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3:37pm June 25, 2014
Anonymous asked: I have angry breakdowns/mood swings/burnouts and lash out. A recent one found me throwing my glasses, computer, and biting my boyfriend hard enough to leave a mark that lasted over a week. I also kick, punch, and slap. I often hit myself as well, but not to hurt myself, but instead my boyfriend. I also say things I don't mean and that haunt me afterwards. Have you had similar experiences? How do you work through them? How can I make myself safe to be around?

Yes.

I used to do things like that a lot.

I really, really wish right now that I had a copy of a presentation I made at Autreat one year, and I think I also made it at AutCom.  It dealt with how to stop self-injuring, but most of the ideas involved also work for rage and violent meltdowns as well.

Unfortunately, right this instant I don’t have it in front of me.

I know that it’s taken me a really long time.  Like… I started doing violent things towards others when I was maybe 15.  I stopped entirely when I was maybe 27.  And I had started making a hard-core effort to change when I was 19.

I know that it involved doing a lot of different things at once.

One of the most important was learning to stop thoughts at the source.  Because usually before a violent action was a violent thought, even if I couldn’t notice the thought at first.  So at first I would just think “stop” even if I couldn’t stop.  And eventually I’d be able to stop myself partway through.  And then I’d try to stop myself further and further backwards in time until eventually, I was stopping myself before the violence could erupt.

Redirection was sometimes necessary.  One time I was bashing my head really hard on a concrete wall (right after I destroyed a communication device by bashing my head on it), and my friend said “Here, see those wooden crates over there?  I need them destroyed.  Here’s a  hammer, go smash them.”

A warning about that though:  Redirection works in the moment.  But ‘venting rage' does not generally work for reducing rage.  'Venting rage’ actually tends to make people angrier in the long run and more likely to act on that anger later on.

I also had to change how I thought about myself.  I had to stop thinking that out-of-control rage was something I was entitled to as an abuse victim or an oppressed person.  I had to stop thinking that it was ever justified to hurt someone because of my rage.  I had to stop believing that my actions were justified because of past abuse or oppression.  I had to stop believing that I didn’t have the capacity to seriously hurt anyone, or that other people experienced my violence the same way I did.  

And I had to spend a lot of time and energy learning to deal with anger, learning to understand anger, learning about my own anger and where it came from, and learning when anger is justified and when it isn’t, and how to use it well and when it is used badly.  How not to make anger into a lifestyle.

And also I had to learn how my actions affected others.  Not just those actions, but actions in general.  Which is an ongoing problem for me.

I had to learn what situations were going to trigger meltdowns, because sometimes a meltdown is just going to happen and the only way to avoid it is not to be there.

I learned that if I was going to have a meltdown, if I could stay more than an arm’s length away from people, I was far less likely to end up hurting anyone.  Because during meltdowns, I didn’t have a tendency to actively go after people, I’d just hurt people who were within reach.  YMMV.

Oh and I had to learn that for the most part I could not engage in fake play violence.  Like you know when your friend does something silly and you pretend to whap them upside the head?  I can’t do that.  Because sometimes it’s going to be harmless.  But sometimes when you start that motion, it’s going to feed into a pattern where your body gets used to making motions of that sort, which makes it easier for violence to happen.

And each of those things was hard to do, and I had to do all of them, together, over a period of years, and more.  It really helped to have the support of my family for a lot of this, because my father had some of the same anger problems I did.

This is just a short list of things on a tumblr, too.  There’s a lot more to each of these things than I’m able to talk about here.  But maybe knowing at least some of these things can help?  I don’t know.  I tried to write out everything I could remember, just in case any of it does any good at all.  And all of these things take a lot of time and a lot of effort, and the effort doesn’t necessarily go away.