A local reader wrote me asking for some advice about anger management classes, because I’ve written that I had to take one some years back. I was happy to make a recommendation (hopefully it’s a good one — the teacher seems to be the same guy), and it reminded me of an article I wrote about the class I attended.

I took the class to allay “fears” a judge might have because I was accused of being angry and abusive (this is a pro-forma accusation in custody disputes). I’d never been arrested, despite having had the cops called on me, accused by my ex of making death threats while armed with a gun during a handoff. This provoked a heavily-armed police resonse that I was definitely NOT expecting. In fact, I was chilling out and drinking beer after a long day with the kids, and saw police cars zoom by, thinking at the time “I wonder what that’s all about?” Little did I know…

I was fortunate in that a neighbor witnessed the entire so-called “incident” and my ex retracted her initial statement under closer police questioning, and later admitted that I’d been neither armed nor threatening. It turned out that her feminist mother had urged her to make the call, probably because because a hearing was coming up soon, and she figured I couldn’t contest anything if I was in jail. If it weren’t for the neighbor and professional police work, I’m sure I would have spent the night in jail, assuming the police didn’t shoot me first, and although I likely wouldn’t have been convicted of anything, it would have been a really big problem for me.

The only time I really lost my temper during divorce proceedings was at my in-laws, who wouldn’t let me see my kids even when there was no visitation/custody order on the books. In hindsight, instead of yelling at them and using harsh language, I should have just called the cops and had the children returned to my custody, which legally they were obliged to do. But there’s something about having people get between a father and his children that causes feelings of very intense anger — even rage. It’s instinctive, so I don’t feel ashamed about it, although I recognize that it was counterproductive.

So, the upshot of all of it is that I had good reason for being angry, but being angry, even if it’s a reasonable reaction considering the circuмstances, is treated as a quasi-crime in family law. In order to atone for my anger, I agreed to take an anger management class. I really didn’t have any choice, because the alternative was a six-month DV program that cost thousands of dollars and would have prevented me from seeing my kids during the time I took to complete it.

Here’s what I wrote about the experience back while I was still involved in it four years ago:

Social Policy Breeds Pop Psychology

5/07/2009

I have had some recent experience with the world of social work, and although I’ve tried to have an open mind, I certainly haven’t been too impressed by it. Yesterday evening I was in an “anger management” class, and the teacher embraced what appeared to be a Daoist ideology. He described emotions as “energy,” which sounds suspiciously like “Qi” — the vital force in Daoism. There is really nothing scientific about Daoism, but it does contain a lot of valuable insights about nature, spirituality, human perception of the world, etc. However, the American understanding of Qi is necessarily primitive, it not being a millennia-old cultural concept here, so I’m not sure what value it holds for people without any background in Chinese religion.

The office and classroom were adjacent to a couple of naturopaths, whose profession seems to me to be rather superfluous in our society, but if someone’s willing to pay for it I guess that’s fine. However, as I discovered yesterday, much of the money flowing in the direction of these practitioners of ancient methods of healing and foreign spirituality comes directly from the taxpayer, and attendance is mandated by courts in the case of divorce, and, for all I know, various other civil and minor criminal issues. As far as I could tell, about half of the attendees had been arrested in domestic violence incidents, and most of the others were going through contested divorces. One poor guy was ordered to attend for losing his temper during mediation, which is very ironic to me, having been yelled at and threatened by a mediator in a failed attempt to get a reaction out of me in my only mediation session. A few others, like me, were persuaded to take the class by their own attorneys as a kind of protection against the exceedingly common tactic of calling the spouse angry and dangerous (I have seen this over and over in court, and promise to write about it soon).

The teacher quite plainly stated in class that the Violence Against Women Act (VAWA) has contributed greatly to his business. That all but two of the attendees were men, the majority of whom would probably rather clean the gutters than attend new age classes, would appear to validate this statement. He told stories about how things have changed since he was younger, and warned that even touching someone while angry, e.g. poking them with an index finger, can result in a “life-changing” arrest. Because this is true, I have to give the guy credit for warning people about this and at least attempting to keep guys out of jail, but he isn’t offering a cure so much as a palliative treatment. In fact, one could call these kinds of programs hospices for broken hearts.

During the class we learned about the physical damage anger and stress can cause, and the teacher suggested a few techniques for dealing with these feelings. They probably work, and some, such as getting a massage, seemed perfectly agreeable. However, at one point, when he said that anger is often used as a cover for other feelings, I asked him whether being angry is really worse than being depressed. He had no real answer to this, but he implied that being sad is better than being in jail, and that was probably the most important lesson of the day as well as the most poignant critique of our judicial regime.

An overzealous system of family law, and the criminal law that has been developed to support it, has made it necessary to scour the world in search of exotic solutions to the very problems created by “fixing” what wasn’t really broken. Now that the traditional concepts of marriage, family and relationships have been discarded, we are treated to half-baked notions of “energy” to help people cope with the devastation wrought by contemporary family law. In the long run, I doubt that pop psychology can have much more than a marginal effect, and in some ways these classes border on punitive, but they may do some good for a few people. However, the real problem – the injustice inherent in unnatural family law – will have to be addressed before significant relief can be obtained and people can go back to leading happier, less stressful lives.

"anger management" is just a way to pathologize men who've been given the shaft.

There are two ways this can go:

As society becomes increasingly harsh, it's likely that

1) Men will increasingly resort to retributory violence

2) The response will be an increasingly totalitarian regulation of men.  The prison system is crammed to the brim right now but there is always the possibility of "re-education" and the stripping of rights.  I see average men in the future increasingly under the thumb of the state, increasingly subjected to control, and increasingly in a situation where only law-breakers have any vestiges of freedom.