Manage Your Anger

faire face à la colère basée sur la réponse de notre cerveau et nos expériences d’apprentissage précoce

In the first three chapters of this book, we’ll take a close look at anger through the lens of compassion focused therapy. We will begin to understand it as the product of emotion-regulation systems that have evolved over millions of years, and we’ll explore how these ancient systems can interact with our abilities to think and fantasize to trap us in cycles of anger and hostility. We will also explore other emotion-regulation systems that can help us to balance our anger with other emotions and gain control over the way we think and feel. Later, I’ll introduce the concepts of compassion and the compassionate self, and a variety of exercises for working with your anger to cultivate a calm, confident, wise, and compassionate mind.

Some of the practices and approaches used in this book are unique to CFT, and some of them may be recognizable to you already. For example, assertiveness training and techniques for changing how we think are drawn from cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT). The idea behind CFT is not to reinvent the wheel. Rather, it seeks to provide us with a way of transforming ourselves that is compatible with powerful and established methods of change, while also adding something new—a compassionate understanding of how our minds work. My goal in this book is to help you develop your compassionate self so that you can cope with life’s challenges in a way that allows you to manage your anger instead of being controlled by it.

Now extend your awareness to your emotions. How are you feeling right now? Interested? Excited? Irritated? Bored? What thoughts are you having?

Finally, consider your motivation for reading this book. Why did you pick it up, open it, and start reading? Was it curiosity? Have you struggled with anger and are perhaps looking for something that could help? Maybe someone gave this book to you and asked you to read it. Maybe you’re reading it because you know someone else who struggles with anger—a friend, family member, or, if you are a mental health professional, a client or patient—and you’re hoping to learn how to help them.

Consider your motivation and see if you can work with it. See if you can approach this activity—reading this book and doing the exercises it contains—with the motivation to be better able to understand yourself and others, and to be able to help yourself. Imagine doing this so that you can learn to cope more effectively with the difficult emotions that you will experience during your life, so that you can exist in the world in a way that is kind and helpful both to yourself and to everyone you encounter.