My father was a rage-aholic and I thanked him for not hitting me before he passed on. He did smack me once when at age 8 I stole a 50 cent pea shooter and he slapped my for a 2nd time at age 14 when I told him to go f*** himself. But for the rest of the times, the abuse was verbal.
I began paying attention to my own anger for the first time when my 5 year old son did something that five year olds do, like spilled his milk or something, and I felt my father’s rage fill my body. It was like the “Invasion of the Body Snatchers”. I was possessed by him and I took hold of myself and told myself, “I’m not going to do to him what was done to me”. From then on, whenever I got angry, I whispered. He knew when I was pissed but he was not afraid of me and often we would just end up laughing about how silly I had been.
I had no idea that ten years later I’d find myself teaching Anger Management to hard core felons, some with two strikes, transitioning out of the California Prison system. ( www.stevewolfphd.com)
After teaching 20 or 30 Anger Management classes to these guys as I had been taught to do, I realized that the classes were not providing me or the men with good enough tools to control themselves in that moment of anger when they lose control, so I took it upon myself to develop a training program to do just that.
A year later, I had developed Taming Your Anger ( www.TamingYourAnger.com ); which I continued to refine over the next several years (I’m a perfectionist when it comes to my work). I self published a workbook and CD in English and in Spanish, (www.domandosuira.com ) and a DVD of me teaching the material to about 35 parolees. I have taught more than 1000 men over the following 5 years, some with a history of serious violence, and I demonstrated to myself that the Taming Your Anger Method (www.TamingYourAnger.com ) accomplishes what I had set out for it to do: to provide sufficient tools for taking control of behavior when emotions threaten to take over in regretful ways and to consciously discharge emotional pressure; while doing neither physical nor emotional harm.
After getting laid off due to state and federal funding cutbacks, I wanted to go upstream from the men coming out of the prison system, to teach at-risk teenagers on probation headed for prison to develop their self control to avoid becoming men and women locked into the prison life.
I then developed and self-published the very simple EQ-101 Building Blocks of Emotional Intelligence manual to explain to teens what they needed to know to better understand their emotions (very challenging). I soon realized that these Building Blocks for Emotional Intelligence were for the teenager in all of us, and I created the Wolf Training Institute ( www.WolfTI.org ) to teach emotional intelligence and Taming Your Anger and to train others to teach for their own career development.
Until then I hadn’t been dumb enough or brave enough to attempt to work with teens, but I decided to give it a shot. Eighteen months later, I am now teaching the program twice a week in an inner city school. A doctoral student in Psychology has completed her dissertation research on my program and received her PhD and we’ve completed 90 percent of a film documenting the program.
As an Adjunct Associate Professor at USC’s School of Dentistry, I’m also presently teaching the same Emotional Intelligence/Taming Your Anger program to members of the USC Dental Student’s Professional Ethics Club.
I am passionate and I feel honored and privileged to be able to make a contribution by
Teaching this work to develop Emotional Intelligence and to reduce violence in our society.
Thanx for listening.
Comments
Nice Steve,
Would love to see the documentary footage when it's ready for viewing.
All the Best,
Philip