Anger Recovery Barriers and Obstacles

Often those that struggle the most with anger also struggle with taking full responsibility for their anger. Here are four ways that you may be avoiding taking full responsibility for your anger and being unsuccessful in anger recovery.

Justifying Your Anger

An angry person may find an excuse for his actions instead of owning what he did. The basic message here is, “I can’t help it. It’s just the way I am.” Justifying is similar to blaming, except justifying doesn’t blame a person. Justifying blames a situation. It sends the message, “it’s not my fault because there is nothing else I could have done.” But if you are justifying, then you are making excuses. You are not owning your anger, and that means that your justifying is going to get in the way of you ever being successful in controlling your anger.

Minimizing Your Anger

You take whatever happened and make it seem like it was smaller than it really was. You point out that it could have been worse. The problem here is that you are not taking full responsibility for what you did. If you are minimizing then you are not owning up to your anger, or at least the full extent of it. You are making your problem look much smaller than it really is. You re downplaying your actions. And if you are doing that, then you are not owning them.

Shifting The Focus Of Your Anger

You try to take the heat off of what you did by changing the focus to someone else. You put the attention back on the person who brought it up, or change it to another person. If you are shifting the focus, you are not owning your anger because you are changing the subject to make it about someone else. you are taking the attention off of what you did  and making it about another person.

Waiting For Anger Problem To Go Away

You sit around hoping that your problem will go away on its own without you having to take the effort to fix it. You are crossing your fingers that your problems will just disappear without you having to do the work to make them better. The basic idea is that you are waiting for someone to take care of you anger problem for you . Once that happens, you think your problems will be solved and you won’t have to change anything. This is passivity, not working on your problem. Your strategy is to sit and wait and hope for the best, but that’s not really a strategy at all. Your action is to wait for someone else to act. Doesn’t sound like a great strategy, does it?

Justifying, Minimizing, Shifting the Focus, and Waiting

All four of these: justifying, minimizing, shifting the focus, and waiting are serious problems for you if you want to learn to control your anger. These statements are extremely common for people with anger problems. They seem like they help in the moment because they take the heat off. They give us a reason and an excuse. These four obstacles make it easier for us to deal with our anger because we don’t have to look at ourselves in the mirror. We have a reason why we did what we did .

Anger Management Counseling

We recommend that you seek counseling for anger management that works. The AMEND anger management program works. Call today to setup an initial counseling consultation to find the best way to management your anger.