Coping with Anger

Part of coping with anger requires recognising that there are times when anger is appropriate and ‘normal’ as well as times when anger is simply an outburst that bears little relevance to the situation in which it arises.

Everybody gets angry at times in their lives but anger becomes a problem when it is ‘inappropriate’ or becomes destructive to other people or indeed to yourself.

Anger that is pointed ‘outwards’ towards other people is the least damaging to your own psychological health, but can be pretty unpleasant when those people are on the receiving end of it.

Of course, you’ve only got to meet somebody who is not prepared to accept you ‘venting’ your anger on them to expose yourself to a whole range of associated problems, such as getting ‘punched’ or having a loved-one leave you.

Un-expressed, or bottled-up anger, is a lot less harmful to those in or around your life, but is pretty harmful to you, even more so if your bottled-up anger is also inappropriate! For example, you might get angry with yourself for not ‘being perfect’ and feel that making the smallest of errors means that you are justified in being angry with yourself.

In this particular case the justification for being angry is based on the distorted belief that you MUST be faultless or perfect.

Our focus in coping with anger problems is by helping people to modify their core limiting belief systems so that anger is not under-pinned by beliefs that make it justified.

Coping with Anger – Key Ideas

If you want to be better at coping with anger then there are a number of key points worth understanding:

• Anger is a normal human reaction to a range of events and in many cases is reasonable and understandable
• It is not possible, or sensible, to desire a life that is 100% free of any kind of anger
• Anger is often built upon the idea that ‘life is not fair’ or that you have not been ‘treated with fairness’
• Sometime people experience anger when they are trying to ‘control’ external events or other peoples feelings
• Many people believe that ‘events’ make them angry, but this is not true – we can choose how to respond
• Coping with anger is most effective when dealt with at the core, fundamental level (our beliefs)

Coping with Anger By Controlling Your Responses

The most effective and sustainable way of coping with anger is by learning how to manage your thinking processes more effectively. The fact is that we ‘create’ the angry ‘response’ through cognitive, or ‘thinking’, processes based on what we believe is happening, or about to happen ‘to us’.

So one of the key concepts for coping with anger is recognising that YOU are the architect of this feeling – its NOT simply happening to you, you creating it in the first place. This is GOOD news because you can also learn how to un-create it (or simply not create it in the first place).

Coping with Anger Using CBT

We do not know of any better method of coping with anger than by following our course of cognitive behavioural therapy which provides a more effective way of dealing with ‘mental health problems’ that is not based on the medico-psychiatric-model of ‘disorders’ and ‘illnesses’.

There is plenty of research indicating that ‘labeling’ people as ‘mentally ill’ not only causes additional problems, but also leads people to feeling ‘powerless’ when it comes to solving the problems associated with anger.

Read our post ‘psychiatric diagnosis, fact or fiction‘ to find out more.

Transform Your Thinking & Start Coping with Anger

If you’re committed to coping with anger problems then we highly recommend following our Advanced Tranceformental CBT programme with Paul.

Tranceformental CBT is available as Online Therapy if required

The Tranceformental programme is a highly successful & pragmatic psychological training course, run over 10 sessions, that will teach you everything you need to know to understand your problem, identify how unhelpful thinking and limiting beliefs might be reinforcing the issue, and then show you how to make any changes to your unhelpful thinking styles or maladaptive safety behaviours that you may have developed as part of your coping strategies.

Our Tranceformental CBT programme is an empirically supported approach used by mental health practitioners around the World.

Free Initial Consultations to Discuss Coping with Anger

We offer all prospective clients an initial consultation to discuss your mental health problems prior to commencing any counselling.

The consultation is free and lasts around 50 minutes.

During this consultation we will discuss the various types of psychological therapy that are available to you and make a considered recommendation based on your individual personal circumstances.

Initial consultations are also available as part of our online counselling service.

At Tranceform Psychology we emphasise the importance of the therapy relationship in helping people to bring about effective change, so its important to be able to ‘meet’ to discuss our change programmes BEFORE proceeding.

Our policy is to help people make a fully balanced & considered decision about undertaking mental health work with us, including both the financial and personal implications.