Lots of people have the power to hurt or frustrate me. Only one has the power to make me angry.

Me.

If it is true that no one else can make me angry, it is even more true that no one else can make me respond aggressively or inappropriately when I feel anger. It often seems that way because my response to feeling anger has become so routine that it seems "automatic." It feels as if the person or event triggered my anger and caused my response.

The truth is my response is learned behavior. I learned it long ago, from people I grew up around, learned it so informally that I was not aware that I was learning anything.

Tommy Bolt has been described as the angriest golfer in the history of a game that has stimulated the secretion of more bile than any other single human activity outside of war and denominational meetings. One (possibly apocryphal) story recalls a time he was giving a group lesson on how to hit a ball out of a sand trap. He called his 11-year-old son over.

"Show the people what you've ...