Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: TUESDAY, February 5, 1991 TAG: 9102050119
SECTION: VIRGINIA PAGE: A1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: MIKE HUDSON STAFF WRITER
DATELINE: LENGTH: Long
A man wearing a Fu Manchu mustache and a pink baseball cap was speaking.
Around the wooden table, seven more men in the same room for the same reason - beating their mates - nodded their heads.
Alvin Nash disagreed.
Nash, one of two counselors leading the group, said the men had made decisions about how they would react long before they had lashed out. All had a list of things that they had decided would anger them, he said.
"I'm saying it was premeditated," Nash said.
But the man with the Fu Manchu wouldn't change his mind. "It was out of control."
Such exchanges are common at sessions of "men's anger control groups" run by Family Service of Roanoke Valley. Most men are there because they were convicted of assaulting their girlfriends or wives.
Later, Nash asked the men if any had made "five-year plans" for their lives, about where they want to be and how they want to get there. The man behind the Fu Manchu said, "I've got today under control - into tonight. I hope."
\ It was noon on a sunny Saturday when men started arriving at the conference room at Family Service on Hershberger Road Northwest.
Before everyone was there, one man looked across the table after hearing another's last name and said: "I should know you."
It turned out he knew the other man's cousin. "He got me messed up one time," he told the other man. "Cost me 60 days in jail."
Nash started things by going through a true-false test designed to make the men think about relationships and violence.
The first statement said that one-fourth of all murders happened between spouses. The men agreed that it was at least that many, or maybe more.
Nash said it was true, and he thought that figure was scary.
But one man said: "If both would do what they're supposed to, it wouldn't happen."
Nash tries to force the men to think by placing himself in amiable but prodding conflict with them. He and Sterling McLaughlin, the other group leader, question almost everything the men say, attacking their preconceptions and prejudices.
At one point, the conversation turned to what the men would do if somebody called their mother a b----.
"I'd walk in my house, get a .357 Magnum, and that person wouldn't be standing there."
The statement came from a thin, bearded man who was starting his second 13-week tour through the program for assaulting his girlfriend.
Nash countered that he wouldn't let it bother him if somebody called his mother a name. "You control your anger by deciding what's important."
Calling his mom a b---- doesn't make her one, and nobody can hurt him if he doesn't want them to, Nash said. "You tick me off, I can't win by hurting you. I want to win. The least amount of thing I have to win with is muscle, is threats."
As Nash tried to get him to explain, the bearded man waffled. He said he wouldn't shoot the gun. He'd use it to run the name-caller off his property.
What if Nash said it sitting then and there at the table?
"I'd sit here and think about it," the man said nervously.
Why?
Well, the man said, he wasn't getting along well with his mother anyway. She tries to tell him what to do and what not to do. Just like his girlfriend, he said.
The man asked Nash: "You wouldn't let somebody stand there and call your mom a b----? Would you just go back in the house and start laughing about it?"
Nash replied, "You don't let somebody do anything. They do it." Nash said he wouldn't go to either extreme, laughing or violence.
Nash ended the meeting by talking again about planning. Having a plan can make all the things that frustrate and anger you seem less important, he said.
"The things that used to make me angry have become very, very little since I started looking at not where I've been, and not where I am, but where I'm going."
\ Another Saturday, two weeks later.
A new group member introduced himself by explaining that he is an alcoholic. A month before, he said, he had attacked his girlfriend after drinking nearly a fifth of liquor.
One minute, he said, they were at her house, getting ready to go out on the town, laughing and joking.
The next thing he knew, he said, he was in West Virginia, and his car was broken down on the side of the road. He couldn't remember a thing, he said.
He said he later learned he had "beat the hell out of the girl."
"I do have a lot of problems dealing with anger," he continued. "I take things in and hold them in, and they build and mount. It scares me. . . .. It's no way to live."
Nash asked the group: "Why do you think one person would hit another person?"
One man, who had argued with his wife in bed over money, said: "Somebody is in my path, blocking me. I feel blocked and I want to knock that out of my way."
Nash: "Then you hit her - now what do you feel?"
"I felt immediately sorrowful that I did that," the man said.
Another group member, a large, towering man, had a simpler explanation for why people hit each other: "I'm mean as a snake - bite quick. I was born mean . . .. Some women, they ask for it . . .. Some women like pain. It's a lotta women in the world that like men to beat 'em - before you go to bed with them. Tie them up."
\ A month later.
"We judge people too harshly," Nash was telling the group. "We're killing each other."
When a relationship starts, everything is wonderful. But later "you just examine the hell out of each other."
Insecurity has a lot to do with why people lash out, he said. He tells the men they're never going to make it in life "if you don't know who you are."
Nash's words struck a chord with a man who said he was a recovering cocaine addict. He had been forbidden to live in his own house. "Our spirits have been wounded. How I feel about myself is very low now."
Nash said, though, that the men should realize that for the most part "the wound is self-inflicted."
You have to take responsibility for your life, the money you make, the relationships you have, and not blame it on somebody else, Nash said. "If I rob a bank tomorrow, and you guys read about me in the paper, it's not my mother and father's fault."
One man, with short cropped hair, asked: What if your woman sleeps around on you, should you take responsibility for that?
Another group member, who was wearing a black nylon sweat jacket and a blue body shirt, agreed: "A woman can drop her pants quick, Jack."
McLaughlin, Nash's co-counselor, said the men in the group seemed to harbor a lot of unproven suspicions. "We make leaps of assumption," he said. "We presume something is going on."
The man in the nylon jacket asked: What if there is proof? What if you catch them in bed together?
"If it's going on in your house and you kill both of them, they paid for it," the man said. "And I would do it, too."
Nash said nobody wins that way. If you kill both of them, then you end up on death row and that's three lives gone for no real reason. "We put so little value on human life."
For much of the 1 1/2-hour session, five sets of eyes were riveted on Nash, who was doing much of the talking. The men listened intently.
A sixth group member, who was wearing Reeboks, sweat pants and a sleeveless white shirt, dozed, sometimes with his head thrown back, sometimes with his chin on his chest. He snored a little toward the end.
To wrap up the session, Nash returned to the idea that a man should not let his anger and insecurity control him. "You can't get to me. You have no idea what to say to me. . . .
"The big-mouthed guy who wears his rules and regulations on his shirt sleeves: piece of cake. You can make him or break him just like that."
by CNB