Whether the Johannesburg court Judge Thokozile Masipa finds that Oscar Pistorius intended to kill his girlfriend or not, or whether she finds that he thought he was shooting an intruder, this was an act of rage.
In my models (Parker Hall, 2008), rage is a behaviour that is linked to trauma; typically those who experience rage problems have never developed the capacity to feel the discrete emotions (such as fear, sadness, *anger and joy) which enable us to process or digest life’s experiences and move on.
This important mechanism can only be activated in an empathic, emotionally attuned environment where carers respond to an infant’s needs in a relatively short space of time or take to care to comfort and soothe a child where meeting their needs has been delayed. Put very simply, an attuned carer will help a child to contain their overwhelming feelings of joy or distress through physically holding them and by making the appropriate facial expressions and noises to allow the child to feel understood and then to settle. From such consistent emotional care a child internalises the capacity to feel their feelings and to express them bodily and verbally for themselves and can fully engage in life for better or for worse. In the absence of such care, the environment is experienced as hostile and results in hyper-vigilance (hot rage) or disinterest and withdrawal (cold rage).
Many of the clients who come to see me for Empathic Anger Management therapy have a history of traumatic life events that they have never been able to come to terms with because their natural emotional processing ability has not yet been developed. This accumulation of unexpressed feelings puts tremendous pressure on their organism and any stimuli or change in their environment can be too much to cope with; even a very trivial event will then result in an emotional explosion. All the raw and unprocessed feelings that a person has acquired, perhaps over their entire lifetime, is unleashed in a traumatic way that can result in physical and emotional harm to themselves and others and property damage.
The brain’s frontal-cortex is incapacitated in a rage state and very important functions are undermined. Emotion cannot be regulated, a person cannot self-soothe and reality checking or accurate risk assessment becomes impossible; risks are exaggerated or minimised. Further, anyone in a rage is not capable of empathy; untold horrors can be perpetrated without any understanding of the impact or consequences. Experience and behaviour emanate from a primitive amygdala state where a person resorts to flight, fight or freeze behaviour in order to deal with what feels like a catastrophic incident that they fear will obliterate them (physically or psychically).
Oscar Pistorius has experienced several traumas that we are aware of (and who knows how many more that we know nothing about) which he may not have been able to ‘feel through’ or come to terms with yet that remain in his system, simmering just below the surface.
• at a macro level, deep in the psyche of White South Africans such as Oscar Pistorius is the imprint of a hostile political and social environment. The destructive ‘us’ and ‘them’ polarity of apartheid, of your life or my life, of object Vs subject relating and of de-humanising difference. When we live in fear or hate our organism never softens sufficiently to process our life experience; we remain in a state of physical and emotional arousal with little or no respite
• Pistorius lives in a high-walled community in South Africa, which is known for having one of the highest violent crime rates in the world
• Oscar was born without a fibula in either of his legs. His parents, Henk and Sheila, after consulting with some of the leading doctors in the world, when their son was 11 months old, made the agonising decision to have both legs amputated below the knee. Experts told Oscar’s parents that having the amputation done before Oscar had learned to walk would be less traumatic for him and would greatly improve his chances of mobility in later life.
• his parents divorced when he was 6, a fact that largely contributed to a troubled relationship between Oscar and his father that is ongoing
• his mother died when he was 15, the result of drug complications following a hysterectomy
• in June 2003, he shattered his knee playing rugby for Pretoria Boys High School and feared that his sporting career was over at the age of 16
• for several years, after becoming a Paralympics champion, he attempted to enter able-bodied international competition. He was in direct conflict with the most powerful athletic organisation in the world, International Association of Athletics Federations who were persistent in their objections saying that his artificial limbs would give him an unfair advantage. At the same time he faced doubts from critics that included some well respected peers. He succeeded in 2008 but failed to qualify for the Olympics until London, 2012
I cannot tell to what degree Oscar Pistorius has come to terms with these political, social, emotional and physical traumas but I can speculate that these, and probably many more unprocessed life events, may have contributed to his psychological state of mind as, in his high state of arousal, he shot his girlfriend, Reeva Steenkamp, four times on Valentines Day, 2013. This is in no way to excuse Oscar Pistorius’ behaviour, rather it is to offer one way of making sense of a senseless killing.
*anger; within my models anger is understood as a benign emotion that is always constructive that protects the integrity of the self. It is respectful of self and others yet asserts a person’s needs, feelings and opinions. Rage as described above is a destructive defence mechanism and a symptom of trauma.
Parker Hall S, 2008, Anger, Rage and Relationship: An Empathic Approach to Anger Management, London, Routledge
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