Tag: anger-management

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Maintaining Healthy Relationships Psychology in practice

Do you consider yourself good relationship material?

And why this matters!

Perhaps you have been in a happy and fulfilling relationship for a long time! If so, to what do you attribute this success?

(Do you see this as predominantly due to mutual hard work, your partner’s positive attributes or perhaps are own? Perhaps you see it as a combination of all three)?

I find it fascinating to ask this question of happy as well as unhappy couples.

I wonder if you can predict how the answers of these two groups differ from each other?

It goes without saying really. On average happy couples are generous with their praise of their partners’ positive attributes, such as patience, respect and appreciation for their “other half” whilst troubled couples tend to play the “blame game” and often battle to recall their partner’s positive aspects. Sometimes troubled couples even fail to recall what attracted them to their partner in the first place!

Each of us could do with reflecting regularly on what we personally bring into our most significant relationship, in areas such as:

Our unique personality make-up and attitude to life:

Are you an optimist or a pessimist, for example?

Are you even- tempered or moody? If you tend to be depressed or if your emotions tend to be volatile, your partner may be at the receiving end of your unhappiness. I find that unhappy couples tend to blame their bad relationship for their unhappiness, when there is often more of a circular causal relationship at play.

How do you manage your anger?

When you have a major disagreement with your partner how do you go about finding a resolution?

Do you initiate a discussion with your partner by asking when would it be convenient to talk about the issue on your mind or do you loose your cool and insist on dealing with it immediately? Individuals who lack control over their anger run the risk of seriously damaging their relationship in the long-term should he or she say and 0r doing things that can’t ever be retracted.

Perhaps you are someone who withdraws from your partner when you feel angry or hurt? You may go quiet for hours or days and when communication resumes perhaps the issue in question is never discussed or resolved. The danger here is that partners fail to communicate adequately and constructively with one another and their intimate connection becomes lost along the way.

Are you an anxious person?

It is often difficult not to let heightened levels of anxiety affect your relationship. Anxious individuals tend to crave certainty and predictability. How does this impact on a relationship? Of course every anxious individual will be different in this regard. However, it is common for there to be a strong need for control and an aversion to taking any type of risk. 

How can you do to ensure that you are doing all that you can to prevent your “dark side” from damaging your relationships?

I would suggest that the first step could involve becoming mindful of how you feel during each day and the way in which you are interacting with others. If you believe that you may be suffering from depression, anger issues or high levels of anxiety I would suggest that you speak with someone about it as soon as possible. You owe it to yourself, your partner, family and your friends!

 

 

Categories
Health and Happiness Life in General Maintaining Healthy Relationships

Anger and anger management: What anger can tell you about yourself and your relationship…

And why this is important.

 

What tends to make you really angry?

How do you behave when you get angry?

What happens between you and your partner when one of you gets really angry about something the other one did or didn’t do? How does the argument tend to proceed? Does anger escalate or can you both usually get to some agreement or resolution of the issue without there being an unpleasant scene?

 

Anger is, of course, a universal and necessary emotion. However, anger is also a unique experience as each of us will differ on what we get angry about and the way in which we express our anger.

We reveal a great deal about ourselves through our expression of anger and we invariably see another “side’ of our partner (and our friends and family) when we get the opportunity to witness the way in which they handle anger and conflict situations. I notice this time and again in my couple counselling sessions when partners are in unhappy and troubled relationships. Often a partner will report to me that they have been “turned off” by their spouse after witnessing how he/she behaves in a high conflict situation.  

Your anger will reveal to you (and to others) what issues you feel intensely passionate about. Anger tends to be triggered within an individual when there is an (often unconsciously) perception that their integrity has been challenged and/or deeply held convictions and values have been disrespected or undermined in some way.

In addition, the way in which a person handles their angry feelings has a significant impact on their relationships and also on their health. Individuals tend to fall into two groups: those who like to confront and deal with issues as they arise and the other group who tend to “bottle up” their anger and to avoid potential conflict situations.  I have found that individuals who are experiencing problems in their relationships usually often become more extreme in the way in which they habitually handle conflict.

Both approaches can thus be problematic, especially when goodwill, mutual understanding and respect have been eroded. Couples in this situation usually report that communication has become a serious problem in their relationship. 

What is the “take home message” here? I believe that we could all benefit by paying more attention to the role that anger plays in our lives – what makes us angry, how we express that anger, what impact our anger has on our relationships and whether or not work needs to be done (on either an individual or relationship level) to improve on anger management for the sake of  personal well-being and the important relationships in our lives.

 

Categories
Life in General Psychology in practice

Do you expect too much (or too little) in life? Don’t underestimate the importance of your expectations!

Time and time again in my psychology practice I am told by my clients that one of the most useful things they have got out of coming for psychotherapy or counselling is my highlighting the role that our expectations play in our lives.

Why are our expectations so important?

I have found that faulty and unrealistic expectations underlie many of the issues that bring clients into therapy. Anger, frustration, depression and anxiety often a result of expectations that are out of sync with reality. For example, clients with anger and frustration problems will invariably think  ” X should or shouldn’t act in a certain way” or in the case of road rage “that type of behaviour should not be allowed on the road” If you commonly use the words “Should”, “must”, “always” and “never” in your internal dialogue this is a sign that you are setting yourself up for frustration and anger, which is of course ultimately self-defeating and also potentially damaging to your health in the long-term!

Anxiety, on the other hand, is caused when we predict some dire event occuring at some time in the future – the “what …if” scenarios. When we get depressed we expect that nothing is going to improve and that we will always feel the same way as we do in the moment, which is, of course, also highly unlikely and unrealistic.

And then there are the cases of self-fulfilling prophecies when we predict some dire outcome and then unconsciously act in a way that brings these into being!

As most of the expectations that we harbour operate on a totally unconscious level, these tend to influence our behaviour and our moods largely outside our awareness. This dynamic forms the basis of cognitive-behavoural therapy, or CBT, which has been found to be extremely effective in enabling individuals to improve their moods and thus also their general wellbeing.

So I suggest that you do some self-reflection – get in touch with your expectations and think about how they influence your life and your relationships!

 

 

Categories
Life in General

When Anger Management meets Couple Counselling: Are anger and conflict ruining your relationship?

And if so, where, or with whom, does the problem lie?

Do either of you need individual therapy or should you both go for couples counselling?

 

In my psychotherapy practice, from time to time, I get enquiries from prospective clients about whether or not a particular problem should be dealt with in individual or in couple counselling.

Examples of problems where this type of uncertainty often occurs include self-esteem issues, jealously, trust/mistrust and anger. Because these types of problems aren’t usually evident when a person is single and will only seem to arise in the context of a significant relationship, clients are often unsure as to whether they, thier partner or their relationship should be the focus of the counselling or therapy.

I will select anger as an example.

When relationships are in trouble, there is usually, of course, a great deal of unhappiness and often high levels of conflict and anger. Effective communication is often an early casualty – in our first session couples invariably complain that they no longer enjoy an open, trusting and mutually satisfying communication pattern.

This leads in many cases to high levels of frustration and hurt feelings which are conveyed usually through overt anger or withdrawal.(John Gottman calls these response patterns the “Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse”- criticism, contempt, defensiveness and stonewalling and maintains that the existence of these patterns, particularly contempt, are warning signs that a relationship is in a potentially catastrophic negative spiral).

When anger becomes a problem in a relationship (in the absence, of course, of any type of ongoing physical or sexual abuse) I believe a good rule of thumb is for both partners to come along for couple counselling. Why do I say this?

1. Even if one partner in a couple has more problems in the way in which he/she communicates their frustration and anger, “it takes two to tango” – the other partner is also locked into a particular pattern of response, which they need also to understand and ultimately to change. Both partners need to appreciate, and take ownership of, their own contribution to the maintenance of the problem.

2. Often, in a couple counselling situation, each partner blames the other for the anger that gets expressed in the relationship. If one of the partners accepts the “blame” for the problem and comes along for individual therapy, there is a high likelihood that the partner who presents for therapy is regarded by them both as the dysfunctional “identified patient”, the partner gets let off scott-free and sees no need to change his/her response patterns and the opportunity to work on the underlying relationship issues is lost. This situation can have dire consequences for the future of the relationship.

3. Should the couple counsellor feel that one or both of the partners would also benefit from some individual counselling for anger management, this could be incorporated into the couple counselling programme or the counsellor or therapist could elect to refer one or both of the partners to other psychologists for individual therapy.

 

Reference: Gottman, J. and Silver, N. (2012). What Makes Love last? How to build trust and avoid betrayal. Simon and Schuster.

Categories
Health and Happiness Maintaining Healthy Relationships Managing stress

How good is your anger-management?

anger and frustrationAs a psychologist I find that its all about frustration tolerance and managing your expectations!

I have clients who report that they have days when they feel more and more frustrated, to the point where they are ready to explode!

Often their frustration results from problems in their relationships, either at home or at work, or it arises in certain situations, such as when when driving in traffic.

I talk about frustation being a sign that one’s expectations of a person or situation are unrealistic – we have an idealised idea of how a person or a situation should be (in the perfect world!) and then feel frustrated and angry when things don’t turn out as we would wish.

How would you rate your anger-management (on a scale from nought to ten – ten being perfect!)?

If  you find that you need to improve in this area – what can you do?

 

1. Examine your internal dialogue  – the conversation you have (hopefully silently!) with yourself throughout the day. If you are tending to wind yourself up, you can work on this. Listen to the conversation, and change the self-talk to a calmer, problem-solving tone.

2. Examine your expectations. If they are tending to be unrealistic, alter them to match reality. For example, if you are caught in a traffic jam thirty kilometres away from your office, rather than fuming about not being able to get to the meeting which is to begin in five minutes time, estimate how long it will take you to get there and perhaps consider how you could let people know that you will be late.

Of course it is important for each of us to work on our anger-management skills for a number of very good reasons – such as to preserve our relationships, our jobs and our sanity!

It is important to note that an ongoing pattern of anger and hostility can seriously affect your health. Research has consistently found that A-type personalities who are competitive and also angry and hostile are much more likely to suffer from high blood pressure and have higher rates of heart attacks than people who are driven but not angry.

So being a lover not a fighter is better for one’s health too!

Categories
Maintaining Healthy Relationships Mindfulness Relationship Building

Assertiveness and psychology: What do you need to be able to practise strategic assertiveness?

What do I mean by strategic assertiveness?

I will explain it with an example.

An eighteen year old client arrived at my practice in an extremely distressed state. She told me that she had spoken up in class against unfair treatment on the part of the teacher.She said that she had worked till late the night before completing a homework assignment only to find that some of her class-mates had failed to complete their assignment but had not been punished in any way.

When she spoke up, her classmates who had not completed their work turned on her and said some hurtful things, whilst those who had done their work failed to support her. My client lamented that this was one of the few times she had managed to be assertive and it had turned into a disaster. She vowed to never speak up again!

I commiserated with her experience but suggested that it she might have predicted this outcome as it was to be expected that her outburst would not have been popular with the girls who were at fault. (Of course she was angry and frustrated at the time and was therefore not not thinking rationally). If she had managed to be more in control she would have probably realised that her outburst would have negative consequences in terms of her popularity with her peers!

The take home message from this example is:

Being assertive, and yet not antagonising or alienating others in the process, is a complex skill and is not easy to achieve. It requires a clear, rational mind, good anger-management and high frustration tolerance – all these are aspects of emotional intellengence (EQ).