How Can I Help You Better Manage Your Anger?

To Understand Why You Might Use Anger As A Weapon Against Yourself And Others.

Teach You How To Regain Your Composure Before You React To Your Anger In Self Defeating Ways.

Build Confidence And Teach You How Your Anger Can Be Used To Resolve Conflicts, Build Bridges And Develop More Meaningful Close Relationships.

To Apppreciate The Value Of Reflecting On Your Anger So That You Choose Healthy Relationhips And Avoid Unhealthy Relationships.

To Work Through Guilt Over Experiencing Anger So That You Don't React To It In Ways That Punish Yourself And Others.

Support You To Think About Your Anger In Ways So That This Emotion Is Less Painful And Easier To Use As A Helpful Tool.

Encourage And Support You To Use Our Relationship As A Laboratory To Practice New And Healthy Ways Of Expressing Anger.

Busting Some Myths About Anger Management

Introduction

When we thoughtlessly and impulsively react to feelings of anger it becomes a weapon. It is as if we are running red lights at intersections and putting ourselves and others in grave danger. Many of us are emotionally color blind at the intersection between feeling, thought and action precisely because like any intersection these events appear connected in a logical sequence.  When we take out our experiences of anger on others we tend not to slow down long enough to recognize that what seems logical may not be. Furthermore, what we want to see as a green light is really an impulse running through what under calmer and cooler circumstances would have our consciences, and reality testing/judgment flashing red lights.  If the red light is flashing we are moving too quickly to slow down and pay attention.  Hopefully, we learn over time to exercise more self restraint so that when the dust settles we are not left dealing with the painful realities of having hurt the ones we love. 

Having worked as a social worker in a criminal court in Connecticut I know from experience that the jails and prisons in this country are populated by folks who have both used anger as a weapon as well as by those who sincerely believe they were victims of such aggression and were acting in self defense. This article busts some of the myths responsible for the irresponsible management of anger and other emotions that light fuses on verbally and physically abusive behaviors.  I hope this article will lead many of you out there who know of someone who fits the descriptions in the following paragraphs to share this article with them so that they may do some soul searching and perhaps, if warranted seek counseling.

Myth #1:”He pushed my buttons so he got what he deserved.”

Does an unsuspecting person deserve to be our personal whipping post when something he says annoys us and lights the fuse for 40 years of collected grievances?  If we have not forgiven ______ for what was done to us during our childhoods then, we are likely to still have an axe to grind and may unbeknownst to ourselves spend our days looking to avenge such injustices.  Unfortunately, an untreated victim never loses the drive to repeat history and place himself in harm’s way with the story ending where he either repeats the role of victim or assumes the role of perpetrator after finding a suitable victim.  Misery never finds enough company and is a self perpetuating machine until we break these vicious cycles often with the help of trained professionals.  It’s not anyone’s responsibility except our own to work at healing the emotional wounds suffered early in life. It’s not anyone else’s fault if something happens between ourselves and others who may trigger painful associations to earlier traumas.  It’s sad and unfortunate but, is a reality of life.  If we fight this reality we keep heaping more pain and suffering on everyone including ourselves. If we accept this unfortunate, unfair and unjust reality then, we may head on the road toward forgiveness.   Forgiveness is in our self interest.  We can’t shape brighter futures  if we are still held hostage by our pasts.  If we were nothing more than vending machines then, when someone pushed our buttons we would not be responsible for using anger as a weapon.  We are responsible.  Just ask a criminal court judge in any state.

Myth #2: “I didn’t do anything wrong. I tried to walk away from fighting with him and he pursued me into the bedroom, cornered me and then, called me every name in the book. Of course I slugged him. What else could I have done?”

Life is often not fair and sometimes we have only one unappealing choice to make in the name of our health and welfare.  That choice based on the scenario above is to move out.  Separation anxieties are not an excuse to stay with a partner who will degrade us and otherwise provoke us into a fight until we lose our cool and retaliate.  If our efforts to call time outs or otherwise, deescalate conflicts are not respected and the two of us wind up in violent encounters then, we have one and only reasonable choice at our disposal; find a safe haven until we have evidence that both of us are willing and able to manage our feelings in a more respectful and considerate manner. Two wrongs never make a right and the party that retaliates is often deemed to be as guilty as the one who started.  When the police are called to break up domestic disputes who started often does not determine whether or not both parties will be asked to appear in court to face charges.

Myth #3: “If I get angry I get very destructive.”

The title of this article could very well be Busting Myths About Rage Management.  Anger all by itself does not often lead to abusive behaviors. Most often you have to sprinkle a little rage, envy and hatred to get something akin to an explosive cocktail.  Wars start when people feel attacked and attacks on our life, liberty and pursuit of happiness are often taken very personally by many.  If we are wronged and hurt by others we will most likely be angry.  If we assume that we are being mistreated because we don’t count and we don’t count because the message we hear is that we deserve to be treated this way for some ugliness or defect of character or physical appearance, all we have to do is swallow this message whole and then, anger will bleed into rage.  Rage is a signal that our value and significance is under attack and we are feeling helpless to defend ourselves. This experience breeds destructive acts of retaliation because it becomes a matter of kill or be killed off as a worthwhile person deserving of respect and consideration.

Myth #4: "I was out of control so I’m not responsible for my actions."This translates to: “Denial is not a river in Egypt.”

Many substance abusers and other non compliant consumers of mental health treatment services use “being out of control” to “feel in control” of getting what we want.  If we are responsible by acts of commission or omission for relinquishing control over ourselves then, we are in a very precarious position.  We are very dependent in an unhealthy way on others to look out for us, clean up our messes for us or otherwise, take responsibility for us.  If that dependent relationship falls apart we may be one step away from a rude awakening that goes along with being held accountable for our actions.  This applies whether or not we drink ourselves into oblivion or lose control of our minds as a direct consequence of the decision to stop taking our medications. “The Devil made me hit that person” will not cut it if we have years of psychiatric hospitalizations under our belts that could have taught us what we need to do to manage our hallucinations and delusions.  Sometimes notions of being powerful, important and special are linked to being treated as if the rules of society don’t apply to us.  This is a symptom of not feeling special or important in our own right.

Myth #5: "If I don’t think about it then, I didn’t do anything wrong. I’m not going to be your victim. I’m going to fight back!" 

We do not exist to polish images of ourselves that are false so that we can make real that which is flattering for us to look at in the mirror.  We can walk around and actually believe our press clippings are true if we confuse who we are with what we want ourselves and others to see.  If we choose we ay dismiss evidence that contradict our valued self images as bogus.   In such instances we may feel attacked when these images we depend on for a semblance of self esteem are not validated and are exposed as fraudulent.  We may feel that another person has attacked us by exposing us.  In truth, we attack our true selves because we have contempt and hatred for how we conduct our lives and yet, we refuse to make changes. Consequently, the messenger is blamed for shedding light on our true natures.   We can make ourselves larger than life when our egos our inflated by false notions about who we are and then, when reality intrudes our egos become deflated as if were balloons in The Macy’s Thanksgiving Parade that were pricked by a large pin.  The messenger becomes the enemy and the stimulated rage, anger, envy and hatred  may result in acts of retaliation.  It’s not necessarily that our characters are being judged as all bad.  It’s more like we become self conscious of a stain on our imagined pristine character that we cannot tolerate because we do not know how to keep these stains from spreading and coloring our entire selves.

Myth #6: Adults who behave like children feel much better after they explode and release their tension.

I can tell you from many experiences counseling couples that there may be an immediate and gratifying release of emotional tension from our bodies and minds when we let our feelings fly.  However, most of the adults I have worked with wound up feeling ashamed, guilty and depressed in the long run.  Adults need to be behave like adults and effectively manage age appropriate roles to feel happy, at peace and fulfilled. When they behave like children they may feel immediately gratified but, later on when they have moments to reflect on their actions, they often feel awful.

Conclusion:

Impulse control problems of any kind are most often treated with counseling and/or medications.  Counseling requires that we make time and space to learn to contain, reflect on and change our perspectives and relationships to anger and other potentially hostile emotions.  It takes only one degree of separation from the person we are interacting with, and only one degree of separation from our own feelings, thoughts, and fantasies to start us on the road to neutralizing potentially volatile, destructive and regrettable actions. I hope you will spend some time reflecting on some of the myths I've made a case for busting with this article.     

Anger Management: You’ve Got To Own Your Anger To Manage It

 

We do not fall into neat little categories no matter how hard others may try to classify us.  Still, in my psychotherapy practice I do notice a strong correlation between folks with chronic anger management problems and those who exhibit self defeating personality traits.  Many of us organize our identities around a core belief that we are “victims.” We believe this to be true because we continue to suffer from parental improprieties long after growing up and leaving home.  As much as clients express sincere wishes to move forward with their lives, making these wishes a reality are easier said than done.  Each and every time they are angry, the experiences feel as if salt is being poured on their incompletely healed emotional scars.   They are especially resistant to the notion that their parents and themselves for that matter, did and still do the best they can given their limitations and the limits of the ssupport they receive from loved ones.   They prefer to collect grievances and hold grudges even though such dispositions hold themselves back from breaking with their dissatisfying pasts so they might create more satisfying lives.  

With the fervor of evangelists many of us will settle for no less than one of the following: 1) An end to our pain and suffering, 2) Escapes at will from our pain and suffering, 3) Revenge or 4) Special entitlements to compensate us for our misfortunes.    It doesn’t matter whether we recall our parents as being miscreants of the most premeditated variety, or just very limited and clueless about what motivated apparently automatic and mindless methods of parenting.  On an emotional level we hold tenaciously to demands that the justice be served. 

 

Many of us present as unlucky and unfortunate souls who have not separated who we are from how we were treated as children.  We tell our stories of woe certain there are signs pasted on our backs that read: “Go ahead and kick me everyone else does!”  In truth, the sad ironies are that we are not by any stretch of the imagination victims any longer.  We are in actuality unwitting architects who preserve and perpetuate our pain and suffering.  We are victims of our own self defeating patterns of behavior that we deny and/or minimize responsibility for.  

As implied in the preceding paragraph buried and forgotten and primed to be relived in the present is our investment in being victims in search of ideals of fairness and justice that cannot and will not be served.  How these rigid and unrelenting patterns shape our chronic anger management problems is the subject of this article. 

 My introductory remarks beg the question: How could it be that at 30, 40, 50, 60, 70 or even 80 we still experience ourselves as not responsible for our own destinies?   Well, intellectually we know we are however, the logic of our emotions operate according to a different set of rules.   We believe that managing these problems should not be our jobs because we didn’t bargain with our parents to be saddled with such problems.  Thus, we link “not deserving” such a fate with not needing to own and manage these problems.  We’re scared to death that we might not be able to do anything about these problems and/or find having them so abhorrent as to ensure a future of suffering of our own making.  Now that’s quite a parental legacy to have to shoulder!  So we resist committing ourselves to fixing our problems because we find the unfairness and injustice of it too intolerable to come to terms with.  We may keep banging our heads against the walls in broad daylight hoping that others believed to have been treated to more privileged childhoods will do something to help us.    The implicit entreaty is: “Will you stop standing there and please do something to end my suffering!”  Unfortunately, only we can solve our own problems if we can accept responsibility and discard our propensities for self blame.  This state of affairs never did and will never have anything to do with deserving such mistreatment.       

We may presently be victims but, it’s not of our childhoods. We may indeed be victims of our own guilt perpetuating machines that run 24 hours a day.  We may be blind to it in ourselves and eagle eyed when expressed by others however, we are in truth as capable of cruelty, sadism, anger, rage, envy as anyone else walking the planet.  The crux of our problems are that we do not see ourselves as un-saintly like the rest of the human race unless we are provoked.  We have not learned to own and contain such feelings, wishes and impulses without feeling horrible about ourselves.  Consequently, absent an external provocation we are at the mercy of internal mechanisms that demand punishment and self sacrifice for what are universal aspects of human experience we equate with being bad, evil and destructive people.  Thus we try unsuccessfully and ineffectively to defend against what is “evil” and “destructive” leaving these feelings out of our control to wreak havoc with us.   Our guilt demands self sacrifice.  Oh, how envious we may be of those who live lives of pleasure and plenty. 

What is human for others and does not interfere with their pursuit of happiness oppresses us folks, burdens us and limits our capacities to be happy.  We may be inescapable victims of the need to suffer because we learned growing up that we suffered as a precondition of being cared for.  “Being” did not make us eligible for much at all.  We had to earn whatever we got and usually did so with a pound of flesh or guilt.  “What do you mean you’re not hungry?  There are kids dying of starvation every day in Africa.”  Do you get the point?   In addition the rules of engagement inside these homes were such that no one owned up to being responsible for what exacted so much self sacrifice.  In fact, if anyone felt anything regarded as evil and destructive the accepted myth was that someone else must have “made them feel this way.”  So, these so called assaults on each others’ self esteem led to sanctioned acts of retaliation.  As was to be expected in such environments the children being weak, small and relatively defenseless took the brunt of the attacks.  

It’s not uncommon for victims to beget victims.   We are condemned to remain victims until we develop the mindset that we can change ourselves.  Short of this we walk around wearing our unhappiness on our sleeves as our currency for paying for what we feel entitled to.   We are notorious for apologizing for anything and everything. We apologize for taking up space, breathing too much air, and we may even ask permission to go to the bathroom.  The message is that we do not feel entitled to much and we assiduously ask for little to avoid frustrations and disappointments because if we do not get what we feel entitled to for all our suffering we are likely to feel that we are being attacked as completely worthless when in fact we have devalued ourselves to the point that we may become desperate for appreciation and recognition for our dutiful service.  Absent this, we are likely to blame others for what bubbles to the surface.  I’m referring to all that we regard to be evil and destructive which we will need to blame someone for.

As I indicated, we have anger management problems that stem from the fact that we remain victims of those who raised us.  As long as we feel helpless and hopeless to change were gard being held accountable for our anger as adding insult to injury.  The unfairness and injustice of being stuck with an impoverished sense of entitlement is compounded by the fact that to own our hostilities toward our parental figures is to render us entitled to nothing.  They might as well be dead.  At least if they surrender to demands that they work, sweat, suffer without complaints when they are treated unfairly they are then, entitled to ask for something.  The sense of injustice eats away at these folks and they cannot forgive their parental figures who they continue to avenge in part through their self defeating acts.

 

Many of us fit the profiles of battered spouses; men and women.  We may feel so guilty over our hostile wishes, feelings etc., that we are at the mercy of efforts on the part of the batterers to justify what is unjustifiable.  If the attacks continue a point is reached where the battered party will feel so bad about himself and so resentful of the aggression that the will flee what has become a re-living of his role as child and identify with the aggressor; the aggressive parent from the family of origin.   It’s not uncommon for us to wind up in court arrested for a domestic violence incident when in fact, the police reports read largely like muggings and we may have started out as the victim of aggression who then, retaliated.   Once again two wrongs don’t make a right but, the mentality of an angry victim is not unlike the mentality of a child who identifies with what he has learned.   

 

When my clients come into my office not only do they bring their chronic tales of woe, they also bring with them the guarantee that I will be asked to enact with them scenarios similar to the ones they describe to me.  We call such enactments, compulsions to repeat history.  If we are victims of history then, we have to find ways to control its impact on us.  We will try and shape that which we know how to deal with: To control its influence, destroy its influence or change its influence.  The compulsion is indisputable evidence that we still resist mourning our losses s owe can move on and liberate these energies for more creative and satisfying pursuits. 

 

For example, my clients will come in, regale me with stories of how they are being taken advantage of, reject my efforts to explore what it all means in terms of their motives for such self defeating actions and then, forget to pay me for weeks on end.  Misery loves company and passing the role of victim on to others is a way to stave off envy, and affirms a sense of entitlement to be compensated for all our pain and self sacrifice.  Our actions express a logic that can only be understood by blurring the boundaries between the past and present:  “What right do I (their psychotherapist) have to get consideration for my time and trouble when y clients do not consider themselves and do not ask for their due from others?”

 

In my psychotherapy practice I help many in a variety of ways.  1) I model healthy self interest, and help clients resolve their conflicts over identifying with myself.   I respect  y clients as capable of growing, changing and coping with unfairness and injustice in life that we all must learn to accept, in order to lead reasonably happy lives.  2) I normalize the feelings my clients believe are evil and destructive, establish ground rules for acceptable ways of expressing them, mirror expressions of these feelings with acceptance and understanding, and reassure my clients that they will not destroy me with their anger.  I also reassure them that I will not retaliate should they express anger and disappointment towards myself.  3) I encourage, and acknowledge their expressions of healthy self interest and resist rewarding self defeating actions.  Conversely, I model healthy self interest.  4) In addition, I also model healthy assertions of authority to empower my clients to challenge their guilt, challenge time honored notions that glorify self sacrifice, and neutralize their attacks on themselves that for so long left their self esteem and mood in ruins.  5) We reframe their anger as an emotion that is a starting point to assess what they are getting too little of or too much of that they would like to change, and then how to use their anger to assert their rights to be treated with more respect and consideration and 6) I provide these clients the corrective experiences of being re-parented so that they can mourn their childhood losses and shed their identifications as victims.   

 

I have attempted with this brief article to describe for you the origins of anger management problems experienced by any of us who exhibit self defeating personality traits; our characteristics and how they can be addressed through psychotherapy.  One can teach someone everything they need to know about assertive communications, fighting fairly, de-escalating conflicts, mindfulness, etc.   However, if we are still at war with images of abusive and neglectful parental figures, then until we are ready to wave the white flag all the anger management classes in the world won’t empower us to change until we are ready to own the consequences of what growing up has left us with as our problems to solve.    

 

 

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