True Anger Management isn’t about controlling your anger, its learning to channel your anger.
Blurting your anger hurts others. Blocking your anger hurts you. Channeling your anger is the only permanent solution to anger management.
There are three basic ways that you can express anger. Young children blurt out their anger, they express it in a raw physical form such as screaming, hitting or throwing blocks. Cartoons and fairy tales are violent because they express children’s raw fantasies. One of three things can happen to this basic pattern.
- BLURT – Children who don’t learn to control their anger at all grow up to become under-controlled adults who continue to blurt their anger. This is like letting the brook in your backyard flow wherever it wants even if it floods your basement.
- BLOCK – Children may learn to block the expression of their anger completely. Doing this is like damming up the brook without floodgates. Eventually the dam overflows or bursts. These children grow up to be over-controlled adults who give in way too much until they explode.
- CHANNEL – The third possibility is that children learn to channel their anger, finding more socially appropriate ways of fully expressing the emotion. This is like changing the course of the brook by digging a channel so that the water now flows far away from your basement. Children who learn to channel their anger grow up as assertive adults who express anger in the best way at the best time.
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