Anger

All of us feel angry from time to time. Maybe you ask yourself why is that? Anger is a basic emotion and has its evolutionary origins. So yes, our great-great-grandparents also felt angry sometimes. That anger can sometimes be very strong and feel overpowering. Thus, depending on our coping and anger management skills, it can inflict negative mood in us/others and prompt some inadequate decisions and reactions. Consequently, while feeling angry we can react aggressively – behaving in a way to intentionally hurt or destroy something/someone.

Parents who come to our Centre often ask us for advice on how to calm an angry child. Problems come when parents also feel overpowered by their powerful and strong emotion, like their child is, and hence react inadequately. It’s important to note that children learn to regulate their emotions by looking at how their parents do it. For example, if a child is having an outburst of anger and is yelling at others and then their parents react in a similar way – it will encourage a child to adopt their parent’s reactions and continue yelling when angry. Therefore, it is important that parents become aware of that fact and their own regulation skills to (if it is needed) improve them. By doing that, children will adopt these adequate reactions.

It is important to know that no one is perfect and everyone can make mistakes! If you as a parent react impulsively, it is crucial to admit that you made a mistake and apologize to your child. This way,  you are sending your child a message that even though he/she makes a mistake, it is important to take responsibility for their behaviour – admit their mistake and apologizes for it.

We people, especially grown-ups, often find ourselves immediately trying to make child not-angry. Sometimes we give in to please angry child or feel the need to do anything to calm him/her down. But by doing this, we make several mistakes. First, frequently giving-in to child’s requests can consequently prompt negative responses to family boundaries and negatively impact their learning of adequate behaviours and self-regulation. The second mistake is disallowing/negating their feeling of anger and not talking about it. Every time your child is feeling angry and is showing it somehow – it should be communicated and acknowledged. By doing that, we are sending them a message that feeling of anger is natural and that you are caring for their needs and feelings. If a child is still wanting to express its feelings through aggressive behaviours, it is necessary to set them clear boundaries and propose adequate and acceptable ways of expressing anger.

Remember that feeling of anger is natural and normal! We want to encourage you to acknowledge it and learn to manage it. On this note, we are proposing you with our today’s activity – for BIG and SMALL! You can find attached 12 cards that can help you with your anger-management skills. Cut them out from a paper and, every time you are starting to feel anger in your body, take one of the cards and follow it to manage your feelings.

Anger management skills were downloaded from TherapistAid.

Your Center Luka Ritz