How to Deal With Anger Management Issues

Video Transcript

"Hi my name is John Bosworth, I am a licensed mental health counselor in St. Petersburg, Florida. I would like to speak a little bit about how to deal with anger management issues. Anger management is a topic that people use either very seriously or kind of in humorous ways. There has been funny movies made about anger management. Anger really is a very simple process that a human being goes through. But with old school psychology, and psychoanalytic theory we hear a lot of kind of ridiculous interpretations of where our anger comes from. From a rational perspective our anger comes from one source, and one source only, and that is our thoughts. And the thoughts that create anger are very demanding. One of my colleagues a guy that I have been working with, and have known I consider him actually like a father to me Vince Parr in Tampa he has a great equation, and a couple of equations that help people deal with this. And it is a simple equation, it is anger equals ET plus S. The ET stands for egocentric thinking, which is okay we have kind of evolved to be egocentric. I want what I want when I want it; helps in survival, helps in getting things that we want. It is when we add the S, the ET plus S is the equation. The S stands for should. So we should say not only do I want what I want when I want it, but therefore I should have it or I must have it or I need to have it. That kind of demandingness is the stuff that gets in the way of our happiness. And by that what I mean is we can prefer to have somebody interact with us nicely, and treat us well, and that is okay. Having a strong preference for that would sound like a new thinking. I really want this to happen, I would like this person to treat me well. But in when we become angry if that person doesn't treat us like we think that they should then we have this reaction that is a lot more intense than would really be helpful for us in that interaction. So with anger what we want to look for is not only do I want to have good interaction with this person or for them to treat me well, but they must, they should do it, they have to do that. When we have escalated our preference into the demand of they should that is when we tend to get angry. And no other person or no thing can make us angry it is simply our thought process, and a very demanding thought process that produces the anger or the feeling of anger in ourselves. Some therapist say that some anger is healthy. We say no anger is not healthy at all. Concern, frustration, annoyance is healthy, points you in the direction of achieving your goals. But anger is a dysfunctional emotion that usually doesn't help us effectively solve the problem or actually be happy in our lives. My name is John Bosworth, and we are talking about how deal with anger management issues."