People need to realize that aggression is a normal component of our personalities.
Psychiatrist Karl Menninger discussed this with me years ago.
The pictures of the Boston Bruins hockey team visiting the Newtown kids touched my heart, but when I see them on the ice kicking, punching and knocking their opponents all over the place, I don't feel so good.
Watching someone with a knife in their hand attack another person who annoys them would be very upsetting to me. But as a surgeon I cut people open every day and was rewarded for it.
As Menninger said, maybe my becoming a surgeon was a reaction formation to my destructive tendencies. So no jail time for me.
We need to understand and point out to our children and the world that aggression can be used in constructive and life-enhancing ways. In sports, like the Bruins, we can unload our aggression, and then be gentle souls away from the ice or playing fields. We can hammer nails, hunt, cut up people or cut down trees, knock down houses and make a living at it.
So please provide your children with healthy ways to compete and release their aggression so they can find inner peace when they have to confront the realities and difficulties of life. I doubt that the TV games can do this for them since they are not dealing with reality on the screen they are watching. So turn it off and get them out in the street shoveling snow or weeding the garden and something good will come of it for all of us.
Bernie Siegel, MD
Woodbridge