 This episode was prerecorded as part of a live continuing education webinar. On-demand CEUs are still available for this presentation through all CEUs. Register at allceus.com slash counselor toolbox. Good morning, everybody, and welcome to our presentation on anger management. As you can see, this is the first of two parts. Over the next 45 minutes or so, we're going to explore the function of anger, identify the costs and benefits of anger, and identify anger triggers, such as rejection and isolation, failure, loss of control, and the unknown. Now, if you've participated in some of my courses before on anxiety, stress, or anger, you'll know that those are some of our basic threat triggers, whether it triggers anger or fear. It triggers those things trigger the fight or flight response. So anger is half of the fight or flight response. Based on prior learning, the brain interprets a threat to person, property, or self-concept. So what does that mean? It means it may not be something that is going to kill you. It may be something that's going to take away your property, make you lose money, or it may be something that makes you feel bad about yourself. Either way, it triggers that fight or flight reaction. It triggers that protection. So norepinephrine and adrenaline is secreted to prepare you to fight or flee. This is your excitatory neurotransmitter. It tells you to get up and go. Your heart rate, respiration increases. Your focus becomes very singular. Sometimes we call this tunnel vision. Sweating begins. There's all kinds of things that happen when you trigger that fight or flight response. You also may have the urge to lash out verbally or physically if you're in the fight phase. If you're in the flight phase, you're going to want to get out, or at the very least just kind of withdraw from the whole situation. The other thing to remember is when we're talking about anger, that fight or flight reaction kicks in, but there's also a lot of stuff in addition to anger that's probably going on, fear of rejection, fear of isolation, fear of the unknown. And all of those things make you want to protect yourself, which anger is very protective in some ways. So what are the costs? Well, you know, we know that anger is not necessarily something we want to nurture. But anger serves a purpose. When we feel angry, it tells us we need to do something. We need to fight. We need to flee. We need to do something. It's supposed to spur us on, not give us something to sit there and dwell on and hold on and nurture. So what are the costs? Socially, it pushes people away. Most people don't want to be hanging around with somebody who's angry all the time, which can increase isolation. And remember back to those basic threat triggers, isolation and rejection are one of the threat triggers that set off the fight or flight response. So if you're pushing people away and then you realize you're isolated, it can increase stress, which makes you more irritable, which makes you more likely to have an anger outburst, if you will. Anger intimidates people. Now, when I worked in my first job, it was for people who were on felony probation and parole. And you know, that sounded kind of ominous, but it really wasn't. Most of the people in there were really nice people who had made some mistakes, but there were a few who had developed their lifestyle around intimidation. So we had to have a lot of discussions about the difference between respect and intimidation because they had been raised to believe or they had grown to believe that the only way to get respect was if people feared you. So we talked about the difference between respect and intimidation. And if that is an issue for your clients, then it's going to be something that needs to be a salient point in treatment, helping them figure out how to earn people's respect through active listening, compromise, having their own thoughts, not backing down, not being a doormat, but being willing to be part of a team as opposed to intimidation and having everyone fear you. Anger also is perceived by children, which increases their anxiety. If you've ever been around kids when a parent starts to get upset, a lot of times kids start to become progressively anxious, aggravated. They start acting out a little bit. They get antsy. As the parent's anxiety goes up, a lot of times the children's acting out behaviors will also go up. This is protective. Kids have to have their parents. They can't just go in at four years old and open a bank account and get an apartment and survive. They can't do it. So children need to protect their parents. The only way they know how to protect their parents is by diverting attention, saying, don't pay attention to that. That's getting you upset. Pay attention to me over here. Ha, ha, ha. So it rubs off on children. And if someone is angry and irritable all the time, guess what's going to happen to the children in the environment? They're going to be angry and irritable or acting out a lot more because they don't know what to do with that feeling. Remember, too, that children are egocentric, which means when the parent gets upset, a lot of times they think it's something they did. They don't know what it is, but they're trying to do anything to get the parent to stop being angry. It's like, I'm sorry. I don't know what I did, but stop being angry. So children are internalizing when mom and dad or one or the other is constantly stressed out. Children are trying to figure out what they did, which can have a negative effect on their self-esteem. And most people that I work with, one of the reasons they come to treatment is because they want their children to be happier and they know that they're having a negative effect on them. Physically, anger uses a ton of energy. People with anger management issues often use a ton of energy for things that are not a major threat. If you get totally freaked out upset because somebody left the cap off the toothpaste, is that really a crisis? Is that something to get upset about? Now, when we drill down, remember I said it wasn't always just anger. Actually, it's usually not. So we drill down and go, why did that upset you so much? A lot of times it comes back to things like respect. I felt disrespected because I had asked the person to put the cap back on the toothpaste. So it wasn't the cap off the toothpaste. It was the disrespect that motivated the cap being left off the toothpaste. And then when we go back and really process the situation about how likely was it the person really thought that through and said, you know, I really want to be disrespectful today. So I'm going to leave the cap off the toothpaste. It may just be a habit they have. So we have to figure out how to help them break that habit. So was it worth all that energy? Another cost of anger is the physical injury to self and others. If you get into fights, obviously you're going to have a fair amount of physical injury. But you're also injuring yourself every time you get really, really upset, especially if you hold on to it and nurture that anger instead of doing something about it because you can cause ulcers, gastrointestinal problems, heart attack, high cholesterol. We know when that fight-or-flight response is activated, cortisol goes up. That's one of our fight-or-flight chemicals. Cortisol increases cholesterol. So if your cortisol is always up, then your cholesterol is going to be going up. We don't want that. We want to bring both of them down. One of the things that I learned when I did my dissertation back many, many years ago was heart disease is actually a work-related injury for a lot of emergency service personnel. It was deemed a work-related injury because the high levels of cortisol that they see in people who are law enforcement firefighters and paramedics often causes them to have high cholesterol, which leads to heart disease. So it actually became a documented work-related injury. Emotional costs of anger. If you're angry, you can't be happy. You can't be one or the other. Not to mention the fact that when you're angry, you're using a lot of energy, a lot of neurochemicals. So not only are you going to have to recover from that anger episode. You have the energy from the anger episode, but there's the recovery time. So you have a big chunk of time that's taken out of your day or your week that you can't feel happy. You're not doing things that are happiness or happiness provoking. It can also lead to depression. We know that the body interprets being on edge, being in that fight-or-flight situation for a long period of time. The body says, we can't do this. We can't run on high forever. So it dials down the sensitivity to stimuli, which is what a lot of us call depression because nothing makes us happy. Very little makes us angry because we don't have the energy for that either. The brain has dialed down the sensitivity to a lot of stimuli. It doesn't just say, we're not going to pay attention to the anger-provoking ones. It doesn't know how to do that. It says, you're just not going to pay attention to the little stuff. It has to be something really big to make you want to get out of bed. Environmental costs of anger, broken stuff. I had a friend when I was in college who got into a fight with his girlfriend, put his hand through his windshield. So not only did he have broken knuckles, but he also had a broken windshield. And did it do any good? No, it didn't fix anything. Actually, it made the situation worse. Some people, when they get upset, they throw stuff. They put their fists through walls. Any kind of breaking of things, whether it's personal body or stuff, is an environmental cost. Jail time. If you can't live in your house because you get arrested for an anger outburst because you beat somebody up or you were being disorderly or whatever the case may be, it has financial implications as well as environmental implications. Being angry all the time also reduces your options. Even if you live in a relatively big city, if you're going to try to go to work in the same field, people at different companies talk. Not necessarily HR person to HR person, but if you get a reputation of being difficult to work with, you're going to have a harder time getting hired places. It reduces your options with relationships. A lot of people don't want to be in a relationship with somebody who is angry and aggressive all the time. It may reduce your housing options. If you do end up with a battery charge or something like that, there are a lot of apartment complexes, especially rentals, that will not rent to people who have some sort of charge that involves bodily injury. And loss of employment. Anger episodes at work eventually can get you fired, but it also can reduce productivity because you have so much anger. You're spending so much energy being angry. You don't have energy to focus on the tasks at hand. Or if every little thing makes you fly off the handle so you've got to go take a walk, think about how much productivity you lose. You're also increasing your illness. Our immunity goes down when we're angry all the time because the body is devoting so much energy to protecting. Remember, anger is a protective mechanism. So the body thinks there's a threat and it goes, okay, we've got to protect against this urgent threat right now. We can't worry about protecting against the flu bug. So people get sick more often. They also have an increased incidence of Crohn's disease, headaches, those sorts of things, which cause people to call in sick to work so your productivity goes down again. And if you're in a situation and almost every work situation involves working with others, you know, maybe not in teams constantly, but a lot of times you've got to interface with your coworkers. And if nobody wants to work with you, and likewise you don't want to work with anybody, it's going to create certain problems as far as your productivity and just your general employability because your supervisor is going to have difficulty working you into the flow of things. So those are all the costs. You've probably thought about a lot of those, but what are the benefits? We know people don't do things unless there's a benefit to it. So what are the benefits? Well, as I said, it's protective. Anger pushes away or dominates a threat. It makes people go away. If people are just annoying you, if people are getting on your every last nerve for whatever reason and you bite their heads off, guess what? They go away. If somebody's trying to take something from you and you get angry, a lot of times it makes them go away. It can also make opportunities and all kinds of other stuff go away. But in the short term, it's making the threat go away or giving you power over it. Another benefit that people use anger for, if you will, is punishment or revenge to make other people feel the same pain. So if somebody does something that makes, that you feel is offensive, that upsets you and you get angry at them, sometimes the goal, whether you think about it this way or not, the goal is to punish them and make them feel bad so they won't do it again. Sometimes it's to save face or protect your reputation. If you make a big enough stink, if you make a big enough chaos drama sort of situation going on, a lot of times people won't look underneath to see what you really did. So you can save face. Sometimes, and a lot of times in this situation, this anger involves blaming other people. So I'm going to blame everybody else so nobody looks and sees what my part was in it. It hides emotional pain. When some people don't like feeling vulnerable, they don't like other people to see that they're anxious or depressed, so they'll get angry and push people away because they don't want anybody to know that they're vulnerable. It gets attention. If you start acting all kinds of crazy, you are going to get attention, which can alarm people. It makes a scene. Sometimes, not always, but sometimes, the people responding to your scene will do whatever it takes to get you pacified. This was a strategy that some of my clients would try in residential treatment. They would get upset if they had their smoke break canceled for one reason or another, and they would start making all kinds of noise and drama and getting everybody all riled up. In the hopes that we would give in and go, okay, we'll cut this next group short so you can have your smoke break. Ultimately, as clinicians, as parents, as supervisors, you don't want to set that principle where all they have to do is throw a tantrum and they get their own way. And it changes other people's behavior. We've kind of been talking about this when we go through. Anger as part of the fight or flight, if somebody is doing something that you perceive as a threat or disrespectful or whatever you want to call it, if you make life miserable enough for them, then a lot of times they won't do it again. Think about when you were a kid and you did something that really made one of your parents angry, and they were just furious. After that experience, they weren't not to do whatever that was again. It was like, okay, don't want to go there again. Whatever I got out of the behavior was not worth having to sit through the punishment. Again, it's a balancing act. Is the behavior, is whatever you're doing worth whatever punishment is going to come from the anger? And likewise with the anger, is this anger that you're using, is this energy that you're using worth the effort? Or is it going to result in some little minuscule change or happening that's really, you know, somewhat irrelevant to your life? The other thing I do want to point out before we move on to the next slide is a lot of times anger is a way of giving other people your power. If you let them make you angry, you are giving them your power. You have the ability to choose how you feel. You have the ability to choose to let it go, to say, that's not worth my effort. You have the ability to say, this person is trying to get under my skin and I'm not going to let them win. I am not going to get angry. You have the power to choose whether or not to get angry. Now there's going to be a momentary anger feeling, but you can let it go. You can say, not worth my effort. Okay, so where does anger come from? Society is less interdependent than it used to be 300 years ago, but we still need people. Back in the olden days, you know, if you watched Little House on the Prairie or something like that, if somebody's barn burned down, the whole community pitched in to help them build their barn again, because they needed the barn to protect the animals to feed their family and, you know, make the bills or whatever the case may be. So society was very interdependent back then. And they also had big families. Which meant you had to rely on everybody in your family. Now, we've got capitalism. You know, we can go out and buy a new barn. We can hire somebody to build a new barn for us, but in order to do that, we have to have money. Money has to come from somewhere. So you can't just be a hermit living out in the middle of the woods in Kentucky and be able to respond to a lot of the different threats. Now, every once in a while there's a rare person who can do that. But for most of us, we need other people. Research has also shown that one of the greatest buffers against stress or irritability, if you want to call it that, which is a trigger for anger. If you're already stressed, it's easier to get angry really fast. But one of the greatest buffers against stress is healthy social support. So if we feel isolated, if we feel rejected, then we're going to have a much more difficult time being prepared, being relaxed enough, being ready for stressors that come our way. Our society, in many cases, values power and success over compassion. So a lot of times things that make people angry, revolve around them losing power or not getting a promotion or not being seen as successful. In our society, we accept people based on not that I'm saying we should, but a lot of times we accept people based on how much power, how successful they are. We look up to them. We revere them. Instead of looking at the people and going how much compassion do you have for other people? How much do you reach out and care for other people? This teaches us how to value the same things in our self. So a lot of times people who have anger management problems have pretty low self-esteem because they're not very compassionate towards themselves. If they don't have all the power in the world and all the success, if they're not successful all the time, they're beating themselves up. So they, in many cases, are their own worst enemy. They're constantly rejecting themselves. And guess what? When you're constantly going to others to accept you and if you're sending out the message that I suck, a lot of other people aren't going to go oh, you're fine. I just really want to hang out with you all the time. So they're creating a self-fulfilling prophecy. Harsh or disengaged parenting can lead to anger feelings. Like I said earlier, children tend to be very egocentric. So if a parent is harsh, a harsh disciplinarian, especially a parent who tells children you're a bad boy and nitpicks everything and rarely compliments anything, the person is going to feel very inadequate, feel very rejected by the very people who are supposed to accept them. So it doesn't take a brain surgeon to figure out how that affects their self-esteem. Disengaged parenting on the other hand, the parent doesn't harshly discipline, the parent doesn't reward, the parent's just kind of not there. I mean, they're physically there a lot of times, but they're emotionally disengaged. Whatever the child does, you know, that's fine, whatever. Just let Johnny be. Johnny is desperate to get the parent's attention because he needs that kind of reinforcement, that kind of feedback that you're doing okay. You're a good kid. You're smart. You're, you know, intelligent. You're creative. Any kind of positive feedback that he can learn to hone in on. Primitives coping skills, a lot of people and I keep saying a lot because you can't say everybody all the time, especially when we're talking about psychology, but a lot of people with anger management issues don't have really good coping skills and or don't have a repertoire. They have one or two things they can use and if those things fail, they're screwed, which means they get angry. You know, maybe they know they're supposed to breathe and breathe and count to 10 and if that doesn't work, then all bets are off. So one of the things as clinicians we can do is to help people explore different coping skills like urge surfing, distraction and we're going to talk about a lot of those in the second part of what people can do to help deal with their anger, but we need to know where it comes from. And then low self-esteem and external validation. Like I said before if you feel like you're not worthy of friendship, if you feel like you are a failure, if you're constantly rejecting yourself, if you're constantly setting up situations so you're isolated, if you're constantly telling yourself you feel like a failure then those are three right there, easy notes of the threat triggers that we talked about earlier. If you've had experience with the threat triggers and you've gotten angry and somehow you've gotten a reward for that then guess what? The most common way you're going to respond to a threat trigger is through anger. This is a chart that I do with my groups when I do anger management groups. A lot of times there are common themes or common threads to what people find irritating or what triggers people's anger. And over the years I've kind of watered it down or condensed it if you will, to these six. When people feel disrespected it's a sign of that they're being rejected. It's a sign that they may have failed to gain the power and the respect that they want. And if they're disrespected they've lost control over another person's opinion of them if not over the other person to begin with. When people feel disappointed, a lot of times the disappointment that triggers anger is because somebody made a promise, somebody said they were going to do something and they didn't do it. So again, you've got rejection you've got loss of control because somebody said they were going to do something and you had faith, you trusted that they were going to do it and you had your trust betrayed. When people feel misunderstood and you know I have a teenager down here as an example, most teenagers go through a period, maybe a very long period where they don't feel like anybody gets them and if you've worked with clients in groups sometimes we have clients that say you know what, nobody understands what I've been through. That's that sense of isolation and when people feel isolated they get angry because they don't feel like anybody understands which intensifies their sense of helplessness. When people feel embarrassed if they get called out in the middle of an entire class or in the middle of a team meeting it can be very embarrassing so they may feel rejected other people are going to laugh at me now or they got called out for a reason so they may feel like they are unsuccessful like they failed in some way and they had no control over that situation all of a sudden they were front and center and somebody else had taken their power which takes us to powerless they get angry part of the grief process is anger and that revolves around the powerlessness situation when for example someone dies or someone gets a terminal illness you may feel very powerless because you can't fix it you can't change it and it sucks and we like to make things that suck go away you may not feel rejection or isolation but there is a very big sense of loss of control which can change how you perceive the world if there is all this stuff out here that I can't control maybe there is nothing I can control and jealousy or envy if you look at it in terms of jealousy being either angry at someone else for having something you don't have or angry at yourself because you don't have something that someone else has you can see where jealousy and envy can be interpreted as anger if you're jealous of somebody because of something they have that you don't that indicates maybe you feel like you're going to be rejected because you don't have the power the control the success the money that they have which indicates that maybe you place a lot of value on personal possessions on finances on being the prettiest on being power and success again so we want to look at what other things does the person value besides power and success it can also intensify people's sense of failure when they're looking at singers, movie stars politicians, even bankers who make more in one week than they make in an entire year they can feel envious and it can make them feel like a failure because how did they get to that point when I didn't one of the first things you can do in anger management one of the most helpful things for a lot of people is to remove the vulnerabilities vulnerabilities are those things that make you feel edgy to begin with they make it more likely that you're going to lash out in anger you're already cranky tired, depressed, something not happy things that can do this lack of sleep and I talk about this a lot sleep is important to regulate your circadian rhythms, to regulate your hormones to regulate your neurotransmitters so having a good sleep routine where you're getting quality sleep low blood sugar it's important to eat and keep your blood sugar up now whether you need to eat every three hours sometimes a day whatever it is you need to do to have your blood sugar be stable when your blood sugar goes down you can get the shakes some people when their blood sugar goes down they start getting increasingly anxious because they associate feeling shaky and feeling weak, feeling dizzy with the onset of a panic attack some people get irritable it's important to know how you react when your blood sugar is low too many stimulants just like you can get shaky and irritable with low blood sugar if you've had way too much coffee you can get irritable and snappy at people because you're really revved up and you're just ready to go imagine sitting at a stoplight and you've got the gas pedal floored and you're just waiting to go and as soon as the gas pedal turns red you fly out of the gate that's kind of what happens when you're on stimulants even too much coffee not even necessarily illegal stimulants or ADHD medication but just coffee too much of it monsters are really revving so it's important to realize you're kind of like that car and if somebody triggers you it's going to be like the car when the light turns green and you're just going to fly out of the chute and likely bite their head off and you're in pain most of us are not pleasant when we're sick or in pain to begin with so it's important to just understand that if you're sick give yourself a break don't push yourself too hard don't do things to make yourself irritable my daughter didn't sleep well the night before last and she was cranky she was having a hard time focusing and she kept trying to do what she normally do in a day on that day and I kept trying to point out to her that when you're sick, when you're in pain or in this case when you're really really tired you're not going to focus as well so you need to understand that you're just not going to get that much done and be compassionate with yourself otherwise it increases your irritability because you're getting angry with yourself which rubs off on getting angry with other people being mindless and letting little things build up and I say think laundry or weeds in our house I can do laundry on Sunday and I walk into the laundry room on Tuesday and all of a sudden clothes appeared out of nowhere and I don't know what happened our family goes through a lot of laundry but it builds up really fast and I didn't pay attention on Monday when I could have run a load so on Tuesday now I've suddenly got three loads weeds are the same way if you're a gardener you go out and you make your garden bed look pristine it's gorgeous you go out the next day it looks really good you just kind of quit paying attention to it for a couple of days by the end of the week you go out and you look at your garden and you're like where did all those weeds come from they just poof came out of nowhere mindlessness is the same way with anger little things irritate you the average person has 15 anger situations or irritant situations per day if you let those build up over a week and don't deal with them or let them go then you just you're constantly stacking the deck you're increasing the pressure and the pressure cooker depression sometimes when you're depressed you just want people to leave you alone which can result in lashing out at them and just telling them to go away too much estrogen or testosterone and I use both of these because both are true when estrogen goes up sometimes people can get more irritable when testosterone goes up and I want you to think about body builders who use steroids and increase their testosterone abnormally high and they have rage episodes our hormones are involved in the availability of our neurotransmitters not only the aggression neurotransmitters but also the calming ones so it's important to make sure that you're aware of your body cycles and what increases your irritability if it's something you eat or maybe after you have a really hard workout anything like that and finally anxiety and stress increase our likelihood of having an anger episode why because we're already stressed we're already perceiving a threat so if something else comes along it's more likely that it's going to be overwhelming so our response is to lash out think Bridezilla and most brides go through a period hopefully not the entire period but a period of this where it's getting close to the wedding they're trying to get the dresses finished the bridesmaid's dress is finished all the decorations, all the catering needs to be just so because they've been planning this since they were having tea parties in their bedroom at 6 years old there's a lot of stress there there's a lot of threat of failure a lot of threat of the unknown what's going to happen is it going to go perfectly so people that are in that kind of situation can tend to lash out more or just being spread too thin even if you're not planning a wedding if you've said yes to four different things and you're spread too thin then when somebody asks you to do something else they may not know about those other four things and they ask you to do something else you're like what you think I've got energy to spare they don't understand your reaction is protective because you just can't handle one more thing they don't realize that so it creates conflict so how do we address the anger a lot of clients want when they come into my office for depression anger management anxiety whatever they want it to go away so if I do their assessment and I send them out and I go you know what come back next week we'll start talking about how to work on this that's not real encouraging sometimes it gives them a little bit of hope but I like for people to walk out of my office every single day with at least something they can do to help them start working on the problem develop skills to tolerate distress and self soothe remember in the beginning I said sometimes we have this anger feeling that comes through and we immediately jump on it and just build it up and make a mountain out of a molehill and then realize later you know that wasn't really worth the effort one of the first things you can do is develop the stop mechanism as soon as you feel a feeling you don't have to act on it distract yourself for a minute two minutes fifteen minutes until you can think is this worth my energy if if so alright so let's harness that energy to do something instead of just feeling angry because feeling angry burns the energy but it doesn't fix anything so what can you do that's proactive to make the threat go away or change the situation in a way that you want it to some people when they get angry the first thing they need to do is journal they need to write it down and get it out of their head otherwise they're going to keep replaying that situation in their head over and over again and every time they play it in their head they get a little bit more irritated urge surfing if you think of an urge the urge to lash out the urge to scream the whatever your urges think of it the urge to wave and waves crest and they go away so when you initially feel something figure out where you are on the wave is it like way up at the top are we talking about a fifteen foot wave or are we talking about one of those little ripples and just ride it into the shore let it go away because you know the urges will dissipate after a little while unless you feed them develop mindful self-awareness and vulnerabilities check in with yourself when you get up in the morning before breakfast, before lunch and before dinner I use those because almost everybody eats breakfast, lunch and dinner and gets up and ideally before you go to bed so that's five times a day you're checking in with yourself and you're going how do I feel emotionally am I content, am I angry, am I irritable what's that about what am I thinking how am I thinking cognitively am I neutral or am I positive physically how am I feeling am I in pain, am I sick am I tired, am I exhausted socially have I got my social needs do I feel supported and you can stop there I mean there are other places you can go with it but those are the biggies let's figure out how you're feeling know your anger warning signs everybody's anger warning signs are a little bit different some people start breathing faster some people get red in the face whatever your anger warning signs are that there's inclination that you're getting ready to get really ticked off know that so you can remove yourself from the situation before you make a choice before you act on an urge without thinking about it know your anger triggers you know just trigger you try to avoid them if driving in heavy traffic is an anger trigger try to leave early maybe leave early go to the gym and then go to work from there or take back roads find some way to avoid that anger trigger if you know that's just gonna put you in a bad mood if there is you know you're going to a family reunion and Uncle Bob is just annoying as all get out but you have to go to the reunion plan ahead for how you're going to deal with Uncle Bob and or avoid Uncle Bob be aware if you're going into a situation that you know there are going to be some stressful things you need to kind of stack the deck make sure you're well rested make sure you're not hungry make sure you're not over caffeinated any vulnerabilities eliminated as possible so you have as much energy as possible to handle any threat that comes your way or any anger trigger and make a goals card think about when your anger is resolved how will things be different what's important to you what are three reasons that you want to work on your anger these are all things that you can have on your card and you can look at when you start getting angry to remind yourself okay getting angry about this particular thing is not worth sacrificing the goals that I'm trying to work toward and in general just eliminate as many anger triggers as possible and that's you know there are anger triggers everywhere I have this little idiosyncrasy we call it flat surface items in my house when flat surfaces start to swell it drives me absolutely bonkers in my house all I have to say is I'm seeing a lot of flat surface items going on and the kids get up and they start cleaning up because they know they've just stacked stuff everywhere so you may not be able to completely eliminate it but if you can address it without having to get angry and freak the freak out then it's going to go a long way towards improving relationships and eliminating the negatives associated with anger so emergency anger control first things first stop before you act stop and that's not always easy a lot of times it's not easy at all but it's a goal to work towards breathe slowly it doesn't have to be 10 breaths even one just breathe in and breathe out and go okay I got this which takes us to your confidence phrase and I usually say repeat it three times I've got this I can do it this isn't worth my energy whatever phrase you want to tell yourself that helps you sort of de-escalate so you can take time to figure out whether this is worth your energy take a walk it doesn't have to be a long one you can just go outside and walk around the front yard for a second which will help you get your breathing under control and then come back in while you're taking a walk or right afterwards identify your courses of action again I usually say three because one is not always going to work identify what courses of action you have and then choose the course of action that's most in alignment with your goals so if your goals are to have a better relationship with your kids more energy and less desire to drink alcohol then is getting angry over the situation getting you closer to those goals or further away likewise okay you get angry so you have response options is screaming at people likely to improve your relationship with your kids probably not that goes back to the intimidation versus respect is it going to give you more energy if you just like scream until you're blue in the face and you can't think no probably not is it going to reduce your desire to use drugs or alcohol well that's probably not but it depends on the person so screaming may not be the best course of action what's another course of action you can take initially this takes a little while to go through because you're actually having to think through and play the tape out and go if I do this what are the consequences once you develop a repertoire of three to five really good anger coping strategies it will be almost second nature another thing that I give clients is an addressing anger worksheet they fill it fill it out and obviously I have a space there instead of X but when X happened when something happened I felt and identified one or more of those six common threat triggers which triggered my fear of rejection or isolation failure loss of control or the unknown so we've got multiple layers of threat triggers and then we identify the thoughts that went through their head this happened and I felt disrespected which triggered my fear of rejection because I'm telling myself that if someone respected me and if they wanted to be in my life then they wouldn't be disrespectful so you can address the thoughts but you've got to get down you've got to kind of drill down and figure out what's underlying this threat why is this particular person perceiving this particular situation as threatening at this point in time for every negative thought develop a positive coping thought so on the last one I said if someone disrespects me it means they don't want to be in my life which means they're rejecting me so what's a positive coping thought what else may have led to the disrespect who else do you have in your life that is accepting of you maybe this person was being rejecting it happens so who else do you have in your life are you completely isolated from that particular person's opinion so important to you and finally how are you better off without that person in their current state in substance abuse treatment a lot of times we talk about sort of state dependent relationships and having to set boundaries and limits and go I love you but I can't have you in my life while you are engaging in these behaviors that are harmful to yourself and hurtful to me so sometimes it's better off to set a boundary that doesn't necessarily mean summarily rejecting someone it means saying I can't tolerate these behaviors and sometimes you may realize that that particular person is better off not being in your life right now until you can get your substance abuse or your anger issues under control and you can say alright maybe they're right maybe what they had to say they had some merit to it and it's pointing out that I need to do some work and once I get this under control maybe we can revisit the relationship if someone's thoughts revolve around failure they need to remind themselves about what they do well and what they can learn from their failures if you haven't failed you haven't pushed yourself outside your comfort zone failure is a part of learning what you learn whether it's failing in a relationship or failing at work or failing to learn a new dive or golf stroke or whatever it is what can you learn from it loss of control or the unknown and let me go back to failure sometimes failure just teaches you the things that you're probably not going to be good at unless you want to devote a whole lot of energy I bring up golf because my daddy used to take me golfing and what I did was more abuse and you know I could make a nice divot I could rarely hit the ball but I could make a really nice divot so I knew that golfing is not something that was going to come naturally to me so I had to make a decision about whether it was worth my effort to put myself out there and face humiliation regularly until I got the hang of it and I don't yeah or figure out that golf just isn't for me and there are some things we may say you know what not my strength and that's okay because there are other people that have that strength and they don't have some of yours loss of control and the unknown what we want to look at is if you go back to Bridezilla and she's all stressed about whether the wedding is going to go off perfect there's no way to know that so what's the most probable outcome with all the planning you've done what's the most probable outcome that it's going to go off nicely and any little hiccups are not even going to be noticed by everybody else that's highly likely so if you're getting upset because you're just expecting the bottom to fall out you want to look at how probable is it and you also want to look at how have you handled situations like this before maybe you're getting ready to go out and give a speech in front of 200 people that you've never met before and you're like I don't know if they're going to like it I may get heckled, I may get booed off the stage how have you handled situations like this before have you ever had a speaking engagement before and again looking at the probability how probable is it that you're going to get booed off the stage but then going back to how have you done it before going into a situation where you don't know how people are going to react and compare what can you do and if you haven't been in a situation like that before find someone who has and ask them how do you deal with it when you're going out to face a crowd of people that you have never met and you've got to give a speech and try to sound confident so anger is a protective response to a threat due to a whole myriad of factors people can become hypersensitive to threats everything can seem like it is a rejection of anger of your failure or the unknown you just don't know what is going to come around the next corner or you can be excited for let's see what's going to come around the next corner because I can handle anything and it's a perspective change going from anxious anticipation to anger and dread extended periods of anger and irritability cause the stress response system to dial down sensitivity and depression many people with anger management issues have internalized negative self-talk from childhood it was either directed at them people telling them that they were a failure they were never going to amount to be anything they were the black sheep or interpreted by them because they couldn't get positive feedback so they felt like everything they did just fell short of getting parental approval anger is often reinforced by immediate temporary relief victory or vindication people wouldn't keep getting angry and lashing out if it didn't work for them now whether it works to help them meet their long-term goals it rarely helps people meet their long-term goals but in the short term it makes the threat go away think about being coming face to face with a cotton mouth snake you're not really worried about the long-term you just want to get out from in front of the snake addressing anger involves helping people learn to stop and de-escalate or down-regulate you're not going to think clearly when you have tunnel vision and you're in that adrenaline haze they need to identify and remember why change is important why was it again they wanted to start working on this anger management stuff identify and develop alternate responses both of these are things they can keep on index cards or on the internet or on their screensaver on their phone so they can easily and quickly refer back to them and go this is what I'm supposed to do when they're angry, when people are in that adrenaline haze they're in a state of crisis they're not thinking clearly they are not able to dig into the recesses and go what was that new skill I learned in therapy last week keep it front and center enhance self-esteem to reduce the need for external validation so you're not constantly fearing rejection if people don't like what you did you're just like tough diddlywinks counter-condition unnecessary threats things that really aren't that big of a deal maybe when you were six a dog came running down the fence and barked at you and bared all its teeth and scared the bejeses out of you that's normal for a six-year-old if they see this big dog doing that but from that one experience you're now afraid of every dog you want to look at things that get you angry and go is this worth my energy and or is this really still a threat is this something that should be making me angry and if you say yes then you need to figure out why and address it but there are a lot of things we get irritable over getting cut off in traffic long stoplights cashiers that seem to intentionally be going slow when in reality they're probably just having a bad day look at those and go is it worth my energy become mindfully self-aware of your triggers and your vulnerabilities and eliminate as many vulnerabilities as possible so you have the energy to handle stresses as they come if you enjoy this podcast please like and subscribe either in your podcast player or on YouTube you can attend and participate in our live webinars with Dr. Snipes by subscribing at allceuse.com slash counselor toolbox this episode 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