I was born into a family of six, with myself being the middle child. Anyone who has ever grown with siblings throughout their young life knows anger. Anger runs rampant in us all and having siblings tends to bring that out in us. However, how does one determine the difference between someone being angry and someone who has a problem with anger? A difficult question but one I have had the luxury of witnessing first hand throughout my life.
Joshua, my older brother, 13 months older exactly; has struggled with anger his entire life. I have witnessed firsthand anger completely tear someone apart from the inside out. It’s the look in the person’s eyes when you realize there is nothing there but hate and anger and all sense of logic has vanished. Anger is hard to manage, even harder to measure, though it can be done. In my brothers’ case, anger and selfish desires has controlled his life since his maturity, even before that. This emotion has destroyed parts of his life he can never get back and quite honestly, I have never understood why,
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According to Webster’s Dictionary anger is, by definition, a strong feeling of displeasure and usually antagonism. Anger can be caused by a number of things, hunger, stress, nervousness, sickness, boredom and many other reasons depending on the person. There is almost one similarity that you can track between people who get angry quite often, blaming others for their problems; which then creates an environment that is uncomfortable to the person, due to the fact that they are now convinced that the problem was not their fault, but someone else.
For Joshua, this is his only defense towards any issues that he creates himself. It is never his fault. This intrigued me for some time; it never really made sense as to why someone was unable to recognize his faults in the problems that he created. For the longest it seemed like the environment that he was in was not suitable for his personality. My mother and father tried everything, switching schools, homeschooling, counseling, one on one counseling, forcing him to leave the house, forcing him to obey new rules yet it all seemed useless as the same actions would come around again, just like they always have. A study done by Quigley and Tedeschi in 1996 concluded that, “Feelings of anger and thoughts of blame regarding a situation where someone harmed the participant escalated in a recursive loop, such that the more anger one experienced, the more blame on the perpetrator, and vice versa.” (Lerner 2006) In essence, the higher the situation was escalated, the more the person in anger felt that is was the other person’s fault; which in Joshua’s case, relates to every fight or argument we’ve ever had.
Examining someone’s anger is a gray area, at the end of the day; you never really know all the variables, especially one like ADHD, which my brother Joshua has. From an outside perspective it’s easy to judge but when you bring into account mental disorders, it changes the game. ADHD has been linked to anger issues, especially within men. An article written by Terry M. Dickson states that, “…have a difficult time regulating their emotions and when they are faced with overwhelming situations can have ‘angry outbursts’ that hurt their relationships.” (Dickson 2013) Anger may already stem from some deep saddening childhood trauma story, but when you mix an emotionally unhealthy teenager with anger issues and ADHD, then you’re in for a bumpy ride.
It had always been in the back of my mind that maybe my brother just had something wrong with him. Then I take a look at his social life, the friends he makes the people he likes to surround himself with. In my opinion, not the best choices, choices that led him down a dark path of alcohol and drug abuse, and as far as I’m concerned, a path he is still on. Now almost everyone understands the relationship between alcohol and drugs during rough times or for people with minor mental disabilities, or even in your normal every day person. If you take someone who is inherently angry, with ADHD and substance abuse, what can be done?
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