A Family That Yelled: How Joel Chipkar Learned to Control Anger

In brief

Joel Chipkar, a Canadian who works in his family’s business, grew up in a home where everyone yelled. His rage cost him his fiancée of six years. A book from his mother, and a failure the very next morning, began the slow work of learning to control anger.

The door slamming behind him

There’s an anger that arrives before you’ve decided anything. You hear yourself shouting and can’t find the moment you chose to. If you know that anger, you’ll understand Joel.

He would come home after a fight with his family and look for any reason to fight with the woman he loved.

“My abusive, evil, hurtful words would spit out of my mouth right at her,” he remembers.

Joel grew up, in his words, in “a hot blooded, short tempered, angry, southern Italian family.” He learned to fight with his brothers young. “We yelled and screamed and fought with each other or with any one else who crossed our path over the smallest things.”

For 12 years he had worked with those same brothers almost every day, in the family business.

He didn’t know his anger was a problem until he met her. They were together six years and engaged. She was kind, he says; she never swore or raised her voice. She laughed all the time.

“Day after day I vowed to [her] I would stop getting so angry,” he says. But whenever they disagreed, “that powerful and uncontrollable feeling of rage would build inside me again and I would lash out.” In the end, she left.

After that, things got worse. “Thoughts of blame, self loathing and negativity stormed in my head in a whirlwind of confusion,” he says. He tried everything he could think of — marijuana, alcohol, money, travel, books, a psychologist. Nothing touched his dissatisfaction with life, or his anger.

If you’ve ever promised someone you’d stop, and meant it, and done it again anyway — that shame is heavy. It doesn’t mean you can’t change.

Five minutes into the new life

So Joel called his mother. She practiced Falun Dafa, and he had watched her outlook on life change. He told her he was confused and tired of “going around in the same vicious circles of negativity over and over again,” and that he needed help.

His mother smiled and handed him a copy of Zhuan Falun. “Start to read this book,” she told him. “All of your answers are in this book.”

It was, he says, the hardest book he had ever tried to read. “It pushed all of my buttons.” He argued with it, doubted it, disagreed with it. But he had promised himself six months — a little reading every day, the exercises twice a week — so whatever he couldn’t accept, he set aside and kept going.

The sitting meditation was its own struggle. He would cross his legs, close his eyes, feel calm for a while, then spring up to check his phone messages. The first time he tried to sit the full hour, his mind raced and his legs hurt until he had to stop. “I then realized I had no self-control.”

Three quarters of the way through the book, something shifted. For the first time, he saw himself clearly: insecure, never satisfied, judging everyone he met, always competing. The teaching seemed simple: don’t fight with others; look at them with kindness; look within. “This was the answer I had looked for all my life!”

He felt like a new person. The next day, he walked into his office with his new attitude.

“Within 5 minutes my brother said something that pushed my buttons. I flew into a rage and yelled and screamed as loud as I could.” He left and slammed the door behind him.

At home, the first thing he saw was Zhuan Falun on the coffee table. He sat there stunned. “Why can’t I do it?” he asked himself. “Why do I slip back into my old negative and abusive patterns?”

A new familiar

The answer he came to was simple. Anger had been his “familiar” for so long that kindness and patience actually felt foreign. Understanding the teaching wasn’t enough; he would have to choose it again and again, with support.

If you’ve had your own morning like that — when the old reaction beat the new intention — maybe it isn’t proof that nothing changed. Maybe it’s where the real work starts.

So he kept going. He reads a section of the book every morning and another at bedtime. Things he couldn’t understand at first began to make sense. “My old powerful patterns of negativity and fear are slowly decreasing,” he says, “as new patterns of compassion and tolerance become my new familiar.”

On Wednesdays and Sundays he and his mother do the exercises together. When the sitting meditation hurts, he sometimes opens his eyes to look at her. She sits with her legs crossed and a smile on her face, and when the pain comes she straightens up and keeps going. “My mom is my inspiration,” he says.

The brothers are still the brothers. The office is still the office. What has changed is Joel.

“Now when my brothers try to fight with me I say nothing,” he says. “My mind is less agitated and more peaceful and my desire to react with anger is gone.”

He doesn’t pretend it’s finished. “Sometimes I still slip back into my old skin,” he admits. At times it is “a huge struggle.” But each time he chooses not to react, he says, he feels stronger.

In less than two years, he says, the practice helped him “break the chains of illusion, ignorance and fear” that had run not only his life but his family’s for generations. “For the first time in my life I feel a genuine peace and happiness with everyone I come in contact with.”

The man who slammed the office door five minutes into his new life still works beside the same brothers. When they try to fight, he says nothing back.

What this story may hold for you

• Joel’s anger was learned at home, long before it was his choice. Perhaps yours was too — and what was learned can slowly be unlearned.
• Understanding something and living it are not the same. His worst morning came the day after his biggest insight. That gap is normal.
• He set himself a small, steady goal: a little reading every day, six months. You might find that patience with the process is part of the change.
• He still slips sometimes. Change, in his story, is the old reaction loosening its grip, not vanishing overnight.
• A miracle might be the body healing, or the heart letting go, or finding meaning again — or any mix of these.

A free guide for letting go of what still burns

If this story touched something in you, there are two more like it.

Our free guide, Letting Go of What Still Burns, gathers three true stories of people who were caught in anger and resentment — and what slowly changed for them — with a gentle page on how to begin.

It’s free. One email with the guide, then a few short letters. Unsubscribe any time.

Questions readers ask

Q: How do I control anger when I grew up in a family that yelled?

Joel’s whole family fought “over the smallest things,” and he carried that into every relationship. What changed it wasn’t one insight — he exploded at his brother the very next day — but a daily practice he kept up, until kindness slowly became, in his words, his “new familiar.”

Q: How can I stop being angry at the people I love most?

Joel’s anger drove away his fiancée despite his promises to stop. He found that promises weren’t enough; he needed a daily practice and a way of looking at himself first. Today, he says, when his brothers try to fight with him, he says nothing.

Q: Where does this story come from?

From Joel Chipkar’s own talk, “My Cultivation Experience with Falun Dafa,” in Falun Gong Stories: A Journey to Enlightenment (Golden Lotus Press), and its longer version given at a Falun Dafa experience-sharing conference in early 2000, published by Minghui on April 6, 2000. The quotes are his own words.

A note on health

These stories share personal experiences and inner journeys. They cannot replace professional psychological or medical help, and please don’t stop or change any treatment because of a story. If you are in serious distress or crisis, please reach out to a qualified local counselor, doctor or crisis line.