Anger Management and Counselling in Ottawa, ON.

If anger has a hold on you and your life, therapy can help you feel free again. I can help you learn the necessary skills to manage overwhelming emotions that arise due to anger and help you identify the roots of your anger. Therapy can also help a person address underlying emotions and memories that may be contributing to the distress. With time and patience, anyone can learn to control their anger, and I am here to help you through this journey.

I will work with you to help you understand your triggers. We will talk about the emotions and feelings that are coming up for you in situations. I will teach you coping skills and alternative ways to process these difficult feelings that will allow you to better manage your level of anger. You will find that you are better able to be calmer in situations and your anger will be more manageable once you practice the coping skills more often!

Anger issues can be very destructive to relationships, careers and your health. Even though anger may have initially been used as way to help feel more powerful in the moment, it often leaves you feeling powerLESS in that it often feels like the anger is controlling you rather than you controlling it. It also becomes ineffective as a "problem solving" strategy in the long run. Anger usually hurts more than it helps. I will help you understand you anger - what causes it and why you fall into it so often - and provide the tools and support you need to overcome this issue. Anger may be trauma-based and I take a trauma-informed approach to therapy in general.

We start by identifying your anger triggers & things you have to be angry about. We identify your anger style, including behaviours you engage in when angry. We identify where anger happens in your body & work to help you start to see clues when your anger is starting to manifest. We help you improve your emotional language and vocabulary. We identify new ways you might react to anger. We will explore together your anger process, including analyzing instances when you were angry, the thoughts you had, the related feelings, & the behaviour you engaged in as a result. We will talk about "anger up, anger down," identifying the things you say to yourself that either increases or decrease anger.

Anger is a friend in that it provides us with valuable information about ourselves and our surroundings. It can be understood as our emotional reaction to believing that either we or another have somehow been mistreated. it is most problematic in its expression rather than it its experience. Problematic expressions of anger present in varied forms, from passive forms to expressions of rage. We can learn to promote understanding of the meaning of our anger and the secondary emotions it triggers as well as how to develop alternative coping strategies.

At times anger can feel like an extremely powerful emotion. While anger can serve us by signaling when we’ve encountered injustice or our personal boundaries have been crossed, it can also impact our lives in unwanted ways. In seeking to better manage our anger, we can raise our awareness of what it is signaling while recognizing where it isn’t serving us, and then seek to create new ways of using that energy to create positive change in our lives. Through mindful awareness and behavioural practice, we can learn to respond and react in a manner that is supportive of our greater well-being, personal relationships, and best self.

Helping clients understand their anger - what is triggering them, where this anger is stemming from and healthier ways to cope with the pain and hurt often found behind angry behaviours. Explore various strategies to communicate their emotions (whether it be anger, frustration, pain, hurt, suffering, etc) in a healthier way to those around them. Helping clients understand the impact of their anger and their behaviours on those around them (whether it be in the workplace, with family or friends).

Anger is really the outward expression of internal pain. Often it is easier to be angry than to feel painful emotions such as sadness, loss, and grief. But it is not easy to work through the underlying foundations of anger. By recognizing and understanding the feelings that are driving your anger, I can help you get to the bottom of your anger issues and support positive change in your life.

There are 3 phases in working with Anger 1.Prevention- Attempts to forestall the very onset of anger. 2. Intervention- Aims to reduce the intensity or the duration of anger that has already ignited. 3. Postvention- Aims to discharge any residual anger. Emotions are regulated by re-experiencing, releasing, or converting them into a safe form. We will not only focus on your cognitions and behaviors as entry points but also focus on the modification of affect (your emotions). Anger is an emotion. To have no room in therapy for the feeling component of this emotion is to deny its very essence, your existence. Gestalt perspective- Expression of anger can be very productive. Let out!

I help clients unlock the negative cycle that anger and its accompanying behaviors may cause. In an empathic and supportive environment I help the client understand where the underlying feelings and thoughts originate and loosen the stranglehold that this cycle previously held. Together with cognitive and behavioral strategies we develop new and healthy coping methods to manage these emotions more productively.