Anger management in Counselling and dealing with rage

As a Counsellor I have generally come across little in the way of exercises to constructively deal with rage which a client who has Counselling may feel inside so it is that which I wish to draw attention to and make the focus of this article due to experiencing it’s importance through my practice.  Having read a great deal of Psychology, Spirituality, self help books, it wasn’t until I read ‘Life Works’ by Amanda Ferguson that I was able to find an exercise to release trapped rage and such seems to potentially be of high value to people going through a self recovery process.

This exercise involves standing with one foot in front of the other, ideally in front of a bed and holding a pillow in both hands.  The person doing this exercise is then to rock forwards and push the pillow onto the bed and make any kind of sound throughout this motion then rock back and place the back front down again temporarily before repeating.  Trapped rage can then bubble up then can change to anger and pain.  Clients can healthily cry during this process and experience a kind of existential pain as they are able to find strength and new meaning from their past and new more constructive ways to move on.

The idea of this is that it gives the opportunity to release the more potentially destructive rage clients may have inside them from a disempowered past.  This book describes and illustrates this in terms of a person carrying buckets of water and the ideal state is for us to be balanced and holding a bucket comfortably in each hand whereas someone who feels rage is more out of control with the buckets overflowing and us being out of control.

This can be a frightening process to do as clients feel different levels of out of control rage inside them which can come out.  It is important to feel in a safe environment to do this exercise.  Since having Counselling in the first place takes an amount of strength and courage it seems a positive way to continue the process.

Without dealing with our trapped rage, the rage will always have some underlying control over us.  I have heard it said in analogies such as ‘taming the beast’ and being able to make this work for us and to our own highest good rather than the other way around. 

It seems important to acknowledge where our feelings may be to one degree or another out of control and then to compartmentalise time to complete such an exercise as part of a personal development program.

In terms of the whole self recovery process readers may find my article on co-dependence and some of my blog posts can fit in well with this process here.

Kind regards

Philip

www.newbeginningstherapy.co.nz