A Bully and a Victim walk into an anger management class….

Did you here the one about the bully and the victim who walked into an anger mangement class? It turned out they were one in the same person. Not the comical punch line you were expecting? Well thats because in reality its not really a laughing matter.

Many of our court ordered anger management clients present as victims. Inspite of the fact that they are often sent for their own abusive behavior many clients feel they have been wronged by society. A vast majority of our clients blame law enforcement or the person they mistreated for their own violent behavior.

This is an interesting presentation that comes in varied forms. For most clients who present in this fashion, it seems as though they have not been validated for their perspective regarding the situation that landed them in an anger management course. They have adopted a stance of helplessness and depression. Validating how frustrating/angry/hurt, etc. they feel seems to empower them to take ownership and responsibility for their feelings. At this point they have the strength to heal and move forward with their life. This has been the most common presentation and is nice to help and work with in class, as other clients can help reinforce the validation.

If they have more chronic depression, the helplessness and external locus of control can be more ingrained, We take a more CBASP-style stance, and become more passive, asking what would they like to see come of their situation. Cognitive Behavioral Analysis System of Psychotherapy assumes the client has an absence of “felt interpersonal safety”. The instructors create an atmoshpere of safety in an effort to help clients confront a variety of fears. Such as the precipitating (original) trauma event(s), maltreating from a hurtful significant others who have inflicted psychological insults on the individual through interpersonal rejection, harsh punishment, or emotional abandonment/neglect. There is a technique called “situational analysis” where it looks at the aspects that individuals DO have control over (e.g. their own behaviors) versus the many things that they do not.

As in the case with one of our students Michelle, some seem to present in a more passive-aggressive personality style, where everything with the individual is fine, and the world is the one at fault. This style tends to be underscored with a rigid inflexibility to relationships and the world. For example, Michelle, an african-american client continues to discuss how others are wrong for racial discriminating, yet she “only dates white men” and does not see any similarities/hypocrisy with this stance. In some instances the discrimination is real, no doubt, but the focus on the issue and how it continues to be a pattern in their relational style could be a reenactment of early rejection/misattunement. It is a very analytic stance, but has helped us to understand a possible option for sitting with these individuals. The depth of the relational style and problems over the long term suggest it could be considered as an Axis II issue.

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