What is Anger Management Therapy?
Anger is a natural, normal emotion that can even be healthy. Everyone gets angry sometimes, and anger can be useful in helping to enact positive change and encourage better communication, when it is expressed appropriately. However, for some people, managing anger is incredibly difficult. They may find themselves feeling angry very often, very intensely. This can lead to problems with your relationships, your health, and your overall quality of life.
Anger management therapy helps you to manage your anger by identifying the triggers that set you off and learning how to cope with them in a more effective manner. The goal of anger management therapy is to assist you in improving your self-control, learning how to express your feelings in a healthy manner, and minimizing situations that can evoke anger.
Therapy Techniques We Use
We provide both traditional counseling and Neurofeedback to treat anger management issues. Due to the fact that anger can have severe negative effects on both your life and that of others, it’s important to seek out treatment as soon as possible.
- Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT) – CBT helps you to understand what triggers your anger, learn coping skills, and change how you behave when angry, so that you are both calmer and more in control.
- Family Therapy – In circumstances where anger is often directed at family members, family therapy works to help you come together in order to resolve issues and improve communication.
- Psychodynamic Therapy – This helps you uncover the psychological roots of your anger so that you can develop healthy coping patterns.
- Neurofeedback Therapy – This targets the automatic responses in your brain that gradually retrains your brain and alters your brain pathways so that you can replace unhealthy patterns with healthier ones so that you can manage your anger in a productive manner.
What Anger Management Therapy Can Help With
If you feel as though you are constantly angry or that anger dominates your life, anger management therapy can help you figure out why you are so angry all the time as well as how to control it. Anger in and of itself is neither good nor bad, and is indeed an important emotion for our survival. However, if you have anger issues, your judgment is likely impaired, the way people see you has been impacted in a negative way, and you may encounter problems achieving success, due to the fact that anger can harm yourself and others when it is not expressed appropriately.
Anger management can be as serious a problem as depression and anxiety disorders, but many people either don’t see it that way, do not think they have anger issues, or do not realize that it’s possible to obtain anger management therapy. Recognizing uncontrolled anger and the symptoms that can arise as a result of it is crucial, in order to prevent anger from causing serious consequences, physical and mental, to yourself and/or to other people.
Common symptoms associated with uncontrolled anger include:
- Anger/rage
- Feeling constantly on edge/getting irritated at the slightest provocation
- Negative thoughts
- Throwing things
- Attacking people
- Shouting and arguing
- Muscle tension
- Tight chest
- High blood pressure
- Feeling hot and sweaty
- Difficulty concentrating
- Depression
- Anxiety
- Digestive issues
Uncontrolled anger can have serious consequences for your mental and physical health, your career, and your relationships. It can affect your performance, deplete your energy, and cause people to not feel comfortable or safe around you. Anger management therapy helps you to recognize the problem, monitor your behavior, learn how to feel anger without acting on it, and diffuse it by uncovering the underlying emotions hiding behind the anger, such as past traumas.
Benefits and Effectiveness of Anger Management Therapy
Anger management therapy can help you learn to deal with your anger in a healthy way. There are many benefits to anger management therapy, such as:
- Identifying what situations trigger your anger so that you can learn to manage your reactions to them or avoid them.
- Changing unhealthy thought patterns that charge your anger.
- Developing coping skills so that you can cope with the anger triggers, regulate your emotions, and control how you act in situations that make you angry.
- Learning relaxation techniques that can help you to calm down and relax both your body and your mind when you get angry.
- Solving problems that result in repeated exposure to triggers or situations by finding solutions or alternatives.
- Improving communication skills so that you can express yourself in a healthy and respectful manner without aggression.
Anger management therapies such as CBT and Neurofeedback, among others, have been shown to be very effective in helping people express their emotions in a more beneficial way and lessen how much they react angrily to situations.
Get Started Today
Ogden Psychological Services has trained, board-certified professionals who specialize in anger management therapy. If you’re arguing a lot, threatening others, getting violent, breaking things, or getting arrested due to incidents that occur from your anger, anger management therapy can help you. Contact us today to schedule an assessment and let us help you regulate your emotions and maintain control, so that your anger doesn’t impact your relationships, health, or career.