Anger in Therapy
Anger is one of the most misunderstood emotions in clinical work, and in ordinary life. It is routinely treated as the problem when it is almost always a signal. The question is not how to eliminate anger but what it is pointing at. This is also why conventional anger management, focused on techniques to suppress or contain the feeling, so often fails: it treats the signal as the fault.
Anger as information
Anger arises when a boundary has been crossed, when something of value has been threatened, or when helplessness has reached its limit. It is the psyche’s way of registering that something is wrong. In this sense, anger is not dysfunction. It is function.
The difficulty is that many people have learned (from childhood, from culture, from repeated experience) that their anger is unacceptable. So they suppress it, redirect it, turn it inward, or express it in ways that cause damage.
The anger beneath the anger
In clinical work, what presents as anger is frequently covering something else: grief, fear, shame, helplessness. The person who cannot stop raging is often a person who cannot yet cry. The work is not to remove the anger but to follow it down to what lies underneath.
“Anger that cannot be spoken becomes depression, or it becomes explosions. Neither is useful. In therapy, we try to find the language for it, not to discharge it, but to understand what it is protecting.” , Philippe Jacquet
Anger management, a different approach
Most anger-management courses teach techniques: count to ten, breathe, walk away. These can help in the moment, but they rarely reach why the anger keeps returning. For many people, particularly high-achieving professionals and men who are expected to stay in control, anger is the one feeling that gets through, the visible edge of grief, exhaustion, powerlessness or old injury that has no other outlet.
The work here is not a class in suppression. It is understanding what your anger is protecting and giving the underlying material somewhere to go, so the anger no longer has to carry it. That is what makes change hold, rather than white-knuckling it. Sessions are available in person in London and online worldwide, in English and French, in complete confidence, which suits people whose position makes discretion essential.
Anger and the body
Anger is one of the most physically alive emotions. It has a location in the body, the chest, the jaw, the hands. Working with it often requires attending to what the body is doing, not only what the mind is saying.
Book a consultation with Philippe Jacquet, psychotherapist and Jungian analyst, in London and online.