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Pauline Carey Blog

Read our blog to hear from our experienced Surrey counsellor and trainer Pauline Carey as she provides counselling, training and corporate crisis management information.

17
Dec
2014

HOW TO MANAGE YOUR ANGER

December 17th, 2014 | by Pauline Carey | in |    0   

Ok – so your ANGER is a problem for you or others.  What can you do about it?

You’ve already made the first step – acknowledging there is a problem – great!  Now what?

Anger management is all about anticipating anger – thinking ahead – and having a plan so when anger hits, you don’t end up doing or saying stuff you’ll regret later.

Here are some Do’s and Don’ts to help you anticipate your anger and create plans to avoid or reduce it:

ANGER MANAGEMENT DON’TS:

  • Don’t talk yourself up (say stuff to yourself that makes you more angry, like “he does this just to bug me, she’s treating me like dirt, I don’t have to take this")
  • Drink alcohol or use drugs when angry unless these calm you down
  • Drive while really angry

ANGER MANAGEMENT DO’S:

  1. Take a deep breath or two before acting
  2. Feel the feeling, choose the action
  3. Anticipate being angry, and plan how you would like to handle it better – having a plan makes it much more likely that you will manage your anger when it does get triggered
  4. Take a time out – walk away till you calm down- rather than do or say something that will make things worse
  5. Talk yourself down – think “he probably didn’t mean to upset me, she’s probably just having a bad day, this isn’t such a big deal”.
  6. Soothe yourself – go for a walk, take some quiet time to calm down
  7. If you need to do something about the situation, take action only when you’ve had time to think about it clearly.
  8. Then choose words or action that are true for you but which don’t feed your anger – words that are more likely to solve the problem that triggered your anger in the first place.

These suggestions are really Anger Management First Aid – immediate steps you can try to reduce your problem anger.  If this is too difficult to do, or doesn’t fully solve the problem, you may want to check out other areas of your life which may be feeding your anger – a difficult relationship, a stressful job, communication breakdown, past trauma.  Self-help is a great place to start, and may be all you need to resolve the problem.  Watch this blog for more on anger management.  You could also consider joining an anger management group or getting individual counselling.