Anger Management Counselling Peterborough

Anger can take a lot of different forms, but it is a common emotion that most people have.

Irritability is similar but different to anger. It's also a common emotion. The very term 'irritability' implies that there is no justification for the reaction. It suggests that a person is snappy and bad-tempered when there is no call to be so.

People are almost always criticised for being irritable and angry. You may be your harshest critic in this respect.

What makes us angry?

It is essential to know the sorts of things that make you angry.

There are three categories of events that make people angry:

• irritants,
• costs,
• transgressions.

There are plenty of irritants:

• people leaving doors open,
• neighbours making noise,
• even the way people eat or cough.

Likewise, there are plenty of things people do that have a cost for us:

• our children break-things and the consequent financial cost;
• our partners contradicting us and costing us a loss of face;
• having to do things unexpectedly, which costs us time.

The important thing is, you, like everyone, else will have a set of rules that you expect other people to abide by. When someone breaks one of those rules, it is known as a transgression. When you spot a transgression or think you have, the chances are you'll be angry.

Some things which make us angry straddle the boundaries between these categories. For example, a child breaking something may make us mad because of the cost involved in replacing it, but also because they have not, in our view, taken enough care.

Understanding Anger

It’s possible to learn about your anger and how you cause it to come about. It is well worth doing this because you can then analyse your actions and those of others.

Armed with this awareness, you can then intervene to lessen the anger you experience. Moreover, we can also alter the responses we produce. It is those responses that people refer to as our ‘irritability’ or ‘anger’.

Digging deep into your anger means beginning to understand your:

• triggers (what triggers your anger)
• the anger itself (which can gradually build-up, like increasing amounts of water pouring into a bucket);
• inhabitations (which stop us from giving vent to our anger)
• responses (which can range from nothing at all, when we are entirely in control of our anger, through to catastrophic responses when we fail to control it)