Anger Management Therapy Program for Urban High School Students

Introduction

Sources of anger among urban high school students are numerous, including various stressors associated with urban living, school situations, adolescence itself, and family dynamics. Any effort to address the problem of anger among these students needs to give them the tools to control their own responses and to cope with the various stressors they encounter. These young people are old enough to know what sorts of stressors have the greatest effect on them, even if they have not been able to avoid the consequences and even if they are allowing their anger to guide them into antisocial or self-destructive behavior. They likely simply lack the knowledge or tools that would allow them to take control of their emotions and direct those emotions toward more positive outlets — what Golden (2003) describes as healthy anger.

The program described here provides these tools and is geared toward enabling students to recognize what affects them, to be more immediately aware of their own responses, and to change those responses into a more positive form. As Thomas (2001) notes, psychoeducational interventions such as anger management are not really therapy but a different form of training, one in which the leader serves as teacher and coach rather than as therapist. This kind of intervention has a greater potential for behavior change by increasing knowledge, providing a new perspective, and giving students opportunities to learn and practice specific tools and strategies.

Such training is typically provided to groups, and it is thought valuable to allow individuals to maintain eye contact with another person while learning to control their breathing and voice when expressing anger. Students are better able to learn to express their angry feelings when others are available to support, empathize, provide feedback, and role-play problematic conflicts. Students in the group experience the safety of the group and gain greater confidence that they can enact new anger behaviors in real-world situations — which is the goal of this approach. It is also usually recommended that students engage in concurrent introspection through an anger journal or log.

Rationale for Anger Management in Schools

The specific purpose of an anger management program is to help high-risk students decrease their drug involvement, increase their school performance, and decrease depression and suicidal thoughts and behaviors. These high-risk students tend to have more negative school experiences, greater drug involvement, more emotional problems, more negative peer pressures, and a greater likelihood of family dysfunction. Students in this category are at increased risk of performing poorly in school, being suspended or expelled, and having frequent absences.

Schools also benefit from programs like anger management through increased student performance and attendance. Students who participate in these programs are more likely to have positive school experiences, higher self-esteem, and a greater sense of belonging. When students feel good about their school experiences and can take pride in their accomplishments, they perform better in testing situations. This in turn will be reflected in higher scores on mandatory achievement testing and will increase the school's ability to meet applicable educational standards.

The process of anger management should also become a process of self-control and self-direction that individual students carry forward into later educational experiences and into life, providing a more balanced and rational emotional life from the time of training onward. The intent is not simply to address existing behavior but to provide tools so that each individual can continue to control anger and direct that energy into more positive pursuits. The negative consequences of uncontrolled anger — such as drug abuse or alcoholism — can also be reduced or eliminated when individuals have absorbed this training into their personal behaviors across a wide variety of situations.

Use of Anger Management Therapy

Various approaches have been applied to controlling anger, and aspects of these have been incorporated into the specific approach of Anger Management Therapy. The cognitive approach is described by Ellis (1971) and Glasser (1975), and more recent techniques have built on their work through the contributions of Kriegel and Kriegel (1984), McKay, Davis, and Fanning (1981), and others. Cognitive therapies ask the individual to become aware of thoughts, feelings, and actions in various settings; evaluate whether those responses are irrational or rational; and then execute future behavior based on a view of reality. Common elements include:

1) recognizing thoughts, feelings, and reactions to stressful situations; 2) identifying what the reaction was based on; 3) rehearsing future situations based on rational beliefs and information rather than irrational fears; and 4) performing cognitively corrected behaviors.

Given that stress contributes to the development of anger, many suggest stress reduction as a way of addressing the problem. Brott (1994) notes that experts recommend that managers focus on the causes of stress rather than on employees' reactions to stress — treat the cause, not the result. If employees are working in a dysfunctional environment, they will burn out regardless of how well prepared they may be. Improved lines of communication tend to have a strong corrective effect. In the late 1980s, companies that eliminated layers of communication found that when employees had frequent personal contact with supervisors and believed that they made a real difference, workplace stress was reduced immediately. Many companies have used this concept in creating integrated strategies to prevent stress — using cohesive teams that allow members to share common goals and accountability as a buffer against stress (Brott, 1994, p. 81).

The state of affairs in the workplace is also related to how people behave in school. Stress often begins long before a person enters the workforce. An annual survey by the Higher Education Research Institute at UCLA's Graduate School of Education and Information Studies, conducted in 1999, found a record 30.2 percent of freshmen reporting that they felt "frequently overwhelmed by all I have to do," compared with 29.6 percent in 1998. This continued an upward trend that began in 1985, when only 16 percent reported feeling stressed. In addition, a record 24.7 percent of freshmen reported some or a very good likelihood that they would work full time while in college. When broken down by gender, 38.8 percent of women reported feeling frequently overwhelmed compared with 20 percent of men — a gap that may reflect differences in time use, financial concern, and domestic responsibilities.

While stress is a major cause of anger, it is not the only one. Reducing stress may not eliminate anger responses, and stress itself can only be reduced, not eliminated — it is simply a part of life. Reducing stress is a good beginning, but learning to turn stress into a positive force is a more valuable lesson. Similarly, anger cannot be eliminated but can be channeled toward more constructive outcomes, which is what Anger Management Therapy attempts to achieve by training individuals in how to handle anger and its causes.

To a degree, such training is similar to biofeedback in that the individual becomes more aware of both physical and psychological processes as they relate to stressors and to reactions such as anger. Such training also involves helping the individual gain power over his or her own actions rapidly — teaching quick situational assessment, implementation of control strategies, and appropriate channeling of energy. The process is not treatment in the usual sense, because it does not simply fix a problem. Instead, it teaches the individual how to handle a problem that will recur, just as stress will always recur in life. Recognizing that some things are worth getting angry about and some are not is only a beginning, for even when anger is justified, it must be controlled and channeled toward positive ends.

Anger Management trains the individual to achieve alone what may, at first, only be achieved in a group setting with a coach's assistance. The goal is for the individual to be able to manage anger without such assistance and to do so before that anger leads to personal problems, bad behavior, violence, or self-destructive behavior.

The objectives of this training are to reduce expressions of anger on the part of participants; to instruct them in how to cope with the causes of anger; to show them how to assess and monitor their own reactions to various stressors and anger-inducing situations; to substitute positive behaviors for expressions of anger; and thereby to reduce anger-associated behaviors, ranging from conflict with others to self-destructive behavior. In the training, the first objective is to help participants recognize how much damage their anger is doing to themselves and others, and to use the group setting to engage all students in the process. The progression of sessions moves from helping students understand the nature of the problem to assessing how well they are able to apply what they have learned in daily life without the support of the group or coach. The ultimate objective is to take each student from needing external assistance to a state of autonomy in which he or she can control and manage anger at the moment of provocation.

Groups usually consist of five to eight persons at a time. A larger group might be less manageable and would not provide the one-on-one coaching that is often needed. A smaller group would not provide the diversity of experience and willingness to participate that serves both the group and each individual member. In addition, time is a factor. Sufficient time is needed to train the students, but those students do not have unlimited time and must be brought along as rapidly as possible without shortchanging the process. The eight weeks allotted for the program described below are sufficient to give students the tools they need and to help them learn to use those tools, while also fitting within the time frame of a normal semester or quarter during which a group can be held together.