anger management
denver, co
In many professional circles anger is considered to be a ‘secondary emotion.’ That being held true, anger is an emotional and/or behavioral reaction to a primary emotion such as sadness, disgust or fear. Anger is intended to signal (to us and our environment) that a violation has occurred. This could be a real or perceived violation of expectation, boundaries, desire, values, or need. And while our raw experience with anger genuinely arises to communicate something of value (e.g. anger in response to protect you or your loved one from danger), oftentimes how we express our anger can do more harm than good. It can be disproportionate to the situation, wrongfully displaced, or simply not the most adaptive solution for a given circumstance. In any case, examining one’s relationship to anger is an important goal for self-growth or the treatment of anger management.
Anger is not a clinical diagnosis in and of itself, however it often presents as a symptom when a clinical diagnosis such as depression or anxiety is present. In some instances, anger may be an isolated problem arising from a deficit in communication skills and impacting interpersonal relationships. Either way, when anger is left unmanaged, it often disrupts our ability to achieve our goals in relationships at work and with our friends and family, and in the most extreme cases can place us in dangerous circumstances.
Therefore therapy for anger management is a step-by-step process to not just manage behavioral impulses like anger, but to reduce them entirely.
Anger Management Therapy
My treatment process goes beyond simply learning how to manage anger to effectively learning from your anger in order to reduce it entirely. By examining important aspects about your anger, including how anger functions in your life, we are then able to draw out underlying information that will help you not only reduce the maladaptive need for anger, but also encourage more effective ways of being.
Like many behaviors, anger can be habitual. And since habits are difficult to break, they require a variety of skills that are purposeful to achieve the function(s) anger once served. And while skills are effective placeholders to cope with anger for the interim, my goal is to utilize evidence based treatments that go beyond your reliance on coping skills. Therefore, my treatment process is sequential in nature, providing you with skills to reduce behavioral impulses and increase coping skills, understand more about the nature of your anger, and adopt other more adaptive ways of getting your needs met.
For example: I examine many aspects about how one’s experience with anger is being maintained. In other words, I spend time examining how anger is being maintained by your environment including your relationships, how anger is being reinforced for you personally. For example, without knowing, anger may serve as an outlet to manage the mental and physical stress we experience, therefore I offer tools that reduce your stress so that you are able to apply more adaptive, functional skills to better meet your needs in the moment.
Schedule Your Denver Anger Management Consultation
Anger, when healthy, is a useful detector alerting us to important information about ourselves and our needs in the moment. However, anger is often seen as a “bad emotion” in which we judge ourselves for having or expressing. As a result, we end up missing the useful information we need to learn from anger, that may give us a clue that we need to make different choices in our relationships, work, and lives. If you are interested in scheduling a free consultation for Anger Management, contact Dr. Lauren Gorog from Gorog Health today.
