Three Lessons From the Master of Anger Management

The Greeks, naturally, had a word for it, and the Romans, also naturally, stole it and embroidered on it.

To the physicians of ancient Greece, “choler” was a disease, probably cholera and maybe bilious jaundice as well. The Romans made it a metaphor for anger, and listed it among the four “humors,” the states of human temperament: cheerful, angry, melancholic and phlegmatic.

Blood pressure cuffs and EKGs have replaced the four humors in the physician’s kit, but choler--anger--still stalks in different guise, from a passing flare-up to a killer sociopathology that feels like an epidemic these days.

On the freeways, at home, at work, road rage, spousal rage, workplace rage is triggered by nothing or a series of nothings into nuclear fission. No surprise that one of the growth industries of the ‘90s has been anger-management programs; there’s so much anger out there to be managed.

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We hear mostly about those whose names we know, sentenced by some judge to a course in anger management: rapper Tone Loc, who whacked a waiter in an argument over a pizza. Rock drummer Tommy Lee and actor Harry Morgan, who hit their wives. Basketball player Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, who shoved another driver in a traffic dust-up. Actress Shannen Doherty, who got a little wild outside a West Hollywood bar.

There are the unknowns whose anger-management sentencings make the papers too: an Orange County community college professor whose superiors found his newsletters contained overtones of “violent behavior.” A Burbank man who broke his cat’s jaw. A white supremacist in Glendale who put hate messages in boxes of Pop-Tarts and Cheeze-Its.

It is by no means foolproof; the Columbine High School killers passed anger-management courses with flying colors. But for the hundreds of men and a few women sent to L. John Key since he began this work two or three years ago, anger management can be a learned art, a regulator on the pressure cooker of temper that, unchecked, can send people to prison, and has.

Key is director of the program at the Affiliated Psychiatric Medical Group in Rosemead, where courses run from 12 to 52 weeks. His clients are as young as 18 and as old as 75 (“it doesn’t tend to get better as you get older”), and most have been sent to him by courts, from glowering gangbangers, to a pair of men whose freeway middle finger-flipping got out of hand, to a man who screamed at some kids that if they didn’t get out of his driveway he’d run them over.

A few come voluntarily. “People can scare themselves with the capacity for anger,” and when a spouse issues an ultimatum (“Get help or I leave”), they find Key. Los Angeles County alone maintains referral ties to more than 100 anger counselors or therapists, to whom nearly 10,000 clients were referred last year.

There are rules in his anger-group sessions, hard and fast ones. No banging on walls, no stomping. “You can get upset,” he tells them, “and you can talk about it, but you cannot take physical action.” Once or twice he has felt intimidated; he cites a late appointment with a client who had a drinking problem and a fondness for bar fights.

Whatever they expect, these men (and the rare woman) all learn, as all Key’s clients do, critical breathing exercises.

“Controlling breathing can control reactions. When you’re in a high state of arousal, the quality of your judgment is poor, so we try to maintain a level where we can think clearly and do some problem-solving . . . You can control your body much quicker than you can control your mind, and think clearly and get out of a crisis situation.” This alone is the sort of guidance that empowers men who had before found power only in their fists.

Lesson two: “Anger is a naturally occurring event. Darwin wrote about it. It’s why you get angry and what you do with it that we’re here for.”

He has a third lesson for the sullen, trouble-bound young men who find a “mad-dog” stare an insult to their masculinity, and reason enough for a beating or a shooting. “I make the distinction in class,” says Key, “between manhood and masculinity. Masculinity is being able to father a baby, but manhood is being responsible. Masculinity--all you’re going to do is fight and struggle.”

Key can’t say for a fact that there’s more anger out there now; maybe it’s just more widely reported. But in the end, that is secondary to what he tells the felons and the onetime hotheads alike: “People need to have better ways of managing themselves and their anger.”

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Now I’m embarrassed to admit how irresistibly cathartic I found a W.C. Fields movie vignette. He’s a driver infuriated by “road hogs” and their ilk, and when someone leaves him a million bucks, he buys a whole fleet of tin Lizzies and gleefully proceeds to smash them up, one after the other, right into the other offending cars.

After a really bad freeway day, it sure helped to manage my anger--I ended up laughing at it.

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Patt Morrison’s e-mail address is patt.morrison@latimes.com