Anger Management

Courage is your strength.

You take pride in your ability to face threats head on. At your best, people feel protected by you. Unabashed confidence is one of your biggest strengths.

Say it how it is, and don’t be afraid to speak your mind. These are your mottos. It is hard for you not to be blatantly honest when you perceive something isn’t right.

You can’t stand being disrespected or insulted and will not let incoming threats or injustice go unnoticed. No one takes advantage of you or what you love. It annoys you when people cross your boundaries.

Fighting and standing up against injustice and unfairness is the only way to gain freedom from injustice truly. An offensive and direct stance gets results way faster than trying to dance around an issue.

People should know better and not mess with you.

You have no problem accepting people might not like you when you confront them. It doesn’t matter nearly as much as making things right… if they don’t want your response, they should not have done what they did to make you angry.

But… overuse of your strength has become your greatest weakness.

There are times, however, when you feel you have overreacted. Looking back at your behavior makes you feel embarrassed and often guilty.

You wish you could have avoided saying this or doing that. Apologies are not enough anymore.

Why can’t you just let things go more quickly? Being honest and right comes at a price, and you often sacrifice the comfort of the moment in pursuit of correcting a perceived wrong. Such behavior usually leaves friends and family members feeling exposed and uncomfortable.

Prioritizing “being right” over making people feel comfortable ends up isolating you.

People have told you they think you are cruel and hard to be around, especially when you are angry. Your anger causes people to feel like they are walking on eggshells around you. People that once felt protected by you now feel threatened by your boldness and lack of restraint and filters.

Justified, yet disproportionate in your response.

Many times, angry reactions don’t always garner sympathy because the original trigger gets dwarfed by the angry person’s behavior with an anger issue.

For example, we can all agree that being cheated on would be infuriating and very painful. But if a person ends up killing their spouse or permanently injuring them in a fit of rage after discovering they have cheated, who would get the societal label of having been worse off?

When you get angry, you feel justified 100% of the time.

If anyone heard you out, most reasonable people would agree that whatever made you angry is upsetting. However, your reactions to incoming offenses inevitably make you lose the “moral high ground” of the situation.

In other words, you often lose the sympathy you deserve and end up vilified because your reaction was disproportionate to the offense. It makes you even angrier to know that now you end up apologizing for hurting someone after “they started it” by doing something that upset you in the first place!

The truth is, though… you know in your core that some things you did in reaction to an incoming offense went over the line. When you reacted and ended up saying or doing things too embarrassing to acknowledge publicly, you could not fully think. You are afraid that you are losing control of your reactions, and you are well aware of the cost it could have if you reacted in the wrong place at the wrong time.

You are afraid you might lose it in a situation that will get you in real trouble. Deep down, you know you could handle your anger better.

Therapy helps you reclaim your control over anger.

We want you to use your anger to your benefit when it is needed. Anger is a powerful tool that is required to make the world a better place. Like fire, it works best when contained and focused (like on a boiler, a fireplace, or a rocket engine).

Anger is not being used to your benefit if it ends up isolating you, getting you in trouble with the law, or breaking your relationships.

Therapy provides an empathic and supporting relationship and uses traditional anger management programs, cognitive-behavioral therapy, and somatic (body) grounding techniques. These approaches help you learn how to harness your anger so you can use it productively and assertively.

Anger is often used as a “shield” emotion to cover up more vulnerable emotions. Therefore, expect to dive deeper into possible underlying feelings of jealousy, shame, guilt, envy, anxiety, and depression. We might also invoke the use of EMDR trauma-related treatment if it is deemed necessary.

Anger is manageable.

It’s time to lengthen that short fuse, release some pressure from the cooker, and appease those aggressive urges.

We can help with the process.

If you are ready to improve your relationship with anger, please call (917) 268-9213 today.