Anger Management
Do You Have Trouble Controlling Your Emotions?
Are you struggling with outbursts of emotion and high levels of reactivity?
Do you find yourself lashing out at the people you care most about?
Have your loved ones told you that you might have anger management issues, but you’re not sure if you believe them?
Maybe anger is not a word that you readily identify with—when you think of anger, you think of violence and other extreme behaviors that don’t align with who you are. Nonetheless, you may struggle to regulate your emotions and reduce feelings of overwhelm. Perhaps you feel keyed up, on edge, and easily stressed out. Every little thing gets under your skin, and you find yourself snapping at others and reacting in ways that you didn’t intend.
For the first time, you may be thinking of seeing a therapist who treats anger management issues.
Mismanaged Anger Can Negatively Impact Your Sense Of Self
Anger can be disempowering. It can overtake you to the point where it dictates your actions and leads you to say things that you quickly regret. As a result, anger often leads to shame and embarrassment. You might end up isolating from others so that you don’t have to address what you’ve said and done.
The truth is that anger doesn’t have to be destructive. There are healthy and constructive ways of harnessing your anger—it isn’t an inherently “bad” emotion. The key is understanding what anger is trying to tell you and using it as a reminder to access self-care. At Rocky Mountain Counseling Collective, our goal is to help you recognize anger when it emerges and have tools readily available for navigating your emotions.
Contrary To Popular Belief, Anger Is Not A Character Flaw
Our society often demonizes anger, but in reality, there’s nothing wrong with feeling angry. It’s a normal human emotion that all of us experience from time to time. After all, there’s no such thing as a bad emotion. It’s the behaviors connected to the emotion that can be problematic, harmful, and disruptive to our lives and our goals.
It is important to understand anger—and any emotion, for that matter—in a multifaceted manner. All too often, we tend to think of happiness, sadness, and anger as the only emotions. If we expand our emotional vocabulary, we can begin to understand ourselves as complex emotional beings with different needs, goals, and values.
Gender-Specific Expectations About Anger Can Impose Unhealthy Limits On Us
Our society is full of unhealthy gender dynamics around anger. Generally, anger is seen as a male phenomenon—men are allowed to express anger but not sadness. Women, on the other hand, are expected to express sadness but not anger. These social pressures can be limiting and confining. They can prevent people from embracing the full range of their emotions.
There is great wisdom in learning to accept all of our emotions and focusing on responding to them in healthier ways. Doing so can help us challenge the societal limits that our culture imposes on us and expand our emotional intelligence in the process.
Therapy Can Equip You With Evidence-Based Anger Management Skills
Mismanaged anger never comes out of nowhere. There are often deeper underlying reasons for it. Sometimes it stems from unresolved trauma and unhealed emotional wounds from the past. Other times anger was role-modeled by parents or caregivers as a default response to stress. Therapy can begin the process of uncovering the root causes of anger and the level of overwhelm that leads to mismanaged anger.
The combination of understanding the root causes, along with learning the right tools for managing anger, can create a highly effective therapeutic process. Once you realize why anger arises and how it impacts you, you can recognize it in real time and respond to it more thoughtfully and intentionally.
This is a highly individualized process, since everyone responds to anger differently. For some, anger results in emotional shutdown; for others, it leads to lashing out. Our therapists will help you develop coping skills that are uniquely tailored to your challenges.
Our Approach To Anger Management Therapy
Rocky Mountain Counseling Collective utilizes a wide variety of evidence-based treatment methods to help clients work through their anger and improve their emotional regulation. Some of these include:
Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT)—This approach can help you improve your anger management skills by understanding the intersection between how you think, feel, and act. When you learn to manage the thoughts and feelings that fuel your anger, you can more easily respond to your emotions in a way that’s in line with your values.
Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT)—At its core, ACT is all about accepting the emotional experience of anger and committing to changing what’s in your control. Oftentimes, this means exploring your values. For instance, let’s say that you want to improve your relationship with your partner, but anger prevents you from doing so. ACT can help you prioritize what you value (i.e., the health of your relationship) so that your anger doesn’t get in the way.
Dialectical Behavioral Therapy (DBT)—This approach uses a wide range of mindfulness skills and emotional regulation techniques to help you both tolerate and reduce feelings of anger. Instead of reacting to stressful situations in angry and impulsive ways, you’ll learn to respond thoughtfully, mindfully, and intentionally.
Regardless of which approach serves you best, our therapists are confident that we can give you the skills to manage your anger more effectively. After all, emotional regulation is a skill that you can learn. Think about the first time you learned to ride a bike or learn a new language—at first it felt awkward and cumbersome, but with the right practice and encouragement, it quickly became second nature. Our hope is that you will experience the same thing in regard to anger management.
You May Have Some Questions About Anger Management Therapy…
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It isn’t possible—or even healthy—to live without anger, so that’s not the goal of therapy. Remember that anger is actually a “good” emotion, since it’s your body’s way of communicating that something isn’t right. Therapy can help you befriend your anger so that you can harness it in positive ways, enabling you to be more open, honest, and vulnerable with those you love, including yourself.
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Therapy is first and foremost a relationship. It isn’t something that you can “fail” at, since the relationship between therapist and client is different for everyone. Your therapist will ensure that a strong therapeutic alliance is established prior to going deeper into difficult experiences. They will be there to support you in skill acquisition so that you can achieve your goals.
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Each client’s needs and goals are unique, so there is no universal timetable for the healing process. We encourage you to stay in therapy for as long as you find it useful. The good news is that therapy doesn’t have to be long-term—the anger management skills we teach are easily learnable and applicable to your life.
Your Emotions Do Not Have To Control You
With the right therapeutic alliance and a wide variety of evidence-based approaches, you can learn real-life skills for managing your anger. To learn more about how Rocky Mountain Counseling Collective can help you overcome anger management issues, you can call 720-252-0345 or email ustoday to schedule a free 30-minute consultation.
