Anger and Cessation

Cessation, calling a halt to something,  stopping doing something you are doing or participating in that is counter-productive, smoking, yelling, anger, sadness, violence, litter, reacting, arguing, the list goes on of the things and actions, emotions and thoughts that we as the humans who inhabit this planet want or believe we should call to a halt. To my knowledge other species do not this;  other species do not get themselves stuck in this position; something repetitively that they cannot easily give up.
Cessation and action are not  ordinarily symmetrically arranged. Whilst cessation and action appear as a duality, polar opposites at times perhaps, but they are not, and to treat them as such is a mistake that leads to profound errors of judgement. This pamphlet sets out the idea that cessation and action are complementary and in the first instance sequential, cessation coming before action not the other way around.  

Why do I insist on this? Because the world is arranged in terms of symmetry and complementarity. All interaction between people is either symmetrical or complementary. Love  between adults is symmetrical. The love of a parent to a child is complementary, waiting for symmetry to appear in due course. Some of the pathologies of parenting are when  complementarity and symmetry are confused, mistaken one for the other,  dressed up and disguised as something that it is not.  

A parent who demands that their child reciprocally love them as they love it (the child); the parent who withdraws love from the child as a punishment for something that the child has done, a transgression of some kind that has angered the parent and persuaded that parent that love is negotiable and not an imperative. 

For we as the humans of this earth,  unique as a species in every regard, no matter which way we look it, we have a particular genius for messing things up, for making the same mistake over and over and over,   reframing or relabeling this as a virtue, calling it determination, leaving this place and our lives in a mess -  endlessly making the same mistake and, the accumulation of mess, physically, in our lives, in our heads in our hearts, literally and metaphorically that goes with it, is truly the hallmark of being human.  

This paper is about ‘cessation’ – the calling mess/rubbish/cr.p to a halt – stopping doing things that self-defeating,  pointless, damaging to us and this place, injurious to others – as the most important way to effect individual and collective change. 

Simply,  if you follow the instructions set out in this paper, your life will change, your family will change, and perhaps everything around you will change. If you do not follow the instructions in this paper nothing terrible may potentially happen to you, and you will never notice the difference. 

The truth about mess is that it  accumulates in our lives and in our heads and hearts, simply because it is so, it does, and it is there. Chaos naturally disperses mess/cr.p; but human beings are not chaotic even though they may appear to be so at times and often tilt in that direction.  

The truth is that, as a species, we  as the humans of this planet, are highly organised, so organised that we have organised ourselves to dominate this planet, to take over this planet and eat this planet out of house and home. What we do on a macroscale, globally,  is replicated in our hearts and minds, in our relationships and families, and in our homes; and vice versa for everything is circular and reciprocal  and self-reinforcing.  

Humans are highly organised an organisation begets mess; that is how it works. And we as humans have a particular proclivity for keeping the accumulation of cr.p in our lives a secret, from the world and from others and from ourselves; we deceive others as we deceive ourselves;  we refuse to allow the left-hand to enter any kind of dialogue with the right, and so on and so forth. 

Cessation is not about  wonderful strategies and romantic visions of the future,  most of which fall short and disappoint, cessation is about simply calling cr.p to a halt; directly, transparently and immediately.

The hardest thing of all when calling cr.p to a halt is to remember to do it.  Remembering is often more difficult than actually doing it. Cr.p in this context is a generic term or euphemism for the habits, ways of being, ways of thinking, interactions, relationships, behaviours, automatic responses, thoughts, emotions, feelings,  anything we do or think or feel or believe  by ourselves or with others that is on some kind of autopilot. These can be minor, trivial, or deeply profound; these can be passive or active; literal or metaphorical. These can involve doing something but more often they involve doing less or nothing. Perhaps an example will assist. 

Yelling is a common problem in family and other  relationships; a behaviour that harsh judgements are often made about; a behaviour that is genuinely difficult to remove. When the adults in a family yell at each other, the children ordinarily followed suit; they do the same thing with each other and eventually do the same thing with their parents. Suggesting to one or more of the adults that they stop yelling is ordinarily met with some degree of incredulity. Why? Because, ordinarily, that person has unsuccessfully tried to stop yelling, often many times before. This is not the first time that this has been suggested. It is fair to observe that, for the person who yells, yelling is an integral part of that person’s life, appears to be part of their makeup, their whole character; that’s what it looks like from the outside, from the other person’s perspective, the person on the receiving end of the yelling, and I’m pretty sure that’s what it looks like from the inside as well; from the perspective of the person doing the yelling.  

Yelling is relational; yelling is interactional; yelling is neuro-biological; yelling is biochemical; yelling is hormonal; yelling is habitual – habitual is all of the above and more, all looping in and off and around each other, intersecting, amplifying, and reinforcing each other; probably cast into a number of complementary neural loops inside the brain, which when matched to relational loops of interaction between that person and others,  becomes difficult to toss, to change, to alter, to stop, to cease. That is how yelling is organised into a life and a set of relationships; yelling does not happen unpredictably or randomly; yelling is highly organised. Yelling becomes integrated into the invisible fabric of that persons being, their existence.  

The suggestion is that the biochemical characteristics of yelling, especially when associated with anger, mean that certain thresholds (biochemical thresholds) are passed beyond which it is difficult to turn back; it is difficult to stop feeling angry; it is almost impossible to stop yelling; and it is almost impossible to stop saying things to hurt the other person.  

Anger and yelling do not always go together and in some cultures are somewhat gendered. Some people become angry, internalize, and take it out on themselves; others act out and take it out on others. This particular example is addressing the question of yelling irrespective of whether it is associated with anger or not. Some people reflexively yell whether they are angry or whether they are not angry.  

Let us strip conventional ideas about causation out of this. Some people yell when they are angry, and some people become angry when they yell. Some people become angry when yelling does not get them what they want.  The idea that yelling and anger are sequentially arranged is nonsense notwithstanding the fact that anger and yelling are sequentially arranged for some people. Yelling is common across all cultures and is managed to differently in different social and cultural contexts.  

Managed means constrained, limited, held in check, legitimised, blocked, sanctioned,  permitted, and so on. Let us remove the word cultural from this and stick with the word social. Different social contexts manage and constrain yelling differently and how each social context does this it is of great interest to all of us. The capitalist West has taken the view that yelling in relationships between men and women, between adults and children, in teaching, education, childcare, parenting, employment, etc. is inappropriate and must come to a halt; notwithstanding the fact that yelling has been legitimised in all forms of relationships between adults and between adults and children for thousands of years. This is an observation not a comment. Yelling at children was stock-in-trade for parenting and teaching, no longer. In many social contexts yelling is a celebration of inequality; an attempt to enforce a form of complementarity on a relationship that might otherwise be symmetrical in that moment. For the person who habitually yells at their partner or their children.