Advice From A Behavioral Expert—

Controlling Anger In Adults Might Help Abused Children

By Shannon Hicks

Research shows that the average time a middle-aged man spends talking with his children each night is 37 seconds.

Less than a minute. About the length of a television commercial.

In his opening remarks for the Seventh Annual Child Abuse Prevention Conference, which was hosted by Danbury Hospital on May 5 and 6, James T. Reese, PhD, offered that startling statistic. Dr Reese offered two lectures for the hospital, the first of which, “Snowman Falls from The Sky Unassembled: The Challenge of Care Giving,” was featured during a dinner event on May 5 at The Inn at Ethan Allen. His second lecture, “Anti-Social Child: Predictors of Violence,” was delivered on Friday, May 6, during a full day of lectures at the hospital.

Dr Jack Fong, a Newtown resident and the chairman of the department of pediatrics at Danbury Hospital, introduced Dr Reese. The department of pediatrics was the sponsor of the conference.

“There are more than one million cases of child abandonment and abuse in our country every year,” Dr Fong noted. “That’s not a small number, yet we don’t talk about it, and you don’t see a lot of information about this in the [media].

“I think that’s a shame. In one sense it’s one of our best-kept secrets,” he continued. “There are professionals out there to help the children — to glue their broken hearts and to resuscitate their shattered lives — but to prevent child abuse we have to involve every citizen. To care about every child in the nation would make this a better place.

“If we don’t invest in our children, and do our best for others’ children, we’ll wake up one day and regret that,” he said.

Dr Reese injected passion and humor into a one-hour lecture on Thursday evening that combined elements of living a less stressful life with ideas on combating child abuse. The lecture also addressed the challenges faced by caregivers of abused children.

“It’s kind of a sad world, yet we can bring something good to it,” he said. “God did not create junk. There is good to be found everywhere.”

Dr Reese is a veteran of the Vietnam war, a former FBI agent of 25 years, and an expert in stress management. When he retired from the FBI in 1995, he was the assistant unit chief of the Behavioral Science Unit at the FBI Academy — the unit featured in the Thomas Harris novel and subsequent feature film The Silence of The Lambs.

For 18 years Dr Reese taught stress management, criminology, abnormal psychology and profiling, and was adjunct faculty with the University of Virginia. Among his credits, he is board certified in domestic violence, stress management, school crisis response, emergency crisis response, traumatic stress, and forensic traumatology.

Today he is president of James T. Reese and Associates, an international behavioral sciences and management consulting firm headquartered in Lake Ridge, Va. In four years of contract work since 9/11, Dr Reese has decompressed more than 460 rescue workers coming off the World Trade Center site.

He also serves as the director of violence presentation for Crisis Care Network, Inc.

He knows stress, and how the human mind works, and how to make it work better.

Within his lecture, Dr Reese offered his six keys to stress-free living: Challenge, Courage, Change, Choice, Control, and Commitment.

The challenge, said Dr Reese, is to defeat child abuse and to create stronger laws.

Life’s challenges also include controlling our anger as adults.

“Quit taking things personally,” he said. “Stop counting the items on the belt of the express lane at the supermarket. Get a life!

“Stop getting angry at everything stupid that happens while you’re driving,” he continued, and this comment elicited a number of laughs and nodding heads from his audience. “We get so upset over next to nothing. Stop it!”

When we let pressure and anger build up during the day, Dr Reese said, we tend to let the steam release once we have returned home. Taking anger out on our family while positing to care about someone else defeats the purpose of providing aid to someone else who is damaged by anger.

“You store anger up inside you all day, and then you get home and all these little things that have built up come out on your wife and kids,” he said. “Control that anger.”

Dr Reese’s definition of courage is having the ability to not conform. “Do what you believe in,” he said.

Change means redefining how one thinks and how one behaves.

“We are the only animals that choose what we become,” he said in explaining his fourth point. “You can help people who need care, but you can’t truly do that by ignoring the people at home.”

Control of one’s life happens when one faces the challenge of stress head-on.

“If you’re not in control of your life, somebody else is. If you let the guy who cuts in front of you in traffic make you angry, and you can’t do anything about that anger, then he — not you — is in control of your life at that moment,” said Dr Reese. “Sometimes you just need to break stride, create a goal, and make your own choices.

“Sometimes anger happens, but you need to be able to set that anger aside.”

Finally, commit to eradicate child abuse.

“There is too much child abuse in this country. It takes too long to prosecute, and there are too many judiciary mistakes still being made,” he said. “This is a commitment we have made to people who cannot help themselves.”

In taking care of children, adults need to work together.

“Snowmen don’t fall from the sky with a carrot on their already-formed head,” he said. “Individual snowflakes are weak. They’re hard to identify separately.

“But when you put them together they’re strong. They take a shape, and they hold that shape.”

In addition to Dr Reese’s lecture the following morning, Friday’s conference included a lecture on child protection laws by Carolyn Signorelli, Esq, assistant attorney general, State of Connecticut; “Sexually Offending Roman Catholic Clergy: Contest and Understanding,” by Gerard J. McGlone, SJ, PhD, visiting professor of psychology at St Joseph’s University; “Kid’s Media: The Good, The Bad and The Just Plain Awful” by Mary E. Muscari, PhD, RN, CRNP, CS, professor of nursing at University of Scranton; “The Clinician’s Obligation” by John M. Leventhal, MD, a professor of pediatrics at Yale University School of Medicine; and “The Workings of a Multidisciplinary Team,” by the Yale Child Abuse Team.