– Angry Men: Therapy as a Last Resort

Last Updated on June 26, 2013 by Chris Roberts

If you were forced to come to therapy for your “anger problem,” then you are in the correct line.

References “How to Heal the Angry Brain.  Mad Men.” an article in Psychotherapy Networker magazine by Ron Potter-Efron

It can seem like common sense that angry men are some of the last people to set foot in a therapist’s office.  It can be common sense to such a degree that no one ever really stops to understand why this is the case.  Or more importantly, it can be common sense in such an unquestioned manner that angry men are never given the opportunity to explore how or when they became angry.  Most angry men seem to be described as, “He has just always been this way.”  And it follows that not many sane people would be interested in going to therapy to simply learn “how bad I am,” or in this case, “how angry I am.”

But what if, instead, anger could be seen for what it really is: a defense mechanism.  What if many of these men, at least in the beginning, used anger as a way to protect them from being hurt again by someone who was abusive or harmful to them when they were younger?  What if anger became something these men used to feel more powerful when they genuinely had no, or very little, power?

Ron Potter-Efron describes it this way,

“Anger is the emotion they can trust, the one that might keep danger at bay. As they grew up, they continued to use anger to make people they regard as dangerous back away.”

It then becomes easy to extrapolate how this turns out.  Angry man, because of his inherent distrust, lashes out at a person.  That person (as most all of us would) retaliates in anger.  The angry man is proved right that people are dangerous and he must protect himself by using anger.  The cycle is self-perpetuating and without an intentional, concerted effort to interrupt this cycle, it just continues unabated.

Most angry men who come to therapy are defensive, abrasive, argumentative, and protective of their right to be angry.  Of course they are!  They have learned, and are extremely adept at, how to keep people away.  They have years of training and tens if not hundreds of thousands of experiences where their anger worked exactly as it should: to keep other people from hurting them deeper than when they were hurt the first time.

Unfortunately, life doesn’t let us get away so easily.  We all find ways to fall back in love, and when we love, we set ourselves up for disappointment, pain, and hurt.  If you, or someone you know, is stuck in the cycles of anger, remember that it wasn’t always so.  And there is help.  And there is hope.  In a future article, I will discuss a different way of approaching therapy for working with anyone stuck in the habits of anger.