Anger Management Continuing Education CEUs

Anger Management Continuing Education CEUs

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1. Become familiar with cultural influences on anger management
2. Become familiar with historical influences on anger management
3. Identify poor anger management symptomology
4. Utilize fundamental anger management techniques
5. Access vital anger management mental healthcare resources

Table of Contents:
1. Definitions
2. History and Culture
3. Anger Symptoms
4. Anger Management Techniques
5. Resources
6. References

1. Definitions

The term anger management typically refers to a system of psychological therapeutic techniques and exercises by which someone with excessive or uncontrollable anger can control or reduce the triggers, degrees, and effects of an angered emotional state.

2. History and Culture

Most civilized societies consider anger as an immature or uncivilized response to frustration, threat, violation, or loss. Instead, remaining calm, levelheaded, or “turning the other cheek” is considered more socially acceptable. This conditioning can cause inappropriate expressions of anger such as uncontrolled violent outbursts, misdirected anger or repressing all feelings of anger when it would be an appropriate response to the situation. Also, anger that is constantly “bottled up” can lead to persistent violent thoughts or actions, nightmares and even physical symptoms. Anger can also aggravate an already present mental health problem such as clinical depression
A large school of thought asserts that depression is essentially anger internalized. Perhaps this is due to the fact that many depressed persons react to stress by internalizing their anger in response to physical or mental abuse or neglect from parents or others. Another impact of the depression sufferer's denial of anger is that their interpersonal relationships are often unfulfilling. Anger can fuel obsessions, phobias, addictions and manic tendencies. Many people unable to express their anger appropriately will externalize it in furious activity which can result in clinical depression or even bipolar disorder. Anger can also intensify paranoia and prejudice, even in normal, everyday situations. People tend to express their anger either passively or aggressively through the fight-or-flight response (Lehrer, Paul M.; David H. Barlow, Robert L. Woolfolk, Wesley E. Sime, 2007. Principles and Practice of Stress Management, Third Edition). The flight response is often manifested through repression and denial of anger for safety. Aggressive behavior is associated with the fight response and the use of the verbal and physical power of anger.

Anger and rage are often conceptualized to be at opposite ends of an emotional continuum, mild irritation and annoyance at one end and fury or murderous rage at the other. Recently, Sue Parker Hall (2008) has challenged this idea; she conceptualizes anger as a positive, pure and constructive emotion, which is always respectful of others; only ever utilized to protect the self on physical, emotional, intellectual and spiritual dimensions in relationships. She argues that anger originates at age 18 months to 3 years in order to provide the motivation and energy for the individuation developmental stage whereby a child begins to separate from their careers and assert their differences. Anger emerges at the same time as thinking is developing therefore it is always possible to access cognitive abilities and feel anger at the same time (Parker Hall, 2008, Anger, Rage and Relationship: An Empathic Approach to Anger Management, Routledge, London).
Parker Hall (2008) proposes that it is not anger that is problematic but rage, a different phenomenon entirely; rage is conceptualized as a pre-verbal, pre-cognition, psychological defiance mechanism which originates in earliest infancy as a response to the trauma experienced when the infant's environment fails to meet their needs. Rage is construed as an attempt to summon help by an infant who experiences terror and whose very survival feels under threat. The infant cannot manage the overwhelming emotions that are activated and need a caring other to attune to them, to accurately assess what their needs are, to comfort and soothe them. If they receive sufficient support in this way, infants eventually learn to process their own emotions. Rage problems are conceptualized as the inability to process emotions or life's experiences either because the capacity to regulate emotion has never been sufficiently developed or because it has been lost due to more recent trauma (Schore, 1994). Rage is understood as 'a whole load of different feelings trying to get out at once' (Harvey, 2004) or as raw, undifferentiated emotions, which spill out when one more life event that cannot be processed, no matter how trivial, puts more stress on the organism than they can bear. Framing rage in this way has implications for working therapeutically with individuals with such difficulties. If rage is accepted as a pre-verbal, pre-cognitive phenomenon (and most sufferers describe it colloquially as 'losing the plot') then it follows that cognitive strategies, eliciting commitments to behave differently or educational programs are contra-indicated. Parker Hall proposes an empathic therapeutic relationship to support clients to develop or recover their organismic capacity (Rogers, 1951) to process their often multitude of traumas. This approach is a critique of the dominant anger and rage interventions including probation, prison and psychology models, which she argues does not address rage at a deep enough level (Parker Hall, 2008, Anger, Rage and Relationship: An Empathic Approach to Anger Management, Routledge, London).
Historically, therapists thought that venting angry feelings was healthy and appropriate based on Freud’s “Hydraulic Model” of energy. He believed that energy could build up to the point that it would overflow and flood the system. The release was called catharsis which was an emptying of emotional reservoirs. However, contemporary research does not support this theory. Carol Tavris (1982) concluded that people who vent their anger tend to become more rather than less angry. The research consistently demonstrates that free expression of anger and hostility resulted in measurably increased angry and negative feelings.