20 Mar

Anger Counseling

Posted by admin, under Anger Management

Anger counseling is a many splendored beast. Ever heard that old AA phrase or acronym HALT, for example? The acronym means that we are at greater risk for relapse when we are hungry, angry, lonely, or tired.

Hunger, loneliness, fatigue, closed head injury, ADD, ADHD, family of origin, addiction and recovery, grief, forgiveness and reconciliation, automatic negative thoughts, stress, our response to facial expressions, all can play a part in the emotional experience of anger.

We are supposed to have anger by the way, it is the energy we use to solve problems. And it is also a secondary emotion, usually following another emotion like hurt or shame.

However, if we use anger to justify violence I think we subvert the purpose of our emotions.

The one thing that no other anger management program that I am aware of talks about is the speed of the Central Nervous System (CNS).

Mihalyi Csikszentmihalyi,Ph.D., author to the book FLOW written in 1993, estimates that the CNS processes packets of non-verbal communication consisting of seven bits of data per package every 1/18th second.

That is 2x as fast as I can blink my eyes, which takes 1/10th second.

So you have to have your anger counseling tools in a place where they can be recalled very quickly.

Paul Ekman,Ph.D. who has worked for decades to develop a systematic catalog of human facial expressions says that all humans no matter what culture they are from, respond to a look of contempt in 1/25th second, and what that means is usually first hurt, then anger.

Any of you who are parents can remember how you felt when your children looked at you with a look of contempt. Even the memory of that look can bring back the hurt/anger emotions.

Michael Merzenich,Ph.D. of the Posit Science Brain Fitness Program says that Senior drivers need to prepare for changing road conditions in 1/45th second, which is about 4.5 times as fast as I can blink my eyes.

I also like to help folks in anger counseling understand that their internal chemistry or hormones change with each thought they have, and that we as human beings have on average about 200 thoughts per day which change our chemistry toward irritation and that we need to be prepared to name our feelings, their intensity, and to make some decisions about changing them much more frequently and much faster than perhaps we thought we did.

Sounds like mindfulness, doesn’t it?

Mindfulness, or awareness of what I am feeling coupled with deep breathing gives me a powerful tool to calm down if I am getting to hot.

John Gottman,Ph.D. and his wife, Julie Schwartze-Gottman talk about something they call Diffuse Physiological Arousal, or PDA, in their excellent workshop called The Art and Science of Love, which is for couples.

Their antidote for the awareness or mindfulness issue around strong feelings?

Take your pulse, and if it is over 100 beats per minute, take at least 20 minutes, especially for men, to calm down. Repeat that process as often as necessary.

Another tool that I teach for the awareness and mindfulness aspect of anger counseling in a biofeedback tool, called HeartMath, which trains the ability to regulate the time between heart beats.

When you learn Heartmath, you can feel good on demand, on any given heart beat. Your heart beat is actually a little slower than your CNS, but it is a much shorter intervention time than most of us are used to.

Heartmath is based on research in the recently discovered field of neurocardiology, which is the study of the heart’s own nervous system. The heart sends a great deal of data to the brain about how we are feeling, much more than the brain sends to the heart, and the heart’s brain is an affiliative and cooperative brain, which is good brain to use in dealing stress.

Heartmath works for your golf score and your brain fitness too.

Anger counseling involving Rational Emotive Behavior Therapy (REBT) or Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT) will involve recognition of automatic negative thoughts and disputing them in the case of REBT or creating a flow chart of evidence supporting your hot thought and evidence contradicting your hot thought in the case of CBT.

Once again, awareness will be a key piece of the anger counseling puzzle, but this time of thoughts, not just physiology or pulse.

When I do my anger management workshops, I frequently teach the Karpman drama triangle, or victim-rescuer-persecutor tool, and I teach about the grieving process using the Kubler-Ross model of grieving which includes a frequent movement between sadness and anger during the non-linear grieving process.

It is amazing to me that our culture teaches the grief process so poorly.

So many of my clients have a life time of ungrieved losses and perceived abandonments which impact their ability to trust, and if their CNS is overwhelmed by the physiology associated with a memory, their body may be moving before they can think about taking a pulse.

PTSD fits in this category, along with family of origin issues like physical abuse or child abuse or even witnessing violence.

Anger counseling always involves accountability, and to teach that I routinely ask my clients where they see me, and most of them are flummoxed by my question until I explain that they see me in their visual cortex, hear me in Broca’s area, feel the chair they are sitting on in the sensory motor cortex, smell in the limbic brain, ect.

In other words, their entire experience of life is inside their head, and their thought about that sensory experience is what brings the feelings, and we know that thought happens really fast.

No one can make me mad, my thought about things is what makes me mad.

Most of my clients have a hot spot when I call them on this over the course of the workshop, because being accountable moves them out of the very powerful victim spot.

Are their any tools that make your brain more effective for this awareness and choice process?

Yes, a very effective tool to use is taking your pulse.

If you find yourself getting excited, stop and take your pulse. If your heart rate is over 100 BPM, then take a time out for 20 minutes, which is very important for the guys.

Or learn to manage your physiology breath by breath by counting your breaths from one to one hundred, focusing only on the in and out of your breathing.

Focusing on the breath will leave you feeling relieved, aware, attentive, and relaxed.

Michael S. Logan is a brain fitness expert, a counselor, a student of Chi Gong, and licensed one on one HeartMath provider. I enjoy the spiritual, the mythological, and psychological, and I am a late life father to Shane, 10, and Hannah Marie, 4, whose brains are so amazing. http://www.askmikethecounselor2.com


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19 Mar

From Cary And Crystal Lake, IL: How Anger Destroys Families And How Counseling Can Help

Posted by admin, under Anger Management

The strongest contributor to individual character development is the family unit. You may have spent years trying to change, eliminate, or copy the influence of certain members of your family unit-consciously or unconsciously.


Consequently, if anger is part of your familys culture, you have probably noticed that it tends to spread itself to future generations. The wider it has spread, the more difficult it is to contain.


Take a look at the way members of your family relate with one another. Is there a hurtful and biting anger present? Remember, our earliest experiences communicating, problem-solving and relating to others occurs within our nuclear family. Unfortunately, patterns of anger in these relationships are then recreated in later relationships and subsequent family systems.


Fortunately, counseling and an expert treatment plan can eliminate the damage of having lived in an angry or abusive family unit.


How Dysfunctional Anger Destroys Relationships

Anger is a very common destroyer of relationships. Couples, however, often underestimate or minimize its impact by sometimes reporting that it is this anger that makes the relationship feel alive. A very dangerous notion.


How does irrational anger start? It grows in relationships which are insecure and where open communication is absent. The emotion of love then becomes buried beneath years and years of hostility and resentment. In these relationships, helplessness often exists in the present and anxiety and fear overwhelm thoughts about the future.


The news is not all bad, however. The good news is that if you are motivated to take part in marital or family therapy you can be rewarded with new optimism and hope.


The following are tips on how to limit destructive anger in your relationships:


1. When you feel angry, mentally evaluate your feelings. Ask yourself if you are over-reacting or jumping to conclusions.


2. Particularly, if you have nothing to lose, start by giving others the benefit of the doubt. Ask yourself if you have taken something too personally or over-reacted.


3. Move to higher ground; get a broader perspective. When you feel resentment building, talk your feelings over with a loved one and get additional feedback.


4. If certain relationships are repeatedly fraught with anger, assess whether or not you should stay in them.


5. If your anger feels out of control and/or mysterious and particularly, if the relationship is important, consider family or relationship counseling.


How Do I Know If a Family Member Has an Anger Problem?


Most of the time angry individuals are aware that they have problems controlling anger. Unfortunately, many of them come to accept that their anger is unchangeable, a fixed aspect of their personality and feel hopeless to to do anything about it. If you wonder whether you or a loved one may have an anger problem, look for several of the following symptoms:


1. Becoming inappropriately angry in response to mild frustration or irritation.


2. Experiencing painful feelings of guilt or regret over something that you have said or done in a fit of anger.


3. The existence of repeated interpersonal conflicts that result from angry outbursts (legal problems, arguments, damage to property, school or work suspensions, etc.)


4. Family and/or friends approaching or appealing to you to control your anger.


5. Having chronic physical symptoms which are generated or exacerbated by too much anger, such as high blood pressure, gastrointestinal difficulties etc.


Where do I Seek Help for an Anger Problem?


Mental health professionals are very responsive to those who seek treatment for anger dysfunction. Referrals to treatment professionals and services are available through The American Psychological Association, The American Counseling Association and The National Association of Social Workers.


You may feel shame or guilt about your anger issues and these problems can actually change the lives of you and your loved ones, for the worst. Therefore, it is critical to consult with a counseling or mental health professional who has many years of experience in anger management training.


What Kind of Treatments are Available for My Anger Disorder?


The most common approaches to anger management problems include the use of individual and family therapies. These therapies help one to become aware of specific triggers and thinking processes which lead to chronic anger and demonstrate how to think productively, rather than irrationally.


Individual Therapy


Individual therapy explores the root of angry feelings and behavior in a counseling format that includes only one client. This counseling approach helps the individual to focus on the most important emotions causing his or her excessive anger.


Family Therapy


Family therapy is a powerful and comprehensive way of repairing the damage caused by longer-term expressions of hurtful anger. Chronic anger commonly alienates family members from each other, resulting in strained communication. It can also cause members to be overly involved with one another in a very dysfunctional way.


Family therapy considers each members role in the dysfunction rather than just pinpointing one person.


How Marriage and Family Therapy Help


Marriage and family therapists, psychologists and mental health counselors are trained in how to identify anger patterns that pass from generation to generation. Identifying these patterns through counseling helps each client to explore his or her perceptions, prejudices and misunderstandings about the appropriateness of certain types of anger.


For example, when parents reflect on how emotions were expressed in their nuclear families, subsequent family members begin to understand the family’s inherited concepts about anger and how to correct them.

Dr Shery is in Cary, IL, near Algonquin, Crystal Lake, Marengo and Lake-in-the-Hills. He’s an expert psychologist. Call 1 847 516 0899 and make an appt orlearn more about counseling at: http://www.carypsychology.com

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19 Mar

Raging Anger: How Counseling Can Douse the Flames-From Mchenry, Algonquin And Cary

Posted by admin, under Anger Management

Counseling can be useful in helping people to overcome abusive anger. In psychological clinics around the world, seemingly confident people often present for treatment because they are fed up with the turmoil anger creates for them at home and work.


Often the people that want counseling for anger management are not stereotypical bullies. They have professional jobs and loving, though sometimes troubled wives and kids.


So why do they lose it so easily and hurt the wives and kids they love? There is no straight answer to this all-important question.


It is usually due to a mixture of factors. The role of counseling for anger management is not delving into the past, so much as it is to gain insight into the triggers that spark the rage, now- in the present.


However, as the person, with the aid of their therapist, grasps a meaningful understanding of the problem, additional factors may be considered, including significant experiences from childhood and parenting. Often, its possible to see that experiences from childhood, whether they are relatively benign or very traumatic, connect to the persons experience in the present.


We know that because the person will often remember and visualize such memories in rage-triggering situations in the present. The good news is that now that you are an adult, you have more resources and knowledge then when you were a kid.


This means that you can start to use these resources to make changes in the psychological and behavioural factors that worsen your rage or loss of temper. Psychotherapy and anger management counseling teaches you how to do this.


Anger management counseling will teach you about the link between events, thoughts, moods, feelings, behaviour and your angry outcomes. You will learn about your distorted thinking and the ways you process information that prolong your problem with out-of-control anger.


People who lose control of their tempers often have an automatic inner critic feeding them exaggerated and negatively biased information about the situations that trigger angry outbursts. This feedback is often just outside of your conscious awareness, to the point that you do not notice it or it becomes so authoritative that it is taken as the absolute truth in your subconscious mind.


Anger management programs will teach you to challenge your anger-triggering thoughts and consider the evidence for and against them. You will learn that you do not have to accept them; you will also learn about the core beliefs and assumptions that you hold about yourself and other people in your subconscious, and how these can trigger your anger and rage.


Once you know what they are you can learn to discard those that you no longer need and replace them with new adaptive and empowering beliefs. Anger management training will also help you to move towards accepting yourself as you are and to care less about what others think.


Your therapist can help you uncover how you measure your self-worth and cope with ever-present frustration. Anger management therapy can literally change your life and save your marriage!

Dr Shery is in Cary, IL, near Algonquin, Crystal Lake, Marengo and Lake-in-the-Hills. He’s an expert psychologist. Call 1 847 516 0899 and make an appt orlearn more about counseling at: http://www.carypsychology.com


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09 Mar

Counseling Self Esteem

Posted by admin, under Self Esteem

In counseling self esteem, I am reminded of step four in the AA program, which states that the alcoholic needed to make a fearless and thorough moral inventory of themselves in order to determine their defects of character which need to be changed and transformed in order to remain sober.

The inventory has to acknowledge the defect and it needs to acknowledge the attributes also.

If I am a merchant, I want to discover which products are selling, and which aren’t so that I do not tie up money on inventory that is not selling.

I am also reminded of a model for solution oriented brief therapy for alcohol addiction which was created by Scott Miller.

That model taught that the most despicable person on the planet has probably done at least one gentle or decent thing in their life, and if a counselor could tease out the thinking and behavioral aspects of that one choice, any despicable person could learn to repeat those thought and behaviors which would lead to more gently and decent behaviors.

I think counseling for self esteem could take a similar path. Counselors need to point out to clients the courageous choices that they see that clients have made.

In fact they could take a hint from the Miller Solution Oriented Brief Therapy model, and do some real cheering for clients, which will give the client an emotional memory of success to fall back on when facing a difficult choice out of the counselor’s office.

Those memories of success can be accessed by a client if they are confronted by an internal thought which predicts failure and judgement from the external world.

So I am saying that self-esteem is an internal experience for most of us, one that says we have the necessary tools to perservere along our path when the going seems a bit tough.

{Here are some other definitions of self esteem from an ERIC digest;

Definitions of self-esteem vary considerably in both their breadth and psychological sophistication. From an intuitive sense we know that high self-esteem means that we appreciate ourselves and our inherent worth. More specifically, it means we have a positive attitude, we evaluate ourselves highly, we are convinced of our own abilities and we see ourselves as competent and powerful-in control of our own lives and able to do what we want. In addition, we compare ourselves favorably with others. We also know what it means to experience diminished self-esteem–self-depreciation, helplessness, powerlessness and depression (Mecca, Smelser & Vasconcellos, 1989). }

My action steps for counseling self esteem involve teaching awareness and choice.

I like to start with a couple of computerized programs, one a biofeedback program called Heartmath, and the other a computerized brain fitness program called Mind Sparke Brain Fitness Pro.

Using programs like these differ from the usual talk therapy, and I choose them for just that reason.

We can talk self esteem to death, and I want my clients to have success with tasks they did not know they could have success with, one task involves learning to control the time between heart beats, and the other involves increasing their IQ.

Both tasks can be demonstrated quantitatively so a client cannot deny that they did it, and using the computer takes us past the talk.

Then when clients are running into a negative rule about their abilities learned during childhood, which might impact a job or relationship currently going on, they can recall their success at increasing their IQ, or their heart intelligence and relaxation skills, to balance or even dispute a low self esteem kind of thought.

For example, a client might have a thought about asking for a raise at work, and a memory comes up from childhood that says they have no talent to achieve, and a client can access another memory of success with Mind Sparke and Heartmath, and can say to themselves I do too have talent and I have achieved, now how can I indicate to my supervisor that I deserve a raise because of the gifts I bring to the organization.

And if you increase your IQ practicing with Mind Sparke Brain Fitness Pro, for 1/2 hour a day, for 19 days, you will definitely be adding something to the organization.

Hope you are intrigued. One of the greatest benefits of Mind Sparke is the ability to quickly pay attention. In other words, I will capture low self esteem thoughts and quickly replace them with high self esteem thoughts.

So What is Heartmath

Heartmath is a biofeedback program used on a computer which gives clients a real time picture of how fast their thoughts impact their physiology.

Clients can enhance their coherence with thoughts about someone they love which opens up higher perceptual centers in the brain for wiser choices.

Again clients are given real time feedback about quickly we move from high self esteem to low self esteem, and how quickly we can switch back to high self esteem.

The key experience your counseling self esteem clients will have is that changing the thought from a negative to a positive will quickly change the internal physiology, so you can move from one to the other very rapidly if need be.

In other words positive self esteem becomes a choice which we can make heart beat by heart beat, which quickly becomes a habit.

And I should mention that Heartmath feels really good to do.

Feels much better than most other kinds of interventions.

So using the two computerized programs gives clients quantitative data that they can achieve success at tasks most folks would say it is impossible to achieve success with, managing the time between heart beats, and increasing IQ.

From those successes, a more traditional approach to counseling self esteem can progress, and I would guess that the talk self esteem counseling will be briefer.

Michael S. Logan is a brain fitness expert, a counselor, a student of Chi Gong, and licensed one on one HeartMath provider. I enjoy the spiritual, the mythological, and psychological, and I am a late life father to Shane, 10, and Hannah Marie, 4, whose brains are so amazing. http://www.askmikethecounselor2.com

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27 Feb

Consider Anger Management Counseling That Puts You in Touch With Your Feelings

Posted by admin, under Anger Management

Anger is known by everyone. Everybody has felt it: whether as an annoyance or as full fledged rage. It is completely normal, healthy human emotion. It is dangerous when it gets out of control and turns destructive. It may lead to problems in your personal relationships and at workplace. Overall quality of your life is affected.

Everybody in society is experiencing stress in our lives due to demands of our jobs, family situations and economic conditions. The ability to avoid inappropriate expression of anger is a crucial skill to living healthy, happy life. We feel angry when things are not going the way we want them to, feeling we are not treated fairly, someone doing abusive to us, not feeling respected by others.

Our out burst of anger should not cause assault and violence. Now tougher laws are in force hence it’s more important now than ever for everyone to take responsibility for their behavior. People who could not help themselves in controlling anger need to learn the Anger management skills. To control the anger people should share the feeling with somebody. Exercise will usually improve an individual’s mood quickly. Simple exercises like walking are ideal for this. It will create a feeling of serenity which ultimately keeps you calm for along time afterwards.

If people come to know that they are not alone facing this problem then they will be relieved and will open up about their feelings. If you join any anger management camp then you will come to know the success stories of other people. You will find a support group. These anger management activities will help you to find a solution to the anger you have. Anger management will be possible for the people if they find ways of expressing anger without causing problems with their family and workplace relationships as well as in public places. Anger Management classes are conducted by many organizations. They have certified teachers to teach the skills of anger management.

If you feel that your anger is really not controllable you might consider counseling to learn how to handle it better. If a psychologist or other licensed mental health professional works with you for developing a range of techniques for changing your thinking and your behavior, you will definitely solve problem. You should tell your therapist your problem of anger and that you want to work with him. His approach to anger management will be guidance for you. He will guide you in understanding the cause of anger. Of course this is not the only thing you will have to do but there is other course of action designed to put you in touch with your feelings and express them. With counseling a highly angry person can move to middle range of anger with 8-10 weeks counseling.

Muna wa Wanjiru Has Been Researching and Reporting on Anger for Years. For More Information on Anger Management Counseling, Visit His Site at ANGER MANAGEMENT COUNSELING

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