Anger is a normal and healthy emotion experienced by basically everyone. However, for many people, it can lead to stress, poor responses to input, and out of control emotional flare-ups that lead to drinking in order to control those emotions. Most of us are familiar with the urge to have a drink to cool down from anger – and that feeling can be an extremely difficult trigger when you’re in recovery.
Learning how to manage anger, usually through therapy and anger management classes, is therefore a very common part of addiction treatment. In fact, more and more treatment centers now offer tools like anger management, stress management, mindfulness-based stress reduction, and emotional regulation as normal elements of addiction recovery.
Here’s how and why anger management plays a role in maintaining your sobriety.
Uncontrolled Anger can Trigger Relapse
Anger is a very normal emotion. However, if you’re not in control, it can be overwhelming and destructive. For many of us, anger results in poor emotional regulation, extreme stress response, and learned behavior patterns. Each of these can result in triggering an episode of drinking. For example:
- Out-of-control anger is often learned from parents or results from not being taught emotional regulation. This means that people with anger management problems often have poor emotional regulation, so any emotion can be overwhelming. Without mechanisms to regulate emotions like anger, it’s easy to resort to substance abuse to manage your anger and other feelings.
- Anger can be a symptom of post-traumatic stress disorder and complex PTSD, both of which require additional treatment. Both also greatly increase your risk of substance abuse as you look for means of coping with things that are out of your control.
- Anger greatly elevates your stress response which increases cravings for substances that release dopamine and serotonin in the brain. As a result, high stress can result in a relapse and is, in fact, one of the number one causes of relapse. If you can’t resolve your anger, you will experience stress and it will increase your risk of relapse.
- Behavior patterns, often known as habits, can be extremely powerful predictors of behavior. You’ll know this if you’ve ever driven the same way to work for years and then tried to take a different route – or found yourself autopiloting past the liquor store on your way home. If you have a habit, you’re more likely to do something automatically, and that means turning to unhealthy coping mechanisms like alcohol. If you’re used to responding to anger by drinking, you’re more likely to continue to do so, even if you have already had substance abuse treatment.
Essentially, there are a lot of ways that anger can contribute to relapse.
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How Does Anger Management Help?
You know how anger is detrimental to sobriety, but how does anger management help? Unfortunately, there’s no quick fix to anger problems or behaviors related to drinking around anger. Instead, you’ll have to work towards slow improvements that help you in the long-term. Let’s take a look:
- Identifying triggers for anger – You’ll want to know what causes anger and why. In some cases, anger is a justified response to being treated unfairly. In other cases, anger is a response to stress, like traffic. For many people, you’ll want to spend time writing down when you get angry and what caused it for a few weeks before you can honestly say what triggers anger. Taking time to write that out will almost always be a part of anger management treatment as well.
- Identifying what anger triggers – Once you know what triggers your anger, you’ll work to identify what anger triggers in you. For example, how do you behave? Do you lose control? Do you use drugs or alcohol to come down from anger? Do you come out of anger only to experience stress and anxiety? Identifying this will allow you to identify what you’re trying to improve on so it’s also a normal part of anger management.
- Developing coping strategies – You’ll work with a counselor or therapist to specifically work on coping strategies that help you with your triggers and behaviors. For example, you can learn to take time-outs, to practice relaxation techniques, to respond in different ways, or to do other things first before responding to anger. For example, if you experience problems with anger while driving, you might be asked to take 30 seconds to concentrate on breathing, to sing a song, or to play a song and listen to it before you’re allowed to redirect attention back to anger. The idea is usually “acknowledge” “Okay I am angry”, “redirect” “Let me do something else for a few minutes” and “check in” “How do I feel now”?
- Developing behaviors – It’s sometimes going to be important to develop a list of behaviors you are okay with and those you are not okay with. It’s important to be able to say to yourself “I am not comfortable responding in this way, so I am going to try to do something else”. Setting boundaries for yourself means you’ll have tools to help yourself realize when you’re going out of control, and that will help you to work towards being in control.
- Setting goals – Finally, you’re always going to want to set specific and measurable goals for anger management. That can look like “I will practice breathing exercises every day”, “I will do a calming sport every day”, “I will take 30 seconds before I respond to anger”, “I will learn to stop responding to anger by shouting”, etc. If you can establish steps, you can work towards them, measure your progress, and see how it contributes to your goals.
Eventually, anger management means understanding yourself, what causes reactions, and what your reactions are. From there, you can more easily get therapy and counseling to help you modulate those behaviors. Having those emotional regulation tools will help you to stay in control, will reduce the stress you feel about anger, and may even help you to experience anger less. For example, if you experience anger about small things like someone cutting you off while driving, redirection and doing something else for a bit might save you anger for the rest of the day. That will pay off in improving your mood and decreasing your need to relax – because you’ll be less worked up. Of course, what you need to work on will depend on your situation, how you’re managing anger currently, and what’s causing problems. In some cases, you need better anger management skills and in others you need to step out of situations that are causing problems with anger. Your counselor will help you with that.
Anger management can help you maintain sobriety, especially if you have a habit of drinking after episodes of anger. The more stressed you feel after getting angry, the more that’s likely to be true. The good news is that anger and emotional management is more and more often a standard part of substance abuse treatment, so you’ll have more options to get anger management worked into your normal treatment and aftercare. Of course, you can also go to a program that’s completely separate from substance abuse, just keep in mind that it will touch less on specific overlaps with addiction and relapse. Good luck getting help.
