Breaking the Cycle of Anger

Applying systems thinking to my life

Description of the situation:

• Someone in the family gets her/himself worked up (it’s mostly she).
• She accumulates tension.
• She needs to get relief from the tension.
• She grants pieces of her tension to others.
• Who are the “others”? Myself. Because I am very open. Others are closed, they have established an architecture of life that closes them off.
• I am not only open, I am ready to receive tension, over the years, I have become very friendly with tension and conflict.
• I receive the tension.
• I amplify the tension and reflect back anger.
• She feels insulted because she just wanted to talk to me and I am angry. “You are always angry”, a well-awaited jump into a generalization marks the beginning of the next cycle.

This pattern escalates and can go on forever. This pattern is everywhere, not only in the family, it’s in the streets, in workplaces, on TV. Until someone stops. For fear of making the other party sick or too stressed or some other reason. But the reason is always fear, never understanding.

But back to the pattern in the family. It happens every now and then and goes unnoticed because of two interesting features.

1. There is a time lapse between her giving me tension and me reflecting it back.
2. There is a change of form between her giving me tension as “tension” and me giving back “pure anger”. I amplify tension and transform it into anger.

But the story doesn’t end there. I usually cannot reflect back or discharge all anger because of fear. Where does the anger go? It remains in my system and makes me look for an outlet to let go of it. I do that with sports and shopping but experience shows that these are not enough to discharge it totally. It’s as if the diameter of the tubes taking away the sewerage, in my case anger, are smaller than the diameter of the tubes bringing it in.

The fact that some of the tension remains is clear from the fact that from time to time I develop minor health problems, mostly injuries. Because I do various active things in life like swimming, dancing, biking, the trauma is very easy to come by. Knee problems, backache, what not. And I create the type of trauma that I trust can be handled in a place I feel good about, a clinic where I have friends. Here I get the help needed, the tension residue is discharged, I receive energy and encouragement and can go on living a semi-normal life until the next episode.

So, I have become a condenser of stress. In a way, this is an interesting role I have taken on, focusing the stress of an entire family or business or community in one place, acting as a lightning conductor. I have also learned to use part of it to boost my creativity, noticing that certain levels of stress help with making my sensitivity more acute. But this is a very unsustainable way of life.

How can this whole system work in another way? For example, living at a distance from my family and seeing them only once in a while does solve the issue. Me, the amplifier is absent. The tension in the system does not get pumped up. It’s routine levels go somewhere, are probably used up by the system or create minor annoyances. Maybe something bigger happens from time to time too but I don’t see it.

So, this is a symptomatic solution which helps for some time. Let alone the fact that it seems too egotistic to me, it is also hardly more effective than biking or shopping. It does not address the fundamental issue of creation of tension in the system and coming up with a way to use it in acceptable ways for everyone. It does not help us in gaining an understanding of the system, in learning.

We do the same thing over and over again and do not even see we do it, let alone solve the issue.

I suspect there should be a more fundamental way of handling this. But how?

Now, if I go back to the description of the situation above, each of the statements is an entry point for a possible intervention. If we pose a simple “why?” next to each statement or question whether an alternative to this course of events exists, we can begin seeing new ways of dealing with the situation.

By contrast, if we just read the story from beginning to end, the only solution we see is the symptomatic solution I proposed above (putting a distance between myself and the problem). It is interesting that a linear reading produces this kind of non-solution. When we tell something in a linear fashion, A leads to B which leads to C, the only way to handle a situation seems to be such non-solutions. Because telling something in a linear way is a huge oversimplification. Also, it assumes that A, B and C have effects on the system that are independent of each other. But, in reality, we know that they are not, they interact with each other and with millions of other circumstances / variables in totally unpredictable ways. So, by believing in such oversimplifications (linearity of the story and independence of variables), we can only produce a clumsy solution.

But if we pose and question to each of the premises of the story, each A and B and C, we see clearly that “follows” does not describe the complexity of it, “influence” is a much better term. And when we question each premise and begin to sense the extent of influence elements have on each other, we start seeing patterns emerge. We start seeing how at each premise a new, alternative world can be opened.

Easier said than done. I do not have ready answers to the problem I have described above. But as Jamshid Ggharajedaghi puts in Systems Thinking:

[We] learn how to use what we already know, learn how to realize what we do not know, and learn how to learn what we need to know.

The emphasis is mine and I am going to learn how to learn what I need to know in order to answer these questions. This book and the Fifth Discipline by Peter Senge and so many others are going to be my companions.

The goal is to understand, learn and develop. To make sound choices rather than be driven by a never-ending cycle of anger and violence.

Development is the capacity to choose; design is a vehicle for enhancement of choice and holistic thinking. ibid

I will share the story of this quest here as I believe writing is very much part of the sense-making process. I know this is only a personal account, not terribly interesting to anyone at this point. I am OK with that. But as I develop the thinking and find the answers, I think it will get more interesting. It will flow over the boundaries of a personal story becoming a description of a road taken by someone meeting a fundamental crisis of their life and working to overcome it. But no promises, I certainly don’t know where I’m going. I’ll just go and see.