What You Can Change _. And What You Can't - Martin E. Seligman [63]
The Cons of Anger
If you are patient in one moment of anger, you will escape a hundred days of sorrow.
Chinese proverb
First and foremost, anger is the emotion that fuels violence. A society like ours, which urges the expression of anger, sanctions it, and makes movies about its virtues, is a violent society. It should be sobering to “ventilationists” that America has five times the rate of violent crime as Japan, an anti-ventilationist society. Murder, assault, and violent rape occur in unprecedented numbers in America. Child abuse and spouse battering are rampant. Strangely, though there are disorders of anxiety and depression, the nosologists have seen fit to designate no certified disorders of anger. The outmoded category “explosive-personality disorder” and the rare category “paranoid disorder (without schizophrenia)” are as close as the taxonomy of mental problems now comes. But out-of-hand anger ruins many lives. More, I believe, than schizophrenia, more than alcohol, more than AIDS. Maybe even more than depression.
A second impact of anger is subtler, but almost as shattering: Serious turmoil between parents is the most depressing ordinary event that children witness. We have followed the lives of some 400 children for the last five years, focusing on children whose parents fight (20 percent) and those whose parents divorce or separate (15 percent).12 We watched these 140 children carefully and contrasted them to the rest of the children. What we saw has important implications for our society at large and for how married couples should deal with anger.
The children of fighting families look the same—that is, just as bad—as the children of divorce: These children are more depressed than the children from intact families whose parents don’t fight. We had hoped the difference would diminish over time, but it didn’t. Three years later, these children were still more depressed than the rest of the children.
Once their parents start fighting, these children become unbridled pessimists. They see bad events as permanent and pervasive, and they see themselves as responsible. Years later this pessimism persists, even after they tell us their parents are no longer fighting. Their worldview has changed from the rosy optimism of childhood to the grim pessimism of a depressed adult. I believe that many children react to their parents’ fighting by developing a loss of security so shattering that it marks the beginning of a lifetime of dysphoria.
It is important to realize that these are averaged results. Some of the children do not become depressed, some of the children do not become pessimists, and some of the children recover over time. Divorce or fighting does not doom a child to years of unhappiness; it only makes it much more likely.
Many more bad life events occur to children whose parents divorce or fight. This continued disruption could be what keeps depression so high among such children. Among these bad events are
Classmates act less friendly
Parent hospitalized
Child fails a course at school
Parent loses job
Child himself hospitalized
A friend dies
This adds up to a nasty picture for the children of parental turmoil.
Parents’ fighting may hurt children in such a lasting way for one of two reasons.
The first possibility is that parents who are unhappy with each other fight and separate. The fighting and separation directly disturb the child, causing long-term depression and pessimism.
The second possibility is the traditional wisdom: Fighting and separation themselves have little direct effect on the child, but awareness of parents’ unhappiness is the culprit—so disturbing as to produce long-term depression.
Only future research