Quite a lot of the men that come here realise that to understand anger management they ve got to stop getting rat-arsed . That might cause them not to come anymore. It seems that alcohol in itself is never the root of the problem but it can inhibit our willingness to change. For some reason I felt the need to press him on the booze question. He quoted from a This is your right programme he was on in the late 80 s in which he was asked a similar question about alcohol and violence.
Alcohol is never a cause of violence but it s frequently the lubricant.
I wondered if he ever felt that there was a need for anger under certain circumstances and that if we denied our aggression we were guilty of a Clockwork Orange kind of oppression. He was adamant that violence, physical or verbal was never justifiable. That there was always room for compromise or even flight if our pride would let us. His claim was that we are passive by nature and it s society that conditions us to be aggressive. We re racked with prejudice, pride and our insatiable desire for capital.