Affiliated COUNSELING AND REFERRAL SERVICE

  DR. Michael Shery, clinical psycholoGY

  2615 Three Oaks Rd, Ste. 2A, 

  Cary, Illinois 60013

www.carypsychology.com  847 275 8236 (24 Hrs);  drmike@carypsychology.com

      Doctoral degree: University of Southern California, 1975

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Expert Evaluations for:

Anxiety - Depression -Marriage -Adolescent-  

- ADHD - Alcohol -Substance Abuse -Anger - Fitness for Duty - Disability -Adoption - Weight Loss Surgery 

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Questions? Call Dr Mike NOW:

                     847 275 8236 (24 Hrs)

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Anger Can Destroy your Future Fast. This is the Best Way to Avoid It!

Therapeutic self talk is a very effective way to reduce your feelings of anger. This approach emphasizes managing your thought processes. 

After all, unhealthy thinking can trigger your anger and prolong it, long after it should have passed. Self talk is used to prevent and astutely manage your angry reactions.

Your self-talk or thinking patterns become conscious mental self-instructions which guide the way you cope with aggravation and stress. Used diligently, they can become very powerful anger management and coping skills.

To implement this cognitive self-talk treatment, first dissect your anger experience into its discrete parts. It is important that you deal with your anger experience one piece at a time, rather than all at once.

Here is the sequence of steps to do so:

1.  Provocation Preparation.

This is relevant when you know ahead of time that you will confront a trigger to your anger. However, this does not always apply because anger is sometimes triggered without any warning.

Keep an anger diary.  In doing so, you will discover that much of the time, you get angry about things that happen repetitively.

By using foresight in anticipating a provocative situation, you can then design a strategy for coping with it ahead of time. You can consciously form a specific thought about it or attitude that will facilitate managing your emotions constructively.

2. Confrontation with the Trigger.

This applies when you actually experience the anger trigger, which might occur suddenly, or gradually. At this stage, you are aware that you are in an anger-triggering situation. Important:  Before you explode, use your early signs of anger as signals or signs to consciously start using your anger management skills.

3. Coping with High Physical Arousal which is Triggered by Anger-Enhancing Chemicals.

Being agitated by a triggering situation is normal, however, as the provocation progresses, adrenaline and other fight-enabling hormones are produced.  Unfortunately, because of this, in the absence of cognitive vigilance, your responses can become unnecessarily self-destructive.

This crucial stage mandates awareness and cognitive vigilance, which will then trigger you to consciously implement your all-important cognitive management skills.

4. Reflecting on the Anger-Provoking Event.

After the fact, reflect on what upset you and assess the effect it has had on you.  Your thoughts and feelings will, likely, be determined by how the conflict was or was not resolved.

If it remains unresolved, your continued cognitive vigilance will be necessary. If the conflict was resolved you will likely feel satisfied.

Therapeutically-oriented cognitive self-instructions enable you to direct your thoughts, feelings, and actions so that you deal with a conflict-laden situation constructively, not destructively.
In this process, you develop thoughts or cognitions that are designed to handle a particular situation in a healthier manner.

Mental self-instructions are consciously used by champion athletes to guide their attention, to promote ease and to trigger skillful execution of their movements.  The goal is to create self, or mental instructions that are uniquely customized to calm yourself in the face of anger-triggering provocations.

When available, be sure to use self-therapy kits (STKs), workbooks, your therapist or other therapeutic mechanisms to create sets of mental self-instructions that will enable you to achieve effective anger control.  Remember, anger takes place as a series of separate components, so it is crucial that you dissect the situation into its discrete parts.

You will probably discover that you perform better in some stages than in others. Nevertheless, managing the separate phases, one at a time, will make the process of managing your anger easier, more understandable and will enable you to customize your self-statements for each unique situation.

5.  Therapeutic Aides

Besides reading, taking classes or consulting a therapist, one way to learn how to do this is by using self-therapy kits (STKs).  They are compact self-help programs that provide valuable ways to write your own mental self-instructions. 

They teach these skills by using any one or any combination of the following:  CDs, DVDs, MP3s, e-books, workbooks, audios, videos etc.  STKs are used at home, are self-paced and are available 24/7.  They provide psychological and self-instruction tutoring and use visualization, behavioral exercises and systems to monitor your progress. 

They are educational in nature and, consequently, no side-effects are produced, and there are no prescriptions or doctor visits involved.  You may even want to test them before participating in any counseling; after all, they may resolve your anger by themselves.

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