Musings on Anger

Little Red House Yonder

I am no strANGER to anger. I grew up on it. My father was not what you might call “an angry man”, but he would fly into fits of rage, and I was afraid to approach him. Invariably, my questions would irritate him or set him off, again. My timid requests for his assistance concerned mainly maths in which I was, incomprehensibly and infuriatingly a total dunce. Where anger is, love is not, so I grew up never knowing if he loved me at all, or why he would hate me so.

In a sense, I grew up in a war zone, since anger is, per definition, martial. Everybody was fighting their own corner, as if they were permanently under attack. In a sense, they were exactly that, if we understand anger as a response to imbalanced Blue Ribbon emotions, those primal emotions which exists in creatures of a higher order to preserve homeostasis, after it ensures survival. When you lack self-confidence or feel unable to live the way you want to, you are going to have the proclivity for anger as your last call-to for affirming the Self.

My mother has always been eerily quietly knotted up into a nucleus of anger, which has started to seep out with her progressive mental deterioration. She always could flash out a sting in the buttock with her Scorpio critical eye, but now she may shoot little rocket glares at fellow passengers on a bus for wearing a hat in a shade of green she dislikes. Green being her favorite colour this causes much offense. All bad taste does, and I think since Eve Marie Saint (still with us at 93) nobody was ever been deemed to have any taste at all. And then there is the incessant black-smoke-muttering following her everywhere.

I worry how much lava will bubble up to the surface, yet. She left us with the ominous statement, back in the late eighties, already, that she was scared of her own anger, and predicted, one day, she would explode. Perhaps, much of this stored-up anger has already gelled into the sclerotic illnesses she suffers from, or is invested in the hope my father passes on before her (and preferably soon) so that she may have a turn at a life of her own before her own demise.

I think it is safe to say that, in that light, I respect her recent announcement that she prefers to entertain superficial relationships only (meaning I may keep my distance). Who wants to live next to a volcano?

Victim of the Vesuvius, Pompeii

My father’s anger is born out of panic or the loss of control. He may “break down the airport” when one check-in desk closes and he is directed to the next one. His queueing will feel to have been in vain (eventhough he will be the next served) because my father thinks in tidy compartments (cannot generalise pragmatic actions) and thus the command to wait for one’s luggage to be checked in at this particular desk has failed. To reprogramme the mind takes executive skills that are impaired, deficient, or delayed for my father by his Autism. We have been multiply mortified in his presence in restaurants, shops, hotels and don’t get me started on customer service desks.

His recent, rare and undiagnosable heart condition seems to reflect his diminished ability to regulate his emotional life rhythmically. In a sense, as for a child, his baser instincts are too predominant in a man of reason. They rule much of his life (hunger, sleep, pleasure, fear etc) and it takes most of his energy to rise above them. In this light, my father may be regarded as truly gifted cerebreally for having excelled both professionally and socially. Asking him to be a kind and emotionally engaged father on top of that, I can see, would be asking too much. Our mother, therefor, always minded us daughters not to.

Looking for esoterically satisfying answers to the riddle of Autism (whilst waiting for modern science to acquire the necessary perspective), it became plain for me to see how managing the Autism for any other individual without violating their own karmic process could only take place through the care for the well-fare of their Blue-Ribbon emotions. It may sound odd, but as carers and guardians, I feel, we only have the right to treat the “animal” (i.e. ur-astral) side of a person, and never interfere with their I. Most therapies, I find, when they aim to “normalise” or overwrite entire characters with applied behaviours, violate the soul with its personal mission (which includes to live with - and not against - Autism).

Once the Blue Ribbon emotions are meticulously monitored and sanitised for children with Autism, stress-levels will drop significantly and (self-)destructive and aggressive behaviours are thus (largely) corrected. (This is hard to attain for adults diagnosed later in life. Hence my plea to rather over-diagnose than under-diagnose - but that is easy for me to say, to whom it would never occur to discrimnate negatively on grounds of a mental handicap or psychiatric disorder….).

Over 50% of the stressors (or triggers) for (autistic - or any for that matter! -) inapporpriate or undesirable behaviours (or “signatures” of the main handicap for those who are otherwise relatively oblvivous to their “abnormality”) stem from systemic errors or continuous perturbances in the primal, instinctive brain. The aim is to satisfy these basic needs and minimise disruptions - as one would do for domestic animals (cows, sheep, horses, cats, dogs: see Temple Grandin for more on her revolutionary insights into the well-being of animals).

If you concentrate on energy management by means of montioring the seven Blue Ribbon emotions (as defined by Jaak Pansepp: SEEKING, RAGE, FEAR, LUST, CARE, PANIC/GRIEF, and PLAY - his caps) you will have done much to help your autistic child (or spouse etc.) to work through their autisic dysfunction, time and again, to arrive at at a stable and reliable foundation from which to build up higher and nobler projects - free of that anger which clearly is the result of frustrated blue ribbon emotions (and hence a key symptom of fair- to high-functioning Autism).

The anger of my son is even more typically Autistic, than that of my father's, since his character is happy-go-lucky and fun-loving overall. He has a great sense of adventure even if it is limited by panic-attacks, obsessive-compulsions and unrealistic fears, paranoia and delusions. But it is a ferocious anger, and comes with much physical force and tends to be of an extremely volatile nature, like the bushfires that flare up out of an overheated eucalptus leaf. It means I live a life of extreme alertness.

This flagrant anger is not unfamilar to myself, either. I fulminate. Every Saturday anew, lightning is discharged as I ascend the stairs to do my loads of washing and meet with fresh mayhem. No sooner have I tidied or sorted through his things, and my son returns it all to dissaray. Furthermore, he is rather heavy-handed for a string-bean, and since I live in rented accommodation his modifications to our carpets and wallpaper is no end of nervous tension for me.

When we reach Saturday - furthermore, in Anthroposophy, the Saturnal (or for me saturnine) day of reviewing of the prior week - I will already have waded through six days of repetitively accumulating stuff, sand, mud, muck, mess on the other floors of my house, and I have spared myself the fat cherry on top of the cake till today. I am trying to let go of organising my son’s life, hoping the foundation I worked my self to the bone on is in place, by now. There is little more I can do to extend this platform for the rest of his life. From this small patch of solid building he will have to proceed upwards.

All I can still try to do is break back down the blocks he put in place that cannot pass examination and may threaten to bring the whole construction down later on. Such collapses are not something you can allow to occur for someone with Autism. I put out a finger against the work done so far, and give it a little push to see what comes toppling down. But this is not the work I prefer to do. I am therefore frustrated - and am easily agitated. I no longer know what I want to do, though, so after my usual rant and rave I calm back down, accepting my fate. The foundation for this was laid back too far down this Tower of Pisa to consider breaking it back down. I suck up the charred plasma with some hoovering and shake the cinders from the duster with short sharp flicks out of the window. At least, I am not cold yet.

Not an ember in my eye

Anger is a lack of flexibility. It is to find oneself outside the flow. My sister IS “an angry woman”. Her dysphoria is the setting of this anger that has no true will-power or creative agenda, and that feels frustrated with absolutely everything. The seams in her nightdress, the gusts of wind, the radiator that is too hot, the balcony that is too cold, the floor that is too hard, the mattress that is too soft.

Her Blue Ribbon emotions are that seriously compromised that she feels fundamentally and permanently insecure. My mother left her too free to make of herself what she willed. But for Autism this willing is extremly hard to access and optimise for a lack of soul-body integration. All three faculties of soul (thinking, feeling, willing) exist barely interconnected. There is stagnation and the I is fragmented on a cellular level; the blood barely manages to outline a whole.

The anger indicates this split. It is a curdling of the blood. Think of a béchamel sauce which separates when the fat cannot be emulsified sufficiently. This unintegrated fuel causes fragmentation. Constantly overwhlemed (on a sensory level) and flooded by distressed Blue Ribbon emotions, my sister’s Self is drowned out. This is a tragedy and an inhumane condition to suffer.

The ramifications of Autism (however brilliant or successful socially the bearer of it may be) are horrifying and forbode great misery for humanity. I believe our children have come to warn us with their Autism, to respect our instincts but to channel them towards a nobler striving. Not a smarter, faster, more automated brain.

Martial arts as applied by spiritual practitioners fight the dragon within. It is not about conquering the dragon to destruction, but taming him into a little devil on your shoulder testing and tyring you, until one day he perches like a cool - karma - chameleon, directing the I AM to tower above the all I am not.