Hi, I’m Michael and I used to be a road rager: one of those people who expressed a lot of anger through my driving.

It was not pretty.

As a teenager in rural Ohio, I would borrow my Mom’s car and go 90 MPH on country roads. Sometimes I was going too fast to stop at stop signs. Luckily, I never had an accident or hurt anyone: God – or someone – was truly watching over me.

As an undergraduate at the University of Cincinnati, I went to school full-time and worked three jobs to earn the money to buy myself a Pontiac GTO (with a 396, V-8 engine).  Unfortunately, I drove so wild and fast that no one was willing to ride with me.

Gulp.

Why am I telling you this embarrassing stuff? I want to share with you what I’ve learned in the past few decades, that it might be helpful to you.

As a psychotherapist, I’ve had a lot of really good psychotherapy over the years, and it certainly helped with most of my problems. But this one, road rage, seemed especially resistant to change. In the late 1980’s – when I lived in Los Angeles – at the strong encouragement of my friends, who were worried about me, I took a (very expensive) anger management class with a bunch of wealthy, angry people in the Hollywood Hills, near Warren Beatty’s house (no, he wasn’t in the group. I did meet him though, but that’s another story).

The anger management classes helped, but, to be honest, not very much.

It wasn’t until I became a psychotherapist – about 25 years’ ago – that I really came to terms with the emotions that were driving my road rage: I was sad. I was lonely. I was still pissed off about stuff that happened to me as a kid. You’d think with all my therapy and professional training, I would have worked it all through. Unfortunately, it was a lot of heavy-duty shit and it took a LONG time to work through.

One time, living in San Francisco, I was driving home from the supermarket when I found myself becoming more-and-more angry at each stop sign. I started to curse other drivers: I yelled inside my car (I’m glad the windows were up). After driving a few more blocks, I pulled the car over and looked at myself in the rear-view mirror. Finally, my moment of truth: I asked myself, “What the hell is going on with you?” as my therapist had encouraged me to do.

To my surprise, I began to cry. And cry. And cry. Sobbing in my Chevy Camero, a few blocks from the Safeway. I started to say, out loud: “I hate my job. My boyfriend doesn’t really love me. I don’t love him either. I don’t like living in San Francisco. It’s too cold and crowded and gray here. And I feel so lonely I could die.”

Needless to say, this isn’t what I thought was going on with me. I had blocked it all quite nicely (or so I thought).

This was a landmark event for me. My road rage behavior didn’t disappear overnight, but a huge dent appeared in my iceberg of rage.

I am STILL chipping away at that iceberg. I may be doing so for the rest of my life. It’s a process.

As a therapist, this is very humbling AND really good for me. It helps me in my work to remember that I certainly have plenty of my own shit to work through AND that I am willing to do so. It also gives me a lot of empathy with my clients, who have their own icebergs of pain and trauma that they’re chipping away at.

I still get impatient, at times, when I’m driving, but I rarely experience “rage” any more. My name is Michael and I still consider myself in recovery from road rage, but I’m willing to do whatever it takes to keep chipping away at that iceberg of sadness and anger.

No matter what iceberg(s) you’ve got in your life, I encourage you to do the same.