Several days ago, a shocking shootout at a Spa in a suburb of Wisconsin filled the headlines of Television and newspapers. Three women were killed and four were wounded, two of them seriously.
The incident caused a wide arc of fear. The assailant was not found right away and residents in the area were scared that he was just hiding in the vicinity and might come out again and resume his deadly rampage.
When the police forces were able to enter the spa, they found out that the dead inside were a man and three women. Upon investigation, it was revealed that the dead man was the shooter who took his own life. One of the three dead women was his wife, a staff member of the spa and the two were co-workers.
A survivor of the deadly incident witnessed how the wife pleaded to her husband not to shoot her co-workers, to no avail.
The man was a veteran of the armed forces. He and the wife he shot dead were in the process of a divorce. The woman already expressed her fear that her husband might commit an act of violence. The court granted a restraining order to prevent the husband from coming close to her.
In many cases of domestic violence the extreme act like this one usually occurs when the woman decides to completely sever the relationship but has not taken enough precautions to protect herself. The legal recourse which is a restraining order often infuriates the husband more and is totally ignored.
According to statistics, on the average, a woman in Canada is killed by her intimate partner, every six days.
In 2009, 67 women were murdered by their current or former spouse, or boyfriend.
We have also heard of violence against offsprings, siblings, parents and other members of the family.
Violence has existed since the beginning of time and is recorded in history as well as in the Bible. It is committed by individuals as well as groups. But the cause has always been the same; the emotion of anger.
Many may disagree with this conclusion but an analysis of each incident individual or groups related would prove this point.
Let us begin with the individual. What makes a person angry? What triggers that powerful emotion?
It could be an attack on the ego, a feeling of being humiliated. It could be a frustration when certain expectations are not achieved. A violation of one’s sense of values, the sense of right and wrong can cause an individual to be angry. The feeling of threat in losing things that are precious to a person, material or immaterial can make a person furious.
These anger triggers are universal. I have gathered them from readings and attendance in anger management workshops. They are the same causes that had started wars as well as terrible events in history like the Holocaust.
We do not need to go very far back to illustrate the point. The terrorist attack of 9/11 has showed that the fury of a powerful nation would retaliate and unceasingly seek for the perpetrators of such a heinous crime to put them down. The United States of America fought and is still fighting two wars and had killed the mastermind of 9/11.
On the individual level, we hear almost every day of crimes where a father killed his offspring for disobedience or for perceived dishonor to the family because of breaking a tradition, a young man shooting and wounding numbers of people in a mall to avenge deaths in his gang, or the fury of a woman towards a daughter who would not stop crying.
Countless organizations have been formed to appease anger, individual or group, in the hope of lessening violence and death. Individual and group counselling are available to understand how this emotion can be managed.
In a video, I watched on anger management three stages in this emotion were identified. First, the trigger that caused the anger. The second is the actual experiencing of the emotion, and the third, the behaviour in response to the emotion.
Everybody, regardless of race, sex, age, religion education or any other factor that categorizes people, experiences anger. It is a universal emotion like fear, happiness, and sadness. The levels of anger differ: it could be very intense like hate or mild like just an annoyance. The intensity of the anger depends on several factors like previous experiences that created the same response, the severity of the effect on the ego, the threat of loss especially if it is power, the importance of the value violated in the individual and the frequency of the success or failures of the individual in overcoming anger.
From my own experiences, I find that reaction to anger mellows as one grows older. The truth of that saying, “Para kang bata” who starts to whine and exhibit tantrums when he/she does not get his way applies to the way we deal with anger. As we grow older, we become more patient, understanding, empathetic, deliberate and forgiving.
We tend to look at the person who caused the anger with compassion and try to put ourselves in his position. Did he mean what he/she said the way I saw them? What is bothering the person? Is he/she always arrogant not only to me but also to everybody? How was the person brought up? Is he always rude and brazen?
Or, why did he not pay me what he owes? Does he not have the money or is he a regular fraud. Was it my fault that I lent him the money?
It is very important that we take second thoughts before reacting in anger. While it is natural for everybody to be angry, the behaviour in reacting to such anger is our choice. We have to think of the consequences. Let us not let tempers flare and cause a fire that is difficult to control. Usually when we try to meditate about a situation that hurts us, the anger slowly subsides.