the Rage and Powerlessness that beset the first months
It is starting to get quietly around Ennet House that Randy Lenz has found his own dark way to deal with the well-known Rage and Powerlessness issues that beset the drug addict in his first few months of abstinence.
Context
The whole horror is framed at the outset as a recovery datum, not a psychopathology: the Rage and Powerlessness that beset the newly abstinent addict are "well-known," an expected feature of early sobriety, and Lenz has found his own dark way to metabolize them. The book insists on reading the killing as displaced withdrawal — the untreated affect of a man white-knuckling his first months with no interior tools, routing the pressure outward because he cannot route it up.