Anger management counseling can help you calm the storm before you blow. Anger can be a destructive force – both internally and relationally. Anger can also serve as a constructive motivator, like when your anger compels you to change your life for the better or to speak out when you witness another person being mistreated or abused.
And then… there are those times when anger isn’t so constructive, like when you attempt to suppress your anger for days and days until—like an unattended pot on the stove—you boil over.
As a general rule of thumb, anger becomes problematic when it becomes: frequent, explosive, violent, out of proportion to the severity of the situation, passive-aggressive, vengeful, or interferes with your relationships, employment, academic performance, or legal and medical status.
You might also be asking, “Why are some people more predisposed toward anger than others?”
You’ve probably heard that anger was a secondary emotion: an emotional camouflaging technique that disguises fear, guilt, stress, or hurt—and that’s essentially true.
For reasons both biochemical and environmental, some individuals have a lower threshold for frustration and a higher level of emotional reactivity, which transforms anger into a near-reflexive response. Like a tap to the knee at a doctor’s visit that makes your entire leg jerk forward…
Luckily, unlike your patellar reflex, YOU CAN learn to rewire your anger response.
Destructive anger comes in different flavors that don’t necessarily involve punching holes in walls or screaming until the neighbors file a noise complaint. Unhealthy forms of aggression include:
So, you have an anger management problem—the irony perhaps being that you find the thought of seeking counseling services to be mildly annoying at best and infuriating at worst, but you recognize that your problem requires some outside assistance. What next?
Next, your therapist will help you to: