In the first few years of my career I worked primarily with teenagers and kids. I still see a few clients from these age groups, but not as many as I saw when I worked for mental-health agencies. Weekly–sometimes daily–I would hear someone say that my clients needed “anger management.” This is one of those phrases from Therapy Land that has found its way into popular culture: almost everyone knows what “anger management” is, and almost everyone thinks it’s a good thing, even if they wouldn’t be caught dead taking an anger management class.

At the risk of offending many good professionals in my field, I say: think twice before taking one of these classes. (Often enough, if you’re taking one, you’re being forced to, so you don’t have the luxury of thinking twice. But keep reading!) Whether you’re being forced to take anger management or you’re just angry a lot and someone in your life has said, “Wow, you need anger management!” it’s important to remember a few things about anger:

1) Anger, like all emotions, is neither bad nor good. It has no moral value. It is a psychophysiological response by your mind and body to circumstances around you. I like the definition of anger (included in the work of Marsha Linehan) that says anger is simply the emotion you feel when something is in your way. That’s it.

2) Anger is often useful. It can tell you a lot about your situation, yourself, other people, and what your options are. It’s hard to see how, say, road rage is useful. But even if you’re experiencing road rage, the emotion might be telling you that you are too stressed out, that you need to take a minute–or a few minutes, or an hour, or a day–to work through something, or simply take a break.

3) There are no “angry people.” There are people who get angry quite often, and people who nurse grudges or hatreds for years at a time, but again, anger is an emotional response, not a personality trait. Senator Jim Webb might disagree. He’s a champion of the Scots-Irish culture, a culture that embraces anger in a particular way, and for particular cultural reasons. But even in a culture like that, where anger is a powerful cultural phenomenon, an individual person is capable of not being angry.

4) Like many emotions, anger is not designed to be chronic. If you are nursing a grudge for long lengths of time, you should know that you’re probably doing more harm to yourself than the person who originally hurt you. This is why I agree with the idea behind anger management, if not the specific methods or intended outcomes of anger management.

5) Finally, my case against anger management. (And I would love to be proven wrong about this!) Over the years I’ve seen that many of my clients find anger management either ineffective or counter-productive. It’s usually ineffective, particularly with teenage boys. They go to anger management classes, but they don’t seem to come out with much at the end. It becomes another irritant for them, and another thing their parents are expected to enforce, which (ask any parent) is the last thing they need. The counter-productive outcome occurs when anger management classes teach people not how to understand and make use of their anger, with the goal of resolving it, but rather how to squelch their anger or find some way to define it as wrong, bad, or useless.

So if you feel you have an anger problem, by all means take steps to address it. You could even sign up for an anger management course! But look at the materials–or talk to the course leader. Find out if they help you understand and deal with your anger, with respect for the fact that it is a useful and normal human emotion.

Finally, if you’ve struggled with anger and learned something about yourself, or about emotions, or relationships, please comment on this blog. I’d love to hear (and share) your story with other normal humans who sometimes get angry.

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This entry was posted on Thursday, June 12th, 2008 at 9:32 am and is filed under Being Your Best Self, Feeling Mad, Sad, or Afraid. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.