Rage

A lot of hard truth there. Underscores the importance of measuring our reactions to circumstances.

In high school I was 5’9” and about 165, soccer player. In shape, not huge. A kid who later was tossed in prison for chasing his room mate around with a knife challenged me to a fight: He said “I think you’re an A&$hole and I want to see you after school.” I said “OK” as if I wasn’t afraid. I spent the rest of the day trying to find a way out of it. He was over six feet and a large, strong one, father abused him. I had never been in a real fight before.

About 50 people were watching. He hit me twice immediately, I didn’t know I was supposed to have my hands up guarding, second time back of the skull. I saw flashes of color and almost passed out. First punch had been to the face, I had braces, blood everywhere.

When I read your post, it’s the first time I remembered ... I don’t remember much over the next 5 minutes, except that I kicked him in the ribs, then I was chasing him, then I decked him, and then I just thrashed on him. I had had no fight training before that.

Some people still remember that fight ... they laugh and say “you slayed the Giant’ - I’m laughing.

But I also lost my mind like you did. Animal takes over when the thought process realizes it no longer has anything to contribute to the situation.

Very good that you held back - in my case there was no choice, and I was defending myself. (I suppose I could have backed out, but his real reason for the fight was that he wanted my girlfriend, and she knew it ... no self respecting kid would back out of that.)

It’s not that you were temporarily insane, it’s that your higher cognitive functions shut down for the benefit of preserving yourself - in a way similar to a primitive part of you starts shutting down brain function as hypothermia sets in. The reptile is running the show.

In many ways this is a religious experience - in those moments you have no opinions, no beliefs, no thought forms. People pray and meditate for years to achieve something similar, although without the ‘kill and break things’ part.

So - great that you know what you’re capable of, and great that a small part of you knew enough to not act on it in this particular situation.

Agreed w/Stealth and Treachery, but more importantly - whatever it takes to remove that negativity from your life.

Do not be afraid of it. It’s your friend, and a friend of the people around you that you love.

Insanity means misinterpreting the world, irrational, acting on cognition that is an inaccurate map of reality. You were a-rational. That is, there were no logical errors because there was no logic buffer between you and your instincts.

This makes you more sane than one incapable of that state. Anyone incapable of that state hates themselves at a very deep spiritual level.

It’s a reflection of the value of and esteem in which you hold your life. Very sane, very healthy. More points for sanity that you acted correctly in the midst of the situation. There is a sort of weird ‘secondary’ rationality that replaces normal thinking. It’s very cold, very practical, and immediate. It’s not evil - in a man of good character, it’s actually very honorable.

There must be a few Moms out there who can identify with a similar feeling when their kids are threatened. Also it’s the theme of ‘The Incredible Hulk’ -> the whole point of him being a hero was that even as he had lost control in rage (”like a switch flipped” as you said,) he hurt no one innocent, and his anger was an expression of defending the good. He was demonized by the media, as was every American who expressed similar outrage @ 911. But that’s another matter.

In summary: you just proved you’re a conservative.

You hardly need any more advice, but what the heck:

A cop I was talking to about after action adrenaline handling siad he always goes for a run. Adrenaline is for "fight or flight", right? So run it off.

"Deadly Force Encounters" by Loren Christensen has a bunch of anecdotes and reflections on them about the sensoria and reactions of cops during and after such situations. As gun-toting lay chaplain in them my sheriff's office, I studied up on this kind of stuff.

Adrenaline in large doses is amazingly and unexpectedly powerful. It helps to know this stuff.

Take care of yourself.

I went to meet the guy and he didn’t show up.

Lucky for you. If something bad happened, you could be the one made out to be the aggressor. If things get jiggy, let them come to you.

I want to jump in and say something supportive, but everybody else has pretty much covered it, and many of them have done so better than I can.

I've heard people use the expression "out of my mind", "temporary insanity", "I wasn't myself", etc. I've never paid much attention to these expressions and always believed them to be BS.

Then I experienced it this 4th of July."

Look at it this way: At least you learned something.

I think there is some kind of dormant insanity in my head.

I wouldn't call it insanity, but pretty much everyone has the potential within them. Also, I'd be more concerned if you didn't consider the possibility of insanity. Those who don't admit to at least the possibility are the ones to really worry about.

Sounds like your adrenalin kicked in good and hard. Fight or flight response as your body was responding and preparing you to make mince meat of threat before it could make mince meat of you. Someone makes a threat against me or even more so my family and I'd expect to have the same response. Now you know why your ancestors survived to pass their genes along all the way down to you.

History consistently shows that civilization is a very thin veneer and under stress humans get back to the basics of what it takes to survive, i.e. kill/escape or be killed. Unfortunately, it can also happen in very unnecessary and inappropriate situations too, like killing folks who cut you off in traffic without signaling. Or when alcohol lubricates an already slippery situation. But not to worry. You're (probably) not insane.

I don’t want to change her mind. I’m angry at her and she can go to hell. Obviously she still has some contact with him or he would not know who I am or how to contact me. That I will not forgive.

Bingo!

Time to move on, my FRiend.

I’ve had fist fights in my younger years and experienced similar things you describe. This was different. what you describe is a 10 second to 20 second event where you do not remember every punch you threw after getting your “bell rung” and can’t remember how you went from being the loser to being the winner of the scrap. This was 2 hours. There are HUGE gaps in my memory. I never got my bell rung. I never went on the offense and never threw a single punch. There were moments when I was literally listening to myself and watching myself and terrified because I was not the one speaking those words and waiving my hands around like that. I was not doing it. But the rage was more powerful than the fear and since those out-of-body experiences only lasted a couple seconds each, I wasn’t at all slowed down by them.

Wrong of me to assume from a few details that it would be the same. That said, I did some poking around. (I'm not a psychologist, but I have more knowledge than the average person both from education and from needing to apply it to some not so pleasant family stuff as a kid)

If you get on the Internet you can find ... not a ton ... but a significant amount of stuff that relates to anger paired with out of body experience. But without even needing to get technical ... rage, especially justified rage, releases a ton of drugs from your brain into your body. Any time the body rushes drugs into its system, the results can span almost anything.

But what's interesting is that I jumped to the certain conclusion - that the out-of-body was your body kicking IN - and that a reduction of thought process was what led to gaps.

When you pointed out that a you are talking about 2 hours whereas I was talking about a maybe 5 or 7 minutes ... I can't say I've had an experience so strong that I could put it into those words, but I do relate. But what I relate to is actually the opposite of what I original said about the fight I had.

In your case, (and I don't know the details of the phone call / threats) ... it's 180 degrees from what I was talking about. My body was flooded w/adrenaline and norepanephrine ... but even as those drugs were flooding into my body, that energy was burnt through expressing it through a pretty rigorous and tiring physical workout during that fight.

In your case, there was no expression - and if anything, it sounds like you held back (wisely.) That version of things reminds me of something that occurrred over and over in my family. Details aren't important ... but let's just say leave it that I had very good reason to be incredibly angry, but there was no way to express it withing my family - as they were the ones perpetrating it, and denying it was going on.

It's one thing to have your body flooded with drugs. It's another to not be able to expend those drugs for the purpose they are released.

What I read is that the people who explicitly tied “out of body experiences” to their anger, especially built up anger in a situation where expression of that anger wasn't a choice ... is they repeated out of body experiences.

Guess what I'm saying is I still don't think there is anything wrong with you.

The question is whether you have a pattern in your life of justified anger where you can't express it. If that's true then event A, occurring in the present, will set off associations, even if you don't realize it, with events from your past, events B, C, D, E, F etc.

This type of episode of anger, which might normally have been like a big crashing wind wave - dramatic but short in duration - becomes more like a tsunami, where the wavelength is miles and miles long.

Maybe it's worth pasting in a description of the physics of a tsunami - which is structurally not at all like a simple big wave crashing on a beach:

“Tsunamis are unlike wind-generated waves, which many of us may have observed on a local lake or at a coastal beach, in that they are characterized as shallow-water waves, with long periods and wave lengths. The wind-generated swell one sees at a California beach, for example, spawned by a storm out in the Pacific and rhythmically rolling in, one wave after another, might have a period of about 10 seconds and a wave length of 150 m. A tsunami, on the other hand, can have a wavelength in excess of 100 km and period on the order of one hour.
As a result of their long wave lengths, tsunamis behave as shallow-water waves. A wave becomes a shallow-water wave when the ratio between the water depth and its wave length gets very small. Shallow-water waves move at a speed that is equal to the square root of the product of the acceleration of gravity (9.8 m/s/s) and the water depth - let's see what this implies: In the Pacific Ocean, where the typical water depth is about 4000 m, a tsunami travels at about 200 m/s, or over 700 km/hr. Because the rate at which a wave loses its energy is inversely related to its wave length, tsunamis not only propagate at high speeds, they can also travel great, transoceanic distances with limited energy losses.”

I'm not saying a physical tsunami was released in your head :-). What I'm saying is that structurally the anger was not a wave whipped up temporarily by something bad that happened (I don't know what that was) ... but that tapped into a deep righteous justified wrongness ... reinforced by quick associations.

And, you had no recourse to address that wrongness. It's still your friend, anger, but it sounds like you you overdosed on adrenaline and norepinephrine and maybe some really bad memories.

I wasn't there, I have no idea what actually happened, and I don't know where life is at for you now, or was in the past.

In short, if there's nothing physically wrong, you snapped. The fact that this episode occurred immediately after something that it sounds like would reasonably trigger intense anger in anyone, suggests that.

Also, it may be that an intense dose of adrenaline and norepinephrine might have worked together with something that's not quite right.

Or, you may be on a medication, psychological or otherwise, that reacted with the anger chemicals.

Or a lot of other things that are more unlikely. Generally though, dissociation (out of body experiences) are intended by the body to be a healthy and protective measure. But still a problem is: What pushed your body to the point that it chose dissociation as a defense, and are those high-stress/traumatic conditions still in your life?

Now knowing any more than I know, I would print out what you posted and
1. Let you primary physician read it, and talk to him.
2. Talk to a rationally grounded shrink, but keep it brief unless you really want to explore how it might relate to something. If you have or had other stuff going on in your life ... let him know that. But if you don't want to get lulled into discussing your entire life history, let him know ‘hey, look, let's do 1 session or 3 sessions or something with a specific time limit, with the specific goal of helping me understand what happened.’ If your generally functioning well, you don't want to get sucked in.

I wish I could press a button and experience for a minute what you experienced - but I can't. Don't let it freak you out. Take a rational approach to exploring something you don't understand. One important reason is that if you go through this again, and it's stronger, you may not be able to restrain yourself.

Apologies for jumping to conclusions on my first post. It was sloppy thinking and rather self centered of me. I'd be really interested to know what the professionals have to say ... but remember, unless you really think it might relate to something deeply psychological - anger as a kid, building anger recently, stuff in the family - whatever it might be for you ... don't let anyone drag you down a hocus pocus road of self investigation unless you really have a hunch there is something there you need to discuss. I made a lot of mistakes as a kid because I was so rip sh&*(t at the baloney going on in my family. Directed it elsewhere instead of at them, ... and I couldn't at the time ... but I've heard it said that “it's not anger that will kill you, it's justified anger that will kill you” ... those may be important words in your search for what the hell happened.

Best! Please write me. I have a personal interest in this one for a number of reasons, and of course hope that a few months from now it's just ‘a really weird experience that happened’.