What is Anger Management?
The experience of anger is normal. However, for some people, their anger is excessive in frequency and duration and is disproportionate to the event or person who may have triggered it.
For these people, anger can lead to highly negative outcomes and impact on their relationships, their work, their self-esteem, and can sometimes lead to aggression and violence.
Problems with anger can be a life-long pattern or something that has developed in response to difficult life experiences.
In general, anger is an emotion that can range from irritation and frustration to annoyance, fury, and rage. Anger is typically experienced when we perceive a threat or that someone has done something to harm or shame us.
Anger and frustration can also occur when we are unable to achieve our goals (eg being delayed in traffic on the way home) or if a situation arises that is not compatible with our worldviews, value, or sense of fairness.
Anger itself is not necessarily a problem unless it occurs excessively in our lives. In contrast, it is how we deal with anger that can be a problem and if it is expressed as aggression.
Psychologist Treatments For Anger Management
Anger management refers to the reduction of disruptive, excessive anger arousal and expression. It aims to teach people to react to the stressors of life with minimal and infrequent anger, and when it is experienced, to express the anger appropriately.
This is accomplished by increasing a person’s knowledge of anger, how they learnt to be angry, their triggers, their unhelpful beliefs, resentments, and patterns of thinking that may fuel their anger.
It also includes learning and practicing ways of decreasing angry reactions and developing more effective responses and appropriate behaviours.
Managing anger or other emotions is often part of counseling.
Personalized Anger Management Plans
Personalized Anger Management programs can also be developed which include:
- Understanding anger and increase insight and awareness of our patterns of anger
- Understanding the difference between anger (our emotion) and aggression (our action)
- Identifying key triggers that escalate anger
- Exploring how our thinking, attitudes, and beliefs influence anger and aggression
- Learning more effective behaviours and actions to use when angry
- Developing physical relaxation techniques and other methods to manage stress levels
- Developing and practicing more appropriate ways to express anger and other emotions