ANGER MANAGEMENT
Anger management counselling
Anger is usually the surface of something else. Exhaustion, grief, or a threat your body registered before you did.
That doesn't make it less of a problem. It means that managing the moment, counting, breathing, walking away… those only take you so far. The pressure is still there when you come back. We work on what's underneath it as well as what to do in the moment.
The same fight every time
Most people who come here aren't angry all the time. They're fine for weeks and then something small goes off, and afterwards it's hard to explain (to anyone else or to themselves) how it got from there to here.
If you've apologized for the same thing more than once, the apology isn't the problem and neither is your self-control. It's a pattern, and when we uncover the shape of that pattern, recognize it for what it is, then we can work with it.
When it lands at home
It rarely goes off at the person who caused it. It goes off at home, in the car, at whoever is nearest and least equipped to understand where it came from.
That's usually the part that finally makes someone call me. Not the anger itself, but seeing what it does to somebody who didn't deserve it. If that's why you're here, that's a good reason.
When someone else sent you
Plenty of people arrive because a partner said something had to change, or because it came up at work. You might not fully agree that there's a problem, or you might agree and resent having been told.
Bring that with you. I'd rather work with someone who's ambivalent and honest about it than someone performing agreement. We can start with whether you think this is a problem at all. That's a real first session, not a waste of one.
Anger that turns inward
Not everyone's anger goes outward. For some people, it turns around and becomes self-contempt. You might be living with a running commentary about yourself that would end a friendship if you said it out loud to anyone else.
That's the same material. It's just pointed in a different direction, and it's often harder to spot because nobody else is complaining about it.
After it happens
The shame afterward can be worse than the anger. People replay it, avoid the person they directed it toward, over-apologize, or go quiet for days.
That cycle is workable, and it's often where we start. Not just because it’s probably the part you're most motivated to change, but because it’s the part that keeps the whole thing running around and around.
What the work looks like
Some of it is practical: noticing what builds before it goes off, what your particular early signs are, and what to do with the twenty seconds you actually have before you blow up. Dialectical behaviour therapy (DBT) is useful here; it was built for exactly this problem.
The rest is the part underneath. What is the anger protecting? What has it learned to do, and is that still needed? Sometimes it’s trauma at the heart of it. Sometimes it's exhaustion, or a life with no room in it.
I'm direct. If I think something is driving the anger that you haven't named yet, I'll say so.
If you've read this far, some part of it landed. You don't have to have worked out what's underneath before we talk.