I had a conversation with a veteran the other day and it brought to mind my own struggle and how I managed. I shared it with him and he found it helpful, so I’m sharing it with you. This veteran’s anger was so bad he teetered between being terrified he was going to die—heart attack, stroke, the whole catastrophic list—and having no emotion around it at all.
I told him the story of what I did in hopes that it would help him. I explained it to him using Einstein’s equation. E=MC². Bear with me.
The Mass, The Multiplier, The Energy
Here’s how I think about it:
M is the mass. That’s the anger itself. The weight of it. Dense, concentrated, hard to move. It sits in your chest, your jaw, your shoulders. It’s the trauma you’re carrying, and it’s heavy.
C² is the speed of light, squared. That’s PTSD’s multiplier effect. It takes that anger and amplifies it beyond anything rational. A minor inconvenience becomes rage. A reasonable disagreement becomes a fight. Everything is accelerated, intensified, out of proportion. That’s the C²—it makes the mass exponentially more volatile.
E is the energy. That’s what you get when you stop fighting the anger and start aiming it. Not suppressing it. Not pretending it isn’t there. But choosing where it goes.
For me, the energy went into HadIt.com. Into research. Into writing. Into helping other veterans navigate the VA’s bullshit because I was furious about how broken the system was, and that fury kept me up at night building something that might actually help.
The anger didn’t go away. But it stopped running the show.
The Early Years: Recognizing the Pattern
It took me longer than I want to admit to figure this out.
In the early years after I got out, my anger was just... everywhere. I was sharp with people I loved. I couldn’t sit still. I’d start projects and abandon them because I couldn’t focus through the static in my head. I felt like I was vibrating at the wrong frequency, and nothing fit right.
I didn’t know it was PTSD. I just thought I was angry. And I was—at the VA, at the system, at the way veterans were treated, at the lies we’d been told. But the anger was bigger than the reasons for it. It had its own momentum.
And then one day I realized: I had more energy when I was angry.
Not good energy. Not calm, focused, productive energy. But energy. The kind that kept me awake, kept me moving, kept me from sitting still long enough to fall apart.
What if I could point it at something?
What if, instead of letting it burn me out or explode outward at the people around me, I aimed it at the work I wanted to do anyway?
So I did. I channeled it into the website. Into researching VA policy. Into writing articles that called out the bureaucratic nonsense that was crushing veterans. Into building something that might actually matter.
And it worked. Not perfectly. Not cleanly. But it worked.
Practice, Practice, Practice
Here’s the part I told the vet on the phone, and here’s the part that matters most:
At first, you’re going to suck at this. I did. Before I figured out the channeling, I was enraged. Not angry—enraged. My face was hot, heartbeat fast, body keyed up ready to strike. I was trying to work on the site and my PC kept having problems, and it was only a couple of months old. I opened my back door, yanked the computer out of the wall, and threw it over the back stairs into the middle of the yard. And then every few days for a week or so I would go outside and jump on it. I thought, I can’t keep doing this. It’s getting expensive. I’d already gone through five dressers. So I was motivated to find a new way.
When I did start channeling it, it still wasn’t clean. I had a workbench in my basement and I would take a baseball bat and beat the hell out of it until I’d expelled enough to focus. Then I’d lay the bat down and go back to working on the site.
You may think that’s all fine and well for me, but I don’t know what you go through. That’s the point—I do know. The computer in the yard? The five dressers? That was me trying to work through the same rage you’re sitting on right now.
You’re going to aim the anger at your work and overshoot. You’re going to burn out. You’re going to redirect badly and still blow up at the wrong people. You’re going to think it’s not working, because the anger doesn’t just go away the first time you try to use it for something constructive.
That’s normal. That’s practice.
You know how you get to Carnegie Hall? Practice, practice, practice.
Redirecting PTSD anger is a skill. And like any skill, you’re not going to nail it the first time. Or the tenth. But repetition builds the muscle. You get better at recognizing when the anger is spiking. You get better at catching it before it explodes. You get better at asking yourself: Where can this go? What can I aim this at?
For me, it was the website. For someone else, it might be advocacy, or art, or building something with their hands, or mentoring younger vets, or perfecting the perfect polish on your shoes, or any other thing that matters enough to absorb that energy. It doesn’t have to matter to anyone but you.
The anger doesn’t disappear. But over time, you get better at the redirect. It stops controlling you. It becomes fuel instead of wildfire.
Not a Cure. A Redirect.
I’m not going to tell you this is a cure. I’m not going to tell you the anger goes away if you just find the right project or the right outlet.
But I will tell you this: if you’re sitting on that much anger, you’re also sitting on that much potential energy.
And the question isn’t “how do I make this stop.” It’s “where can I aim this?”
Maybe you won’t have success right away. The vet I talked to wasn’t sure he would. But the alternative—letting the anger run the show, letting it burn you out from the inside, letting it ruin everything you care about—that’s not working either.
So what do you have to lose by trying?
Point it somewhere. Practice. Fail. Try again.
The energy is already there. You might as well use it.