How to express anger appropriately: Expressive therapy for anger management

Very often, people who have an anger management problem feel they have to "control" their anger by not expressing it.

This makes sense if, by "expressing anger", you refer to destructive outbursts of anger. By all means, we want to avoid this.

However, the issue is that people who have anger management problems are often people who are not able to calibrate the expression of anger.

They're afraid that, once they start feeling their anger, it will be impossible to control. As a result, they bottle up their anger - not expressing it, sometimes not even feeling it.

The feelings stay bottled up... The pressure builds up... And then, predictably, the volcano erupts!

The way to break this vicious cycle is to learn to recognize anger (as well as other difficult feelings) early on, and to learn to find acceptable ways to express these feelings.

We're talking about calibrating, modulating, managing the expression of anger.

I'll give you an analogy. Let's imagine you have a powerful sports car. If all you know about using the gas pedal is pressing on it full bore, then you're in deep trouble, because you can't control the car. You need to learn to modulate the amount of power you're using at any moment, in a way that is appropriate to the situation.

In the same way, the purpose of anger management is not to muzzle you. It is to help you learn how to modulate the expression of your difficult feelings. Far from limiting your life, it will help you get much more satisfaction out of life.