eli westfall, lmft

I have struggled over the years to learn how to manage my anger. It has not been an easy journey, in fact it has been a very difficult and painful one which has caused hurt to others and left wreckage in my life. I have learned a lot about my anger and anger in general. I have always considered my anger and my struggle to effectively manage it as a flaw in my character, and as such I spent years avoiding even talking about anger. One of the lessons I have had learned about my anger is that it is not a character flaw, on the contrary it is a victory in many ways and certainly an experience I can leverage to help others who find themselves struggling to manage their anger.

Shortly after I started working on my master’s degree, I entered my own therapy for the first time. There were so many things I talked about with my therapist, so many things we tried to fix about me. That first time in therapy I made significant progress. I was able to learn coping strategies and skills to help me maintain and manage all of my emotions in a better, more healthy way. However, my anger never really went away. It never really got managed. I just learned how to better hide it. How to better keep the monster under control.

I should take a moment to explain why I called anger a monster. Anger is an emotion, like being happy or sad, and it doesn’t have any inherent goodness or badness standing by itself. My anger turned me into a monster. I was a regular Dr. Jekyll and Mr Hyde. When I wasn’t angry, I was a normal human. When I wasn’t able to control the anger, I became something else altogether… and entirely different thing. I became a monster. I never hit my wife or my boys in these times of anger… but I am embarrassed to admit to the number and nature of other household items which fell prey to my anger. Needless to say, it was ugly. Very ugly. It was a monster.

As I was saying, during my first time in therapy I never really got a true handle on my anger and learned how to tame it. As I began this journey of mental health education which would ultimately lead me here to being a therapist many years later, I always thought myself to be solution-focused. Which is to say, I was more concerned with how do we fix the problem right now and move forward not really caring where the problems started or what caused it. Over the years, I have grown as a therapist and clinician and I have come to understand the past plays a very critical role in who we are and in who we become. You might say, the past shapes our present and future. About the time I was having this epiphany, I was in therapy again… you guessed it, that anger I never really got under control had reared its ugly head and was making a mess of my life… again. In therapy this time, I began to understand I was going to need to figure out why I was angry and resolve what made me angry before I was really going to be able to get my anger under control. One of my favorite memories of that therapy experience (and one I have shared with some of my clients) is when my therapy made me so mad, surprise I know, I stormed out of the room mid-session. Looking back, it’s funny now but in the moment it was very frustrating and I felt like my therapist wasn’t listening to me, that he wasn’t really hearing me. We were discussing my childhood and I had a good childhood. My parents were attentive and loving. I never felt abandoned or slighted by them. I never got the feeling or impression they didn’t care about me. Quite the opposite. In this discussion, my therapist told me ‘People who are as angry as you are don’t have good childhoods.’ He went on to imply I was either lying to him or myself and protecting someone who had harmed me and thereby creating a bad childhood. I dropped some choice words and promptly left the room.

As much as I hate to admit this, he was not wrong about the source of my anger being found in my pre-adult life. After lots of reflection, I was able to identify a time when I wasn’t angry and then after that time I was angry. It wasn’t my childhood per se, but it did take place when I was a teenager. That is when the anger finally began to be resolved. It wasn’t over then, that was just the beginning of the real journey towards managing anger. Finding what was the cause of the anger and resolving it so I didn’t need to be angry anymore.

When I talk about anger management with my clients, I approach it this way: we can learn anger management techniques all day long, but if we don’t find the underlying root cause of the anger it will never really be under control. You see, anger is a secondary emotion. This means, it is never the primary emotion we experience. We experience anger as a response to or for another emotion. For many men, we experience anger when we are hurt, when we feel alone, when we feel rejected, or when we feel sad. I suspect it is similar for women as well. Anger gives us power these other emotions don’t have. Anger allows us to remain in control, rather than losing all sense of control in our lives. We don’t really get control of our anger until we find the emotion we are really experiencing and properly deal with and process that emotion. It is not easy to get behind the anger and find what we are really feeling.

For me, it took years. Literally years. And honestly, at the time I figured it out I didn’t even really figure it out. I was able to identify the experience I had that was the pivotal moment in my life, the moment where I can say I wasn’t angry before that experience and I was after it. When I found this experience and began to work my way through understanding why I was affected so strongly by this experience, I didn’t really understand this experience caused me to feel angry because I felt rejected. After I identified the experience at the root of my anger, I was able to get a much better handle on managing my anger. I was better at managing anger, but there were times I still struggled… a lot. I hadn’t quite done all the work just yet. I figured out the experience which made me but not that the reason I felt angry wasn’t because of the experience itself, but because the experience made me feel rejected.

Feeling rejected sucks. It hurts. It makes us feel powerless. It makes us feel like there is something wrong with us. Who wants to feel like that? No one. Definitely, not me. Now the really hard part came. I thought it had been hard work so far… nope. I had to look deep inside of myself and feel the rejection, live in the rejection. Why did I feel rejected? Why did this hurt so much? What does it say about me that I could be cast off and discarded so easily? What was wrong with me? Sorting out the answers to these questions was the only way to resolve my anger. To actually get a handle on being angry. To not have to be angry every single day moving forward. At the core of those questions was the last one, ‘What was wrong with me?’ You know the answer. Because it is the same answer to my question of myself, as it is to your question of yourself. What is wrong with us? Nothing. There is not a deficiency in me which caused the rejection. The rejection was not about me… it was about them. And of course, the road to having self-worth and self-value is not an easy road to travel. Working through my feeling of rejection, getting anger under control, and realizing this says more about them than it does me is a road that brings me to a place where I understand the worth and value I have inherently. I don’t need to get my worth and value from others, because I already have it. For those of us who are Christians, we know this worth and value comes from being made in the image of God and being loved by him. Whether you call yourself a Christian or not, you have worth and value because you are made in the image of God and he loves you.

Once we identify and work through the real emotion we are feeling behind the anger, we can start to talk about anger management techniques. How do I get this monster under control each day? Check out the follow up post for some basic anger management techniques to employ to better manage the anger outbursts.