“Once the rage set in, it was like I was possessed.”

When I was diagnosed with Intermittent Explosive Disorder (IED) in 2017 I had no idea what it even was. I knew I had problems controlling my anger but I never really saw it as a persistent problem. I thought getting angry to the point I would completely lose it was normal, especially as it wasn’t like it happened every day.

I grew up in home environment where it was common to be shouted at. My father had a legendary temper and if he was angry, you stayed out of his way. I saw him lose his temper many times and it wasn’t pretty. He could be extremely verbally aggressive, and sometimes physically too.

My siblings and I were scared of him, but back then it was more the norm for parents to punish children physically. I think that my parents genuinely did believe they were doing their best for us by keeping a close eye on discipline and coming down hard on us if we stepped out of line.

As I got older, I began to struggle a lot with my temper. I shared my father’s short fuse and would erupt without warning. Often the rage snuck up before I even registered I was angry. When I was younger it was more tolerated and school and my parents thought I’d just ‘grow out’ of it eventually. I’d blow up if I felt slighted or if someone had behaved badly or unfairly towards me, and I got involved in a lot of fights.

When I got to high school it got worse instead of better. I now had hormones added in to the mix so my episodes of rage became both more frequent and more aggressive. I saw everything as a threat and was so tightly wound that explosive anger was the only release. The episodes actually didn’t last that long, but the intensity of them was fierce.

Although in the heat of the moment all I could feel was white-hot rage and letting it out was all that mattered, once I’d calmed down I usually felt awful about what I’d done. It goes without saying that behaving like this ruined friendships and romantic relationships.

I’ve never hit a partner, but I’ve been told when I blow, it’s very scary. That can’t be nice for anyone to experience. Both of the relationships I had in my teens ended because of my temper. Not just because it was frightening for my partners, but also because it put them in a difficult situation of having to defend me every time I’d behaved badly. Their families were definitely not fans of me and that wasn’t nice for them to have to deal with either.

When I lost my temper, I could focus on nothing else but wanting to destroy anything I could get my hands on; people, furniture, possessions. My parents got sick of being billed for property damage at school and as I hit my mid-teens, I also faced criminal charges for damage I caused in the community. My parents were horrified- they’d become the family with that child.

I had multiple school suspensions and fixed-term exclusions for threatening behaviour, physical and verbal aggression and fighting. I was permanently excluded after I threatened a staff member. I was schooled online after that and although it really helped me not to be around other people since my anger was rarely provoked, it didn’t solve the issue of me losing my temper. It just masked it.

In my late teens I started going to college to study engineering. I hadn’t done well in my exams because my schooling experience had been so disrupted with spells of absence. I actually preferred it so much more than school.

Things were going well until I lost my temper one day in the workshop. One of my biggest triggers is losing things, or having things stolen, and some of my equipment had gone missing. I saw red and started yelling and accusing my coursemates. As it turned out, one had taken my things as a joke. But because I had reacted so aggressively, I was kicked out.

It was around this time that my parents had had enough and had been pushing me towards getting a diagnosis. They initially suspected my rage episodes were down to undiagnosed autism, but this was quickly ruled out. The rage that I felt was wholly disproportionate to the trigger, although at the time I felt my response was totally justified.

There was a lot of discussion around Oppositional Defiant Disorder, but this didn’t seem to fit. I actually had no issue with rules and authority in general, unless they were somehow inconveniencing or threatening to me.

Conduct Disorder also seemed like a possibility, but I wasn’t really prone to breaking societal norms or engaging in behaviour that showed disregard for others outside of my rage episodes. In fact when I wasn’t having these episodes, people said I was actually a nice person.

But once the rage set in, it was like I was possessed. And when you’re screaming obscenities in someone’s face, they’re not going to care about you being a nice person the rest of the time. When I lost it, I could not regulate at all.

The moment I realised I needed to change was in late 2016. I was involved in a bad road rage incident. I’d not long passed my test and I was getting caught up in minor road rage incidents almost daily as everything annoyed me; people driving too slowly, cutting me up, beeping me. I got out of my car to confront someone and we ended up in a physical altercation.

I was arrested and bailed, but it was the moment when I realised I needed to get help. Everyone around me was walking on eggshells and it was looking like there was a risk of hurting myself or someone else during an episode.

It was also around this time that what people had been telling me started to get through; that it wasn’t always someone else’s fault. I’d always believed that I lost my temper because someone had provoked that reaction from me and I couldn’t help it. Moreover, if I hurt them it was because they deserved it.

I saw my GP who referred me to a psychiatrist. The waiting list was really long so I decided to pay to go private. I got my IED diagnosis and began therapy. I thought it would be a load of rubbish but it actually really helped.

I understood that my anger was most likely influenced by two things; witnessing my father’s anger towards my family as a child, and anxiety. I was demonstrating an extreme emotional reaction every time I felt threatened or like I wasn’t in control of a situation. Working on my anxiety helped a lot, along with medication.

Although I’m so much calmer now than pre-diagnosis, I do sometimes struggle not to blow up. I think exploding is a hard-wired response and trying to override it is tough. I can’t deny that it’s made me happier overall though. I can have normal relationships now and I like knowing that I don’t frighten people anymore. People want to know me for me, not just because they’re scared.

I’m sad that I can’t go back and change how I behaved in the past. I’m not proud of the way I treated people and I definitely think now that violence isn’t the answer to problems with other people. In fact I knew that all along, but I just couldn’t hold back the urge to act on my anger.

Not many people know I have IED. When I have explained I have this disorder, most of the time people haven’t heard of it or they think it’s made up. But the most common reaction is judgement. They think I use it as an excuse to behave how I like and then not accept responsibility. To be fair, that may have been true in the past. But IED isn’t just ‘anger issues’ and without help we struggle to emotionally regulate ourselves to avoid acting on our impulse to lose our temper.