Anger Management – self-help strategies

In the last post, I outlined some ideas about why some of people suffer from anger issues (if you missed it, just click here to catch up). In this post I will talk about ways in which you can manage your anger.

I am going to focus on Do-able strategies you can be successful with without the help of a therapist. If you want to tackle the route cause of the anger which may be buried somewhere within your childhood, I would recommend you work with a therapist to support and guide you in this process – it’s what they spend years of their life training to do.

 Step 1 – Stock take your anger.
It’s difficult to sort any problem out on your own unless you know the extent of it. If you were in financial trouble and wanted to get yourself out of debt, doing an audit of your spending would be a good idea. What are you spending your money on? Where can you cut down on spending? How much do you owe in total? The same holds true for anger. Keep a daily anger journal. Focus on the following things:

• Who is stimulating angry feelings in you?
• What situations cause you to feel angry?
• What other things trigger anger for you?
• What thoughts are going through your head when you feel angry?
• What physical sensations in your body do you feel (e.g., chest feels tight, headache arrives)?
• What do you do when you feel angry?

Step 2 – Analyse your journal for patterns.
You are looking for common themes. If you know when you are likely to feel angry and can tell the signs of oncoming anger you can take steps to move around the problem. It’s like avoiding a hole in the road. If you know it’s coming up you can change lanes to avoid it or take another road all together.

Step 3 – Break the anger down into phases.
Chances are your anger will involve different components all of which you will have written about in your journal. These components are as follows:

• Cognitive – your thoughts
• Physiological – how your body feels
• Affective – the emotions you feel
• Behavioural – what you do

You have the power to catch the anger when you notice any of these components come into play. These components usually go in a predictable order too. We are going to go back to Johnny from part 1 of this post. Johnny can see the following pattern:

Johnny sees others not measuring up to his unrealistic expectations -> Johnny feels the adrenaline pumping in his body and his muscles feel tight – > his anger starts to rise -> Johnny starts shouting and pointing aggressively

Step 4 – break the sequence.
This is the tough part! Make a choice now. Do you want to sort your anger out or don’t you? Don’t mince – commit! Think about what it’s costing you. Do you want to keep paying or do you want to change? If you truly want to change you can hijack the negative pattern at any of the stages:

• Cognitive – Are your thoughts about what should happen realistic. Be aware of the “Parent” words you may use in your head. “should”, “must”, “have to” are all words you have probably received as Parent messages from your caregivers as you grew up. The reality is that there is no one way of being or doing things as long as you hit your target. If Jenny at the office chooses to leave her work to the last minute and then furiously type it up at the end of the day, that’s ok as long as she gets it done. Also remember that your thoughts are just thoughts. They have no power. It’s what you do that counts not what you think. Thank your mind for the thoughts that have come into your head and decide to behave in a calm way. I discuss this as a technique in much more detail in my post on anxiety you can read by clicking here.

   

• Physiological/affective – Your body and your emotions can both be soothed using similar techniques. It’s a bit of a cliché but it really is about counting to ten! If you have time you can use a grounding technique (I blogged about it here) to bring yourself under control and back to the here and now. If you don’t have time and you feel the red mist rising then breathe, count to ten slowly and remember that long term anger is bad for you and you don’t want to do it that way anymore.

   

• Behavioural – Do it differently. You feel like kicking off but it’s getting you nowhere and causing you problems. If you can, explain to the other party that you are feeling angry and you need to take yourself away to calm down then do it. Go for a walk, refocus, hit a pillow or other (non-living) soft object to get the energy out or do something else that is going to allow you to calm down. If you can’t get away then a great way of dealing with it is to express it in a straight way without shouting or screaming.  Tell the other person how you feel using action/feeling statements. Johnny might say to his boss “when you give me work to complete at the last minute I feel angry so I would like you to build reasonable deadlines into your requests”. That might sound a pretty challenging statement but it’s miles better than “bloody hell, you want me to get this done by tomorrow? Are you joking you idiot?!!” and less likely to get you sacked. To read about emotional literacy you can read my book review of Claude Steiner’s book here and Claude Steiner’s excellent free book here.

   

Easy eh? Well, no it’s not – but it’s all doable if you commit to it. You are not going to get it right all the time. There will be some techniques you like better than others. You may want to use a combination of them all and go with the flow using the technique that seems most appropriate at the time. Understand though that you can change. You have the power. Good luck, and if there’s any way I can help, just get in touch. J

What do you think of the techniques mentioned here? Do you use any of them now? Are you unsure about how to do it? Ask your questions or make a comment in the box below.

Image: Stefano Valle / FreeDigitalPhotos.net

Managing workplace stress – How “Be Strong” are you?

This is a guest post written by Geraldine Osowska, a therapist and counsellor working in Manchester and Stockport who specialises in stress, depression and childhood trauma.    

Typically, we all know what our particular employment role entails: we receive a job description, a person specification and if we’re lucky we’re given a courteous appraisal twice yearly. What’s less clear when we begin our working life is how our reactions to: workload, office politics, deadlines, conflicts etc, will manifest. These factors contribute hugely to workplace stress. However, with a spoonful of self-awareness managing work related issues and preventing workplace stress can become part of your daily routine.
    

How can self-awareness be achieved?
One way to increase your self-awareness and survive workplace stress is to identify your behavioural type – exciting! Most people usually identify primarily with one of the following 5 behavioural patterns:

• Be Strong   
• Be Perfect
• Please Others
• Try Hard
• Hurry Up
   

Becoming aware of your behavioural type can give you a valuable insight into how you’re likely to react to workplace stress; allowing you to build on your strengths and tend to your areas of vulnerability. Both empowering and liberating, this level of awareness can help you thrive at work and develop some positive coping strategies to workplace stress while avoiding the dreaded burn-out!
   

It’s also pleasurably entertaining to ponder which behavioural patterns your colleagues exhibit, but more importantly this insight can help us decide how best to approach and resolve any difficulties with tricky work mates, and let’s be honest, we’ve all experienced them.
 

Interested? I hope you are, because over the next 5 weeks I’m going help you figure out your behavioural type, and I’ll begin by introducing you to Be Strong.
    

Be Strong
Be Strong-ers believe that in order for them to feel ok, they have to stay strong. This means everything from their posture, to the way they talk to their non-verbal behaviour will be about emitting strength and avoiding appearing vulnerable.
    

How to spot a Be Strong 
Your average Be Strong will avoid showing emotions; perhaps believing them to be weak, unhelpful and at worst thinking no-one really cares about how they’re feeling. When talking they’ll distance themselves from their emotions; instead of saying “I’m having a tough day.” they’ll say “It’s a tough day”, instead of “I’m sad about losing the contract.”, “It’s sad about the contract.” Although amicable, the Be Strong may keep their distance from colleagues; avoiding anything they deem too intimate, such as attending work socials or talking about their personal life.
    

The tone of their voice will have developed a monotonous flow which makes it damn difficult to tell what’s going on for them inside. Unsurprisingly their facial expressions can often appear be neutral making them even more difficult to read. But look closely and the Be Strong may have acquired a clenched or fixed jaw to complement their internal belief which is: grit your teeth and get on with it!
    

A rigid posture and crossed arms or legs can also be a clue to recognising a Be Strong. You see, they don’t like giving away any clues as to how they’re feeling and will subconsciously seek to mask their inner workings.
    

Be Strong – the good and the bad   

Anger Management – The Theory

Anger as an emotion has had a great deal of bad press through the years. It’s one of those emotions that people shy away from and never really use to describe anyone in a positive light. Anger is, however, just another emotion. It can be very useful to us in certain circumstances. We all know and have had very memorable experiences of the “fight or flight” response that kicks in when we are under threat. Anger in those circumstances can really save our bacon. Anger also gives us the energy to change things when we are just not happy. We might need that rush of adrenaline and that “sod this, I’m going to sort it out!” kick up the backside to pull us out of unproductive situations. Why then if anger is so good, do we need anger management methods?

Like all things, when you have too much of something it can make you sick. Too much anger can……

• destroy relationships
• cause us to be judgmental and intolerant of others
• get us into conflict, verbal and physical, with others
• react in an out of proportion manner to situations
• compromise our immune system which leads to us getting poorly more often and for longer
• give us a banging headache
• Result in us withdrawing from others and maybe physically harming ourselves

Having taught in schools for many years I’ve seen a lot of angry boys. And I mean a lot! I have also taught girls who have incredible difficulty managing their anger and can out anger any lad with ease. Anger is not by any means limited to males but there is no doubt in my mind that it is one of the safest emotions to express as a male around other people. I was almost tempted to write “around other males” in the last sentence but unfortunately females are complicitous in the promotion of anger in males too. My experience working with eleven to sixteen year olds is that an angry boy is seen as acceptable and kind of cool in a scary way and an angry girl is seen as slightly mad!

This gives a first clue as to where all of this anger comes from and brings us on to the Transactional Analysis concept of racket feelings.

Ian Stewart and Vann Joines book “TA Today” has a very clear definition of what a racket feeling is, they define it as;

“A familiar emotion, learned and encouraged in childhood, experienced in many different stress situations, and maladaptive as an adult means of problem solving”. (page209)

So how do certain emotions get encouraged in childhood? Let’s take little Johnny (could be little Jane too). When Johnny falls over at the age of five he cries. His mum tells him to pick himself up and carry on paying little attention. When he feels scared of going to school for the first time he gets told to “pull himself together” and not be so silly. When he plays happily with his brother he is largely ignored by his parents. When he kicks off, screams and shouts and starts throwing his toys around the room he suddenly gets a lot of attention. Multiply this by the 1825 days little Johnny has had these indirect messages from his parents and I’m sure you begin to see my point. Angry = attention.

With a racket feeling in place, it becomes difficult for us to access the authentic feeling we are really having. Back to Johnny (bless him). As an adult when Johnny feels scared he is going to be made redundant from his job he can’t do scared very well because he has not had much practise. It’s much easier to feel angry, so without even thinking about it that’s where he goes emotionally. Result = he gives his boss a mouthful and gets the sack.

When he feels sad that his relationship has broken down he’s not sure how to do sad either so he easily switches to anger. Result = he feels furious at the situation and punches a wall, breaking his hand in the process.

But how do we know whether a feeling is a racket or genuine? As I said at the beginning of my post, anger can be useful and is just as valid as any other emotion, so when does Johnny know when his anger is a racket and when it’s authentic? Here’s some ways you can tell:

• Racket feelings come from a not OK place
• Racket feelings don’t solve the problem
• Racket feelings come from the Child ego state
• Racket feelings involve a discount

“All very interesting,” I hear you say, “but how do I sort out my anger issues?”  Read my self help plan here and get your life back.

Next Page »