Emotional raging has been a part of my life for most of my years. I remember the emotional rages starting after entering into junior high. They were like going through an intense temper tantrum. Beginning with anger boiling into places where the feeling could not be managed. The early forms of my rage episodes, looked like running away from home. Refusing to go to school, or running away from school, immediately after being dropped off for class. As I got older, the forms of rage changed into yelling hurtful things at people, throwing object against walls, or taking swings at other males, in my family. These tantrums could also manifest in driving cars at high speeds, or threatening to take my own life, because I felt treated unfairly. I have heard from loved ones; it was almost impossible to detect when these episodes might be coming. They would bombard the people closest to me like a ton of bricks. Then, they would be struggling to find ways of keeping me safe and themselves safe, as they struggled quickly for a way of defusing the situation. I don’t envy the position my choices were placing them inside. In fact, it hurts my heart to think about the uncontrollable manner in which I was living, and the impact it was having. But, like many people enveloped in any kind of addiction. I didn’t think I was doing anything wrong and couldn’t understand why my emotions were becoming uncontrollable. I was looking to blame everyone, without truly looking inside myself.
The emotional raging was happening on a consistent basis for years. Probably feeling like an uncontrollable nightmare for those closest to my world. When I returned to working with a psychologist, for the second time in my life, it was fifteen years ago. I felt as though something wasn’t right and needed some help with my emotions. At that point, the emotional raging was happening frequently. I would become angry and lose control a couple times during a month, sometimes even more frequently. I recall often, I would go into my session with the psychologist, telling him it happened, again. I became angry and threw something, or yelled uncontrollable, or got into my car and drove recklessly. He always tried helping with the situation, reminding me the action weren’t okay, helping me work through what might have occurred. My feelings of anger turning into uncontrollable episodes of emotional rage, always left me feeling horrible. I couldn’t understand the reasons for my inability to control my feelings of frustration, why they would so often spin into these raging situations? Placing myself in a situation where I lost control over myself and my actions. I was putting myself and the people around me inside horrific occurrences. It felt like no matter how apologetic I became, I didn’t want to stop my actions. The anger and rage seemed to be giving me something I didn’t want to let go of, a sense of control over others.
Even though I had started working with a psychologist to try helping myself. Everything in my life was still centered around one thing, myself. I could apologize for the throwing, screaming, calling of names, but how sorry was I, really. I certainly wasn’t sorry enough during those years to change my lifestyle, to the magnitude it needed changing. I was gaining too much comfort escaping into my world of sexual fantasy. Whether that be using pornography to ease my pain, or just escaping into mental fantasy for the purpose of self-gratification. I could justify over and over again inside my mind, why my dysfunctional actions were okay and far from my real emotional problem. My justification for why I deserved to partake in my negative habit revolved around my disability. I have cerebral palsy and during that time, felt like it made me impossible to entice attraction. The determination was made inside my head that because of something I couldn’t control, my disability, I was going to be alone forever. No one was going to freely chose to be with someone like me, so it didn’t matter what I did. Pornography and fantasizing a relationship into gaining self-gratification, was going to be as close to a real relationship, as I was going to get. I was so deeply involved in my addiction and irrational way of thinking; it didn’t even register that my actions were hurting people who cared. Probably because it didn’t register that people actually cared. I wouldn’t allow myself to believe this, because if I did, I would have to change.
There seemed to be an early theme attached to my therapy sessions. Along with the conversations over my regret of the emotional raging episodes. I talked many times about my emotions felt around the times I was looking at pornography. I remember it being such a high. Scrolling through and watching the dirty videos. Before I knew it, an entire afternoon would disappear of me watching the screen. I would leave the screen and my home. Driving down the road after these hours, I would feel in a fog, far removed from the would I was driving through. it was an ominous feeling, filled with emotions of shame and regret, over the previous hours. However, it also left me feeling detached from a world that felt like it was causing me so much pain. The psychologist was trying to help me deal with this negative habit. Though I couldn’t see it at the time, the viewing of pornography was causing much more pain than my world ever would. During a therapy session, he had given me a couple sticky notes. On the note, he wrote the letter P with a circle around it and a line across the letter. He wanted me to put these sticky notes anywhere I looked on a consistent basis. Trying to constantly remind myself not to go back into the screen and look at the videos. When he gave them to me, I never actually put them up in my view. At the time, I wasn’t ready to look at my habit, or do anything about changing. When I did, finally begin my journey, the sticky notes weren’t a tool I used. But the fact that I still remember that early conversation and the sticky notes, must imply the impact they had on moving me toward healing.
Working on the reduction of my addiction to watching pornography did help decrease my episodes of emotional rage. It was a slow descend over the years, slowly stepping down in frequency and veracity. Still, I couldn’t get my episodes of emotional rage much under once per month or once every other month. The situations were still happening too frequently. Though I was working on reducing my watching of dirty videos. My habit of self-gratification continued happening unchecked. It was causing havoc on my emotional well-being. Even though I continued to think it wasn’t the problem. The watching of pornography was the problem that I was working on stopping. After more years spent “working” on trying to curb my pornography habit and letting my self-gratification habit run free. I slowly began to realize the impact of my emotional raging on myself and those in my world. I don’t exactly know how I reached the point of starting to understand. Probably a lot of hours working with a caring and talented psychologist. Along with a lot of love and patience from loved ones. But, one day I got into my car experiencing anger, and that anger turned into rage, while I was behind the wheel. On a two-lane road, I lost the care for myself or anyone else and passed a car, where I shouldn’t have attempted a pass. I got around the car and swerved back into my lane just before experiencing a head-on collision. The driver of the oncoming car flipped me off, as I swerved back into my lane. I had lost my mind and was void of all rational thoughts. That moment and the understanding of it, began my healing journey in earnest. Not only did the pornography have to go, but the self-gratification had to be greatly reduced.
I took off along my journey about a month after that life altering incident. It would ultimately take some time for my mind to start truly recalibrating itself. As the days and months went passing by, the moments of rage finally started reducing. I found myself feeling in much more control of my emotions. All of the sudden I would experience moments, where anger would previously have heated me up quickly. Only this time, the heat of rising frustration didn’t seem to move as fast. The emotions weren’t speeding out of control inside my body, like they had previously. During the first years, I was still sliding into a lack of emotional control, on occasion. However, the bite of those episodes didn’t feel as sharp. They also tended to die out much faster than before, signaling it seemed, a brain beginning to heal. Until it finally happened in my third year of healing from the pornography addiction. For the calendar year of 2023, I experienced only one episode of emotional rage. When I became so angry I through an object across my garage. That happen in May of last year and the rage hasn’t shown up again since. I’m writing this post, as time moves into the final week of April. Meaning I sit just a month away from achieving another pretty great accomplishment. If I can move through the remainder of April and the month of May without experiencing another situation of rage. It would signify an entire year without an episode of losing emotional control. Something I have never before experienced in my lifetime.
In my mind, there is no doubt that stopping the use of pornography changes the functionality of the brain. There is research showing this to be true. However, until I convinced myself to put in the work of quitting. It remained challenging for me to fully believe the benefits. Reducing the desire to fantasize and seek self-gratification pushed my healing even further. Taking away many dirty thoughts in my mind and minimizing the thoughts of objectification. The practice of improving my discipline has only continued the process of healing my brain. My patterns of thoughts spend much more time in a healthy place. But it has taken me years to get myself into this better place of sexual health. Time had to be put into making my life a better place to live. The anger issues from my past have become greatly reduced. Who knows if I will ever feel confident enough to feel like they are completely gone? I continue to work diligently on finding methods to further regulate my emotions. However, the giving up of pornography and working to greatly reduce the episodes of self-gratification have all but extinguished the explosive rage, my emotions used to experience. My next step in this journey is to continue working on the reduction of my self-gratification, while also remaining diligently away from dirty videos. As the days go by without happenings of explosive rage, my hope would be to gain enough confidence to someday soon feel I’m completely free of dysfunctional anger. Making people around me safer than they have ever been. I realize how far I have come in achieving that goal, but feel there will always be room for improvement.
A Journey With Cerebral Palsy 