimidator into sub-mission and so regain control. That game always backfires, making the angry person look so much more wrong that he ends up with the short end of the stick, while the real of-fender gets away with it.
The secret of anger management already exists within. We need only rediscover the civilizing art of grace under fire, growing in stature by dealing calmly and graciously with offenders.
Forty-seven of my seventy-two years have been focused on helping people to overcome the hypnotic conditioning of environment. As a former professional hypnotist, I made a startling discovery, which is that the pressures of every-day life exert a hypnotic influence over all of us from the day we were born. Furthermore, therapeutic hypnosis cannot solve problems; it is the problem itself.
Every time we overreact to what we call stress, we activate a traumatic turmoil within that allows the circumstance to implant suggestions and behavior patterns below the level of our consciousness. These subconscious behavior patterns grow stronger than all the efforts of our will to over-come them. Worse yet, the very struggle we wage against any unwanted behavior only strengthens its power over us.
From that point on, every painful event of childhood tends to reappear and be reinforced by the ever-present stress. In much the same way as a Vietnam veteran tends to overreact and jump behind the sofa upon hearing the backfiring of a bus, so does our implanted behavior automatically compel us to respond to look-alike and sound-alike situations.
Unfortunately, our wives, husbands, or people we meet may not really be as mean-spirited as those who have hurt us in the past. Nevertheless, we react to them as though they were the very same violators or molesters of our past. In other words, the implanted behavior of our past continues to be reinforced in the present, gaining strength, and thus guaranteeing a more miserable future.
In order to solve any problem we must see clearly what the problem is. At a very vulnerable time in our lives, we may have overreacted with anger to some type of cruelty. One particular form of anger separates us hypnotically from the sovereignty of our natural self-control, and the name of that anger is resentment. Those who wish to dominate and control us need only to intimidate us. Through the guilt of being upset and the need for peace, we tend to transfer the control of our lives to outer authority, as we did as a child.
We can, of course, continue to become submissive and yield in order to keep the peace. But doing so does nothing but teach manipulative people to go on being angry to get their way. The more you empower the despot, the more he will take advantage and walk all over you like a doormat. When that gets too much for you, then comes the violent rebellion and thus hell escalates between husband and wife, father and son, mother and daughter.
Therefore, the solution lies in the present moment. If you discover the way to stop reacting to the present as the extension of your past, a wonderful thing happens. The present reaction of resentment builds upon the original implanted event and reinforces all aberrant behaviors. I have found a way to break that spell by reconnecting a person to his or her original innocence.
This can be accomplished by a simple technique that needs no support group, just a tape and a book through which to relearn the way to connect to our original selves and disconnect from overreacting. We become calm in the face of confusion and cruelty, and by remaining poised in the face of adversity, we starve the original root of implanted behaviors of their daily reinforcement. We become free and in perfect control of our emotions.
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