Anger Management
Online for Ontario; In-person counselling available for Thunder Bay
You feel like your anger comes on so quickly. When angry your heart rate quickens, muscles tense up, you feel irritated, and heat rushes to your head. Your anger gives you a shot of adrenaline.
Your body is telling you,
“Do something about this!”
after your thoughts say,
“This is unfair!”
When angry it is hard to argue with the part of your brain egging you on to make someone know how wrong they are or shut down completely.
You go into protection mode when angry.
There are many things that set your anger off, but sometimes you are not quite sure why it got that intense. You think,
“Why did I get so mad?”
This has become a huge problem because now it feels out of control. You start to become fearful of your anger because you don’t know why it is so strong and popping up more often. You might start to realise too that you don’t know how to approach your anger and calm down.
Thinking about tackling your anger is overwhelming.
You may have noticed that how you are managing anger is not working in your relationships either.
Others might feel like they are walking on eggshells around you.
You are having a hard time expressing and sharing your frustration with others, but others may retreat from sharing with you as well for fear of what you will say out of anger.
Maybe your spouse or kids don’t want to make your anger worse so they say nothing or try to say the exact right thing that won’t upset you. This can lead to feeling distant from your important people and them feeling distant from you.
What are signs of anger issues?
Intensity of the anger does not fit the situation
Say or do things you regret when angry
Aggression, like yelling, name-calling, intimidation, physical harm to yourself or others
Frequently irritable
Feeling out of control when angry
Can’t shut off your angry thoughts
Takes a long time to calm down after anger
Self-punishment after anger, like not letting yourself go enjoy things or taking care of yourself
Stuck in negative thinking, like self-criticism, blaming others, or hopelessness
Passive-aggression, like sarcasm, silent treatment, sulking
Are anger and irritability the same thing?
Anger and irritability are definitely connected or overlapped. I think the best words to describe anger are frustration and displeasure.
Anger says “I don’t like this,” like when:
Physical or emotional well-being is threatened
You are stopped from achieving an important goal
There’s physical or emotional discomfort or pain
While irritability is being easily annoyed, or on edge.
It is an emotional state that is on the cusp of being overwhelmed. I like to call it the feeling when you’ve reached your emotional capacity.
Irritability certainly is the thing that will make you more quick to anger because your capacity is small. In other words, irritability is when your cup has run dry.
Is it okay to be angry?
Many people seek out anger management therapy thinking they should not be angry. It is a myth that anger should be eradicated. You may think “I need to stop being angry” or “How do I make my anger go away?”
Anger is not bad! Anger is an emotion like any other. We need it.
Like other emotions, anger is a sign and signal that you don’t like something.
What is important to understand about anger management is that it’s not anger that's bad, it’s how we deal with anger that can be bad, meaning it causes us negative consequences.
Because I am going to bet you have a reason to be angry. The reason why you are angry may not be obvious or your anger may be stronger than what makes sense, but there’s something there that caused it. In my opinion this makes the anger a valid emotional response.
Whether in Thunder Bay or somewhere else in Ontario, you can get started with anger management.
Book a call:
Can my anger be ‘cured’?
I don’t think our anger should be cured. Anger is an emotion that everyone experiences.
It is normal to feel angry when things don’t go your way or you feel treated unfairly.
I believe our emotions are signs, it’s just that the many of us never learned to tap into the meaning behind them. Not only this, but what to do with them.
What you are experiencing though is excessive anger. This is where you miss the signs when it starts happening (or catch on way too late) and it gets to the point where you are no longer in control.
So, it is okay to be angry about something. It can help us understand what we need, and what’s important to us.
For example, when something doesn’t happen the way we think it should and it makes us really fucking mad!.
This can tell us that we don’t feel okay when things go wrong, and we don’t want to look less than, or inadequate.
It may be important for you to feel like you're enough and deserving.
All of this can be a sign that we don’t feel super good about ourselves, and feeling more secure can be a goal to work on.
This is one way there might be more to someone’s anger, but there are so many reasons.
There is often so much underneath anger.
There’s other feelings there. For some of us who are not so good with understanding our feelings and emotions, anger can be a go-to. It’s the one that we recognize.
Why are men angry?
I specialise in anger management AND therapy for men, so I see the link here that I think is important to understand.
There are common ways for how we teach men to deal with feelings in our culture and society. This means, not every family raises men the exact same way but often social norms of what it means to be a ‘man’ seep into how we raise men, our schools, extracurriculars, and other areas of life, that result in many men experiencing similar social pressures and struggles.
Common struggles for men are:
Distancing oneself from negative emotions
Limiting emotional expression
Avoiding situations that may elicit emotion
Discomfort with others getting emotional
Difficulty asking for help or relying on others
What does all of this have to do with anger? Anger is one of the emotions that it seems is acceptable for men. An angry man fits within the social expectation of what it means to be a ‘man’.
Anger may be a ‘safe’ way for a man to express emotion, even though anger may not be the original feeling. This means that the man might actually feel sad, guilty, regretful, jealous, grief, or disappointment, but anger is the emotion he can get in touch with.
Without experience paying attention to our feelings, the real underlying emotional experience usually doesn’t get processed and dealt with.
All of that pent of emotion might then come out as anger, anxiety, or depression.
Why do I get so mad?
It feels out of control when you don’t know why you get so mad. This is because if you don’t have the cause then it feels like the anger can just pop out of nowhere at an unexpected time. Why you get so angry can be a combination of things or have multiple possibilities.
Some of reasons I see most often in anger management therapy are:
There's a reason to be mad, but for some other reason you feel like you should not feel anger.
You are responding to what you think is happening, rather than the facts of the situation. For example, you believe someone’s intentions before knowing all the information.
You are reacting to something bigger than the situation. For example, you get mad about your spouse not doing the dishes, but you also feel overall disregarded and unimportant in your relationship.
You have other stress in your life that makes you irritable, and therefore the anger feels more intense.
You are not dealing with the other emotions that come day-to-day, which allows them to get built up and then you explode with anger.
You get overwhelmed when angry because you don’t know what to do with it. This unintentionally fuels the anger and makes it more intense.
There's some other health issue happening that is causing you to be more irritable and quick to anger.
These are just a few ideas of why you get so mad. To explore more about the reasons, I encourage you to read my blogs: “Why do I get so mad?” and “Why am I so irritable?”
How can I improve anger issues?
Learning techniques that calm you down when angry is a big part of anger management of course. When your anger is intense, your ability to think things through and see the bigger picture is difficult.
If you are wanting more anger management tips, visit my blogs:
Getting calm cannot be it though. If you struggle with anger issues and ONLY learned coping strategies to calm yourself down, you are missing out on prevention and meaningful change.
Effective anger management should answer the questions:
What is underneath your anger?
What other emotions exist WITH the anger?
What about this event triggers you into an anger response?
Why is anger the response and not another accompanying emotion?
Where did you learn to express anger this way?
How can you express what’s underneath?
This is why exercise is not therapy, or at least not the same as psychotherapy. Body movement can help calm your body and regulate your emotions overall by having a healthy baseline, but that does not rid you of emotions. It also does not tell you how to deal with the aftermath of anger where you need to mend your relationship.
To learn more about ways to manage anger, here are some blogs that cover important anger topics:
In Ontario & ready to get started with anger management therapy?
How can therapy help anger issues?
You’re reading this because you’ve been there: At the height of your anger where it feels impossible to put the brakes on. You’ve tried to stop yourself before it gets to that point, but it feels like a run-away train.
If you’re reading this you also likely have been dealing with this for a long time.
You don’t like how anger affects you and the effect it has on your family.
There are so many things said and done in the anger that you wish you could take back.
You make promises to approach things more calmly and stop before it gets to that point.
You have the best intentions. It happened again though.
You feel guilty and that you are not more in control of it.
It’s a helpless feeling.
Therapy is a place where you can come to talk about the anger that is disrupting your life.
For some they may attend counselling for anger and a few other things. Often I see men who struggle with anger and also see how their marriage or relationship has been affected. They want to learn how to make this better. Men want to be better spouses, husbands, and fathers.
Anger issues can be especially scary when you have come from having parents who were also angry.
You don't want to be angry like your mom or dad was. You certainly don’t want to pass on your anger to your children. This can be a big motivator to learn how to manage your anger differently.
In therapy for anger, we work together to identify why the anger is happening more often and more intensely. As well, you may want to develop strategies to deal with anger when it starts happening, or know what to do in the aftermath if you weren’t able to stop it in time.
The expectation in therapy is not to discover and learn something new and be perfect at it. The expectation in therapy for anger is to evolve over time and work towards your goal of reducing and managing anger.
What happens in anger management therapy?
When wanting to manage anger better, we sometimes want to jump to the solution, fix the anger, and make it go away. I encourage you to take a beat.
Whenever you want to make meaningful change, you have to start from the beginning and get the lay of the land.
In anger management, you get to know your anger issues:
When do I get angry? Is it the time of day? After/before a certain event?
How do I get angry? What do I do when I get angry? What does my anger tell me to do (I call these anger urges)?
Who is present? Does it happen with a certain person/people, and not with others?
Where does it happen? Is this a work thing? Does it happen only at home?
What does anger feel like to you? What is the first sign anger is creeping up in your body?
What are the thoughts that go through your head when angry?
What is the history there? Where did I learn this? Have I always been this angry or has it evolved? Did my parents/caregivers behave similarly? Did my anger evolve following a certain life experience?
All of this information provides you with the knowledge of your anger. These answers will be different for everyone. When you lay all this information out there about your anger then you can know better how to proceed.
Stop turning away from your anger, pushing it down, or pretending like it doesn’t exist.
Get to know your anger so you may allow it to exist in a way that feels much less scary.
Learn more about anger management basics with my blog, Anger Management: Tips for getting started.
Here are 3 common goals for anger management therapy:
Understanding your anger
Maybe what is making you angry is not as big of a deal as it should be. This usually means there’s much more underneath. What’s the rest of the story here? Learning the why of this very strong reaction and knowing how to deal with that thing too, can lessen those big reactions over time.
Sometimes how we make sense of anger can be too simplistic as well. I think, “Is this anger, or is it ______?” For example, do you feel bitter, criticised, dismissed, betrayed, or jealous?
By identifying the why, you are learning how to read your anger better. So in the future when you start to feel angry you can more quickly go: “Oh, I know what’s happening here.”
2. Prevent anger in the first place.
Preventing anger is looking at how overall you are “regulating your emotions.” In other words, how you are controlling or managing how you feel so you can feel balanced. Improving emotion regulation is also knowing when you don’t feel balanced, like when you are overwhelmed by anger, how you can come back to feeling calm or okay again.
So therapy helps you get in touch with how you deal with your feelings overall. This helps you day-to-day pay attention to yourself and learn how to make yourself feel better, rather than ignoring or turning away from stress or bad feelings.
3. Managing anger in relationships
Many men are more proud when they are self-reliant, like they should do everything on their own. Though self-reliance and independence can be incredibly important in many aspects of our lives, we lose opportunities to collaborate with our important people, like our spouse.
Healthy relationships thrive when we can be transparent about what’s going on internally, even if it has nothing to do with them. Many of us don’t learn how to communicate and collaborate well with a partner though.
Therapy can help you learn how to articulate your anger, ask for what you need, and identify any barriers that stop you from managing anger in your relationships.
There is also the question of how do you make things right after you’ve said or did the wrong thing in your relationships? You can learn how to better repair when inevitably your anger overtakes you. This means: what to say and how to approach this.
Is therapy for anger right for me?
Here are some signs anger management therapy in Ontario is right for you:
You are ready to feel in control of your anger issues
There has been negative consequences from your anger
Your spouse or other relationships have been affected by your temper
You want to reduce irritability
Willing to try talk-therapy
Comfortable enough with the technology that comes with online therapy
You live in Ontario
Ready to get started with anger management therapy?
This isn’t working, you know that.
You want to be able to let things go more.
You want to be able to talk about something that is bothering you without losing it on the other person.
You don’t want to avoid them and go off by yourself all the time.
Importantly, it’s making you feel crappy. You want different:
You want to be comfortable being around others.
You want them to be comfortable being around you.
You don’t want this overwhelming feeling of anger to contribute to the already negative and critical thoughts running through your head.
Working on your anger can help you feel more confident navigating your relationships with yourself and others. It can help you feel more in control, like this overwhelming feeling won’t catch you off guard at any second and you won’t know what to do with it.
Book a call with Christine to started with anger management therapy:
Blog
Maybe someone told you it was or it just feels out of control, but there is something about your anger that is making you ask this question. I’ll walk you through the anger issues that I typically see to help you answer: Is my anger a problem?