Terapia de control de la ira

Terapia de control de la ira is a prison-based intervention intended to help participants restrain violent impulses, but the novel gives its promise a double edge: therapy can teach outward control without changing what remains inside, while the program’s reach may create opportunities for a manipulator to find people he can direct. Its significance emerges gradually, from an officer’s bitter account of treatment to the discovery that Doctor Berasategui taught the very course associated with several killers.

Purpose and Prison Incentives

The program is described as one of the alternatives offered in prison to people seeking to manage violent impulses. Participation can reduce a sentence, giving inmates a practical reason to attend even when their commitment to change is uncertain. Montes says that many prisoners therefore go to therapy, and that every prison has a psychiatrist; some also receive visits from volunteer medical organizations. The institutional setting combines treatment with an incentive tied to punishment, so attendance alone does not establish that a participant accepts the work or has changed.

Amaia’s inquiries show how this distinction becomes relevant to the investigation. She asks whether a prisoner in Logroño who died by suicide had received therapy before or during his imprisonment. She already knows that Medina had not received therapy before prison, but wants to know whether he was treated psychiatrically there; she also asks about Quiralte, who had been held in Pamplona. These are questions to be checked, not a complete set of confirmed treatment histories. In the same conversation, a relative believes that a man did attend, but says he had promised to go after a serious discussion and abandoned the sessions after the second. The episode underscores how easily the fact of referral, attendance, and sustained participation can diverge.

Control Without Inner Change

Montes explains the program’s techniques after hearing a former offender use a phrase associated with an anger-control exercise. He identifies it as a learned method for controlling violent impulses, one of the options available in prison. In his view, it works only if the participant is firmly convinced: otherwise, a person learns to control himself and appear normal in public while remaining unchanged inside. What is not brought out, he warns, stays within and corrodes the person.

His judgment is personal rather than clinical. Montes says he himself attended therapy, but that it only made him feel worse, so he stopped. Even after six sessions, he remembers, he still wanted to kill Amaia. The detail does not prove that the program invariably fails; it gives the novel a concrete counterweight to the promise of sentence reduction and outward self-control. In Montes’s account, composure can become a performance, and visible restraint is not the same as the disappearance of violent intent.

Berasategui’s Role and the Investigative Reversal

The program’s meaning changes when Zabalza reports that Berasategui’s name appears on the relevant list at least twice. Montes recognizes him as the doctor who treated him during his leave and taught the anger-control therapy. The disclosure links the intervention directly to a member of the investigative team’s past: a course Montes remembers as ineffective for him was led by the man now under suspicion.

The connection becomes part of Amaia’s argument about the killings. In front of Berasategui and his lawyer, she identifies a pattern: the victims were adult women from Baztán, and their killers had received anger-control therapy. She calls this a useful context for finding someone manipulable and directing him. Berasategui denies being a manipulator, but his denial does not erase the investigative significance of the pattern Amaia has set out. The claim is presented as her case against him, not as a general finding that everyone who attends therapy can be controlled.

Violence Behind the Case Histories

The therapy inquiry sits alongside accounts of intimate-partner abuse marked not by a single outburst but by sustained domination. One victim’s aunt recounts how a jealous husband prevented her from working, narrowed her contact with friends and neighbors, dictated her appearance, and prevented her from going out alone. Although he did not beat her, the aunt feared he would find and kill her if she left. Her account makes coercion visible as a pattern of isolation, surveillance, and restricted movement, rather than as violence measured only by blows.

Ana Otaño describes a similarly extended process in her sister Nuria’s marriage to Antonio Garrido. After moving to Murcia, Nuria’s calls home grew distant; the family eventually lost contact with her for two years while Garrido kept her confined and chained. She escaped severely weakened, with an untreated fracture, and spent four months in hospital. Later, when Garrido called after leaving prison and threatened to come for her, Nuria hid inside a clothes dryer, unable to face leaving the house. Ana helped her regain confidence by taking her to practice shooting, and Nuria gradually improved. These histories do not establish that therapy caused the abuse or that every violent partner followed the same course. They do show the stakes of recognizing control as persistent and organized, while the case’s therapy thread asks whether a program intended to manage violence could also expose vulnerable participants to someone skilled at directing it.