Last month, I saw an interesting segment of Judging Amy, wherein juvenile judge Amy Gray‘s mother, Maxine, who is a social worker for Dept of Children & Families, is in an anger management class. The class is led through a visualization where they are instructed to “imagine themselves in their happy place” and to see their anger as a red hot ball coming toward them, getting smaller and smaller, and cooler and cooler each time it passes. Afterwards, a small marble is passed around the circle and each classmate, when the marble comes to them, names something that ignites their anger. “My anger is ignited,” one man says, “when drivers don’t signal before they turn.” The next woman says, “My anger is ignited when eating a 2 pound box of candy adds 5 pounds to my hips.” Another says “My anger is ignited when my husband talks loudly and leaves his socks on the living room floor.”

When the marble gets to Maxine Gray, played impeccably by Tyne Daly, she says, “My anger is ignited by men who beat children to death with extension cords, and women who plunge babies into scalding water so they’ll stop crying. My anger is ignited by fathers who rape their daughters, and pregnant women who take crack and drink alcohol without a thought for the tiny souls they are damning to a lifetime of pain. Babies in dumpsters, drug overdoses, burns, cuts, gunshot wounds, wasted minds and ruined lives. My anger is ignited by a society that pays lip service to its children while treating them as nothing more than a marketing demographic, and by schools that are falling apart and teachers so numbed by violence and fear that they’ve stopped teaching, but what’s really pissing me off today is a room full of ‘supposed’ grownups who think that “bad drivers” and “loud talkers” and “hips” are worth getting angry about, when all the rest of that actual evil is loose in the world.” — Maxine Gray (Tyne Daly)~ Judging Amy, Season 2, Episode 5; Unnecessary Roughness. Needless to say, this gave the anger management class a little relativity.

The scene reminded me of a class I myself came in to a little late a few years ago. It was a class I’d not been to before, although I knew some of the people in it. I came in and took the last seat just as they were beginning to go around the circle and give names. The question we were all to answer was “name one thing you would change about your body.” They began with me.

I was glad for the question because I’d given it some thought just that morning! I said I’d like to be able to extend my arms out so they were 2-3 times as long, to enable me to accomplish tasks that needed long arms. Either that or I’d like a tail, as long as it was a prehensile tail that I could use to grip things with. You could hear a pin drop.

The next woman to speak introduced herself and hesitantly said she’d like to weigh 20 pounds less. The next one never liked her hair and so she’d make it straighter and finer. A few didn’t like their noses and they wanted to change that. Thighs and wrinkles were other changes mentioned. I was stunned. It didn’t take long to realize I had taken for granted that I was in a different level class than I was actually in. Here I was in a class of metaphysical students, all talking about changes they could make if they just applied themselves. It’s not always that we don’t know the answers, it’s mostly that we pretend we don’t know the solution is as easy as it is. It’s that we allow ourselves to forget – in the drama of emotion – what we know to be true.