For most of my life, I had two settings. Angry, or numb. Rage, or gone. And nothing in between. I did not even know a middle was supposed to be there.
Both of those are survival tools. Twenty years running toward what everyone else runs from, you learn to flood with anger and you learn to go numb. Maybe you learned both even earlier, in a house where feeling anything at a normal volume was not safe. So your system does something efficient and brutal. It keeps the two extremes and deletes the middle. The regulated setting, the one where you feel something at a reasonable volume and stay present, gets trained right out of you.
The day I finally saw it, nothing dramatic happened. That was the point. I just saw, all at once, what my family had been living with for years. A man who was either too much or not there at all. Never just present.
The cost was never one big explosion. It was a thousand small moments where the people who loved me most got a threat or a ghost instead of a father and a husband who was simply there.
Here is what I know now that I did not know then. That middle is not gone. It was trained out, and what gets trained out can be trained back in. Anger management will not get you there. It only teaches you to white-knuckle the rage. You get there by rebuilding the regulated band your family has never met, in reps, on purpose, until being present stops feeling foreign.
The day I saw it was the day it started changing. My family has a third version of me now. The one who is just there.
If you are angry or numb with no middle, that middle is still yours to rebuild.
Check your intel before you move.