Thank you, interesting post, you are better at writing and thinking than I am for sure. My apologies for being confused in my writing style, as I'm struggling to find the best words to try and put together.
I admire you for writing so well.
I'm humbled, thanks.
I will attempt to re-say what I mean, but I may not get it right again.
I think that learning to communicate appropriately is a skill or set of skills.
Young children may not learn these skills at home, but they may learn that anger is "bad" and therefore don't learn how to manage it.
So they may be every ones friend and buddy and then explode at home behind closed doors.
They never learned the skills involved in say, being assertive.
eek, is this making any sense to you?
Yes, makes perfect sense. I think your example definitely happens with domestic abuse situations, where people are able to remain even totally coolheaded in any situation except one involving a partner. But I think there's a reason for this that still fits the idea that they have poor impulse control -- namely they have poor impulse control, leading to anger and even violence,
only in relationship contexts. The bomb is only sparked by the partner, or more particularly the beliefs and schemas (filters, deep beliefs) that are activated unintentionally by the partner's behavior.
So a woman doesn't want to have sex with her husband, and the husband snaps, ultimately beating her. But what happens under the hood, so to speak? He snaps (has intense anger), but this anger is secondary to a primary feeling of hurt, based in the belief that, e.g., "she doesn't care about me," related to a deeper schema (which get flipped on or off at a moment's notice) of abandonment, maybe from early experience by one or more family members when he was growing up -- all this happening in milliseconds, the behavior of acting out the anger following. Well, it's obvious to think that the woman might care deeply about him and doesn't want to have sex for other reasons -- even for reasons of fearing him, which creates a negative cycle (her fear of him leads to incapacity to have sex with him leads to interpretations by him of rejection and therefore hurt and anger leading to violence, which in turn leads to more fear by her...).
It's all about the abuser's interpretation and the feelings that go with it, and when we're talking about anger we're almost always talking about more primary, softer feelings which are usually covered up even more by shame, as well as certain cognitive tendencies that go with the anger itself (like rigidity, black and white thinking, etc.). So you have a whole complex web of intrapersonal (within the person) stuff going on that creates a complex web of interpersonal stuff.
But, this complex stuff can usually be relatively easily comprehended according to schema theory (usually schemas of abandonment and defectiveness, which create shame and hurt very easily which are then covered up by anger as a secondary emotion for protective reasons) and accessing primary emotions underlying anger.
All that said, I'd rather work with sexual predators (who are there of their own choosing, i.e., want to get better of their own free will) than anger. Not because anger is hard; it's just not my thing. Something about the irony of extreme weakness and sensitivity (the hurt mentioned above) covered up by what our society interprets as strength (physical aggression that leads to domestic abuse) just isn't appealing to me. That and it's always a little intimidating to see a male, especially if he's bigger than me, go into anger mode in the office.
