When a mighty force overstuffs a container, it shatters.

Scott Trobec shattered, in 1996, after a lifetime of never saying an angry word to anyone.

Sound impossible? Not to mental health experts who counsel men suffering from what could be called anger over-management. These men don’t know how to get mad.

They are not just gentle or easygoing types, the experts stress. They are the opposite extreme of the common view of men and anger — violent, out-of-control guys who stab their wives or beat their children or shoot up the office where they got fired — and they leave a different, more private path of destruction.

Many fall into depressions, failed marriages or lonely, solitary lives. Some have even been linked to legacies of family violence, almost like “carriers” passing along illnesses that they themselves don’t catch.

There’s no count of these men. Indeed, there is no “over-passive condition” recognized in the standard guide to psychiatric illnesses, the DSM IV (Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders) of the American Psychiatric Assn.

But specialists say it’s time for science and society to catch on. They attribute the lag to gender stereotypes — people also have trouble seeing men as victims of domestic violence, they say — and to the fact that these men aren’t disturbing the peace.

Abusive roots

Trobec, now 42, grew up in Cottage Grove, Minn. He graduated from St. John’s University in Collegeville, Minn., in 1983, got married and started to build a CPA practice in St. Paul.

His No. 1 adjective for himself was “normal” — until night terrors overtook him in 1996. He screamed in his sleep, terrifying his wife. Days, he found himself distracted by an obstinate sadness.

To his own astonishment, memories of physical and sexual abuse by a relative gathered in his mind. Another family member could confirm enough about those times to convince Trobec and his therapists that the memories of assaults — from ages 6 to 13 — were true.

Psychologist Mic Hunter of St. Paul, Minn., said childhood abuse is often the reason men shut anger out of their lives. As boys, it wasn’t safe to get mad at the person who beat them; the abuser would just get madder, Hunter said. And young boys blame themselves when they’re sexually assaulted.

As Trobec now says, “I was being assaulted by someone I loved and who loved me. So I thought I deserved it, that there must be something terribly wrong with me.”

Hunter said the unspoken pledge among some of these boys becomes: “If this horrible thing is what it means to be angry, I will never be angry.” They can grow into men who feel that no demand from a spouse or employer or friend is too much. They also can become fathers incapable of disciplining their own children who then — never having been required to control themselves — turn into abusive parents themselves.

You may be suffering from anger over-management if: ¢ Your waiter brings you a steak dinner by mistake, and you eat it even though you’re a vegetarian.¢ Your mechanic says your car needs $800 in repairs, and you pay it without asking what’s wrong with it.¢ You let people cut in front of you in line.¢ You buy something you don’t want because the store clerk has spent so much time with you.¢ Your standard answer, when friends ask you what movie you want to see: “I don’t care. What do you want to see?”¢ You can’t say no when your boss asks you to do something, then you don’t do it.– Source: Anger Resources, www.ANGEResources.com

“That’s how you get these things skipping a generation,” Hunter said.

Stifled emotions

Trobec understands the dynamic.

“This wasn’t something going on consciously,” he said, “but I had learned that I didn’t matter, that I survived by taking care of other people.”

He remembers getting angry about a handful of things, but only at a safe distance — emotionally and physically — from his life.

“And the places where I could feel anger, it seemed all out of proportion,” he said.

Trobec said his wife talks not so much about his lack of anger through the years, but his lack of joy. By shutting down his anger, he said, he stifled all emotion.

Therapy tries to help men remember the source of their timidity, so they can understand and then overcome its influence.

It worked this way for Trobec one recent day: A dissatisfied client became menacing on the phone. “Are you threatening me?” Trobec asked him. The caller’s rant got worse. Trobec hung up on him, after silently talking his way through a practiced message.

“I know that as a child I learned that I ‘just had to take it,'” his message to himself goes. “But I’m an adult. I’m safe. I don’t have to take this. Now I can put a different ending on this story.”