As a child I could not control my anger at all.
When it came it arrived as a flood, and the flood went straight into something destructive every time.
A slammed door, a friendship damaged, an afternoon ruined for everyone around me. There was no gap between the trigger and the damage, nothing I could find to stand in. Part of that is how I am built. For me, ADHD has often meant that the distance between feeling something and acting on it is painfully short, impulse running into action with no real pause in the middle. For a long time the anger felt less like an emotion I was having and more like a weather system that arrived, did its damage, and left me to survey the wreckage once it had passed.
If anyone had a built-in excuse to decide that this was simply who he was, it was that kid. He had the temper, he had the wiring that made it worse, and he had years of evidence piling up behind him, every outburst another reason to believe the pattern was permanent.
That belief, that some of u…