Anger: How It Destroys Relationships

Anger grips the mind when we refuse to let it go, and no one escapes it entirely. Maybe you bristle when someone cuts you off for no reason. Maybe something closer to rage builds when a person goes out of their way to push your buttons. People handle that charge in different ways. Some lash out and try to wound whoever is near. Others back away from the whole situation to keep the peace. And then there are the people who carry the feeling around for months, sometimes years, which wears them down and quietly tears apart the people around them.

There was a man in my old neighborhood who drove the ice-cream truck when I was a kid. We all watched for him, glad to see his face coming up the street. At some point he gave up the route and started a business in another town, and after that he almost never came home to his family. As I got older, I kept catching bits of conversation: people were scared of him. My parents told us to stay away from his house and not to play with his children, though they never explained why. The reason arrived one night when my grandmother slipped into our room and whispered that something had gone wrong. A noise had pulled us out of sleep, a commotion from across the road. He had a short fuse, and when he came home to visit, he beat his children. That night he went far enough to leave one of his sons barely breathing. Hurting people who cannot defend themselves is exactly the kind of thing that hollows out a family and a community.

He would turn up looking for a fight, usually drunk, so neighbors learned to lock their doors and keep clear of him. He saved the worst of it for late hours, once he figured everyone was asleep, and his wife and children were forbidden from telling anyone or asking for help. On the night I first heard it happen, he struck one of his sons with electric wires and threw him onto a heap of scrap metal. I never found out what set him off. My mother and grandmother ran over, and when he turned on them he only cursed and walked away, which gave them the chance to pull the boy out and treat his wounds. They kept the child hidden through the night so the father couldn't find him, and the next morning the man left town again and stayed gone for months. A few years after that the boy died in an accident that had nothing to do with any of this. He never knew what it felt like to have a fair-minded father.

Eventually the man shut down his out-of-town business and returned home. His children were grown by then. Age wore the edges off him, and he grew quieter. His wife died, and he found himself with no one. So he went to his children and asked them to forgive him. Most of them were still full of resentment and turned him away. One son found it in himself to stand up and forgive the man anyway, and that son took him in so he could grow old somewhere calm.

I ran into him again when we were both much older. My childhood fear jumped up the instant I recognized him, out of reflex. But the person in front of me was gentle and worn down, and he only wanted to talk about his health problems and the wife and child he had buried. That was the full arc of a man who never got a handle on his anger: he drove off his own family and found a little peace at the end only because one son had the nerve to forgive him.

Working with anger well means steady inner management, the kind you keep up whether or not anything is wrong. Done consistently, it protects the relationships that might turn out to be the only thread connecting you to the world decades from now. Recognize it. Manage it. Change.