Why We Get Mad by Dr Ryan Martin

Author:Dr Ryan Martin
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781786784759
Publisher: Watkins Media
Published: 2021-01-15T00:00:00+00:00

“We had no control”

If I am being honest, the story I heard from Nikki was not the story I was originally looking for when I put out the call. I was curious about people who got angry and got into physical fights as a result of that anger. What she told me, though, was more a story of intimate partner violence where even though she may have “started it” some of the time,† the vast majority of the time she was the victim of violence, manipulation, and gas-lighting.

All that said, what was evident from talking with her, though, was that she was very quick to respond with aggression when angered, and that this was not limited to her fights with him. “I’ve been uncontrollably angry before to the point that I was not using my words,” she said. “I would freak out and hit the person.” She described, for example, very intense physical fights with her siblings. They would punch each other often, sometimes even in the face. She said to me: “All three of us have had issues with anger and lashing out at each other, and I don’t think it was very typical considering it did get physical sometimes like where we would punch each other in the face, and we would physically really rail on each other.”

This made me curious. I am the youngest with three siblings: a sister and two brothers. We picked on each other sometimes, and my older brothers in particular would hit me, often on the arm or shoulder, on occasion, but I do not think it was usually out of anger. In my experience, no one was trying to hurt or injure anyone, and I do not believe any of us ever punched one of us in the face. In fact, I can only remember a handful of times we physically fought in response to an argument or out of anger.

My family experience notwithstanding, I was able to find a research article from 2015 on sibling aggression to get a better sense for frequency. According to Drs. Neil Tippett and Dieter Wolke31 from the University of Warwick, who surveyed nearly 5,000 10-to-15-year-olds on their experience with sibling aggression as perpetrators and/or victims, approximately 50 per cent of their respondents had been the victim of physical aggression from a sibling. It was more common in 10-to-12-year-olds (58.1 per cent) than in 13-to-15-year-olds (41.9 per cent) and it was highly related to being the perpetrator of sibling aggression. In other words, the kids that hit their siblings had been hit by a sibling. What this study did not tell me, though, that I was really curious about in the context of Nikki, was the severity of those aggressive acts. While both can be bad, a punch on the shoulder is not the same as a punch in the face, and I still do not have a sense for how common the latter is.

What Nikki described did not feel typical to me. She has two

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