Digging Deeper Into Anger Management

If you are doing your work in anger management, you have learned how to become aware of your anger, how to stop yourself when you are getting angry, and how to calm yourself down. You have also started to evaluate your anger by considering why you got angry and then deciding if it was a real wrong or a perceived wrong.

Now, we are going to dig even deeper in evaluating your thoughts. This lesson is difficult for some, but those who take this lesson seriously usually see tremendous benefits for their long-term anger management.

Evaluate Your Thoughts

Make sure that you are calm before you take this step. Use your tools to get yourself calm if you need to. If you are not calm, then your thinking will be distorted and your evaluation will be inaccurate. That is one of the reasons why it is so important to calm yourself down before you evaluate your situation.

Fact Or Fiction

Once you are calm, look at your trigger thought and consider if it is fact or fiction. One of the most important questions to ask yourself is if your trigger thought is fact or filter. To do this you must understand the difference between the facts and your filter.

Filters change what goes through them. A furnace filter takes dust and dirt out of the air. A coffee filter lets the flavor through and leaves the gunk behind. An email filter gets rid of spam. Like any other filter, what goes into our anger filter is different than what comes out. Our anger filter takes in information, processes it, and then gives us the conclusion that something is wrong. It is like a magic box where information goes in, something happens in the box, and then the emotion of anger comes out o n the other side. Now let’s look at that magic box, your filter.

Often someone says something to us, and we hear those words and put them through our anger filter. Then we take what comes out, and that makes us mad. But it’s very important to understand, it may be our filter that is actually causing the problem. It may not be what is going in the box that is causing the problem. It may be the filter itself. If we have a dirty filter, we might be getting mad about something that is not really wrong.

The following two tabs change content below.

• Bio
• Latest Posts

Michael Ballard, MA, LPC

Counselor For Anger Management at Front Range Counseling Center

I am an anger management counselor at Front Range Counseling Center, an outpatient clinic in Denver that helps individuals and couples with anger problems. I am a Licensed Professional Counselor in the state of Colorado. I provide counseling services for individuals, couples, and families who struggle with anger. I developed The ASCEND Method® for anger management, and have used this method with men and women, adults, teens, and children. I have also authored various workbooks, training manuals, and articles and has been published in The Washington Post.

Latest posts by Michael Ballard, MA, LPC (see all)

• Anger Management Direct Confrontation Don’t Dos - February 10, 2017
• Anger Management Step: Gaining Awareness - January 13, 2017
• Anger Management Options You Don’t Have - December 24, 2016
• Anger Management Option: Decisive Action - December 10, 2016
• Anger Management Poor Self-Care - October 1, 2016