Something comes up again and again in my work with men with anger issues, and it tends to arrive a few months in, once things are already getting better. The complaint isn’t that therapy isn’t working. It’s that it is working, and it’s tiring.
One (fictionalised) man put it more plainly than most. He was clever and successful at work, and he’d been angry for as long as he could remember. He’d come to believe the temper was simply who he was: some men are like that, and he was one of them. Over the months, something shifted. He’d feel the heat rising and go out for a walk instead of saying the thing he’d regret. He started finding words for what sat underneath the anger: feeling sidelined at home, feeling stupid, feeling he’d let people down. His partner noticed. His children stopped reading his face before deciding whether to speak. He could see it working and he wanted to keep going.
Then one week he said: “This is really hard. I can’t just live on autopilot any more. I’ve got to think about what I’m feeling, what it’s doing to everyone, and what I’m going to do about it. All the time.”
I understood why it felt like that. I also thought he had it the wrong way round.
Does therapy make life harder?
When things start to change, you notice the changes, but it can also feel like hard work. You’re checking yourself all the time. I think of this as the phase where you’re building a new autopilot, and it hasn’t kicked in yet. That takes time and practice.
Then compare it with how exhausting it was being angry all the time, and the effect that had on the people around you.
Living on the old autopilot is the expensive option
When a man runs on the old autopilot with his anger, other people end up managing it. His partner learns to check his mood as he walks through the door. The children learn what not to bring up at dinner. Colleagues work around him. And after every outburst comes the clearing up: the apologies, the silences, and the trust that takes a long time to return and never quite gets back to where it was.
All of that is hard work. It’s just that other people are doing most of it.
It costs him too. On autopilot, you react to whatever happens, and that decides where you end up. You can want a close marriage and children who trust you, and still keep ending up in the same row. That’s a hard way to live.
Where anger in men often comes from
Many men with anger issues learned early on that anger was the one feeling they were allowed. Hurt wasn’t acceptable, and neither was fear or shame. Those feelings didn’t go away. They got folded into the anger, so the anger ended up carrying all of them.
That’s why I don’t see anger as something to get rid of. It’s often doing the job of every feeling that never got a name. When a man starts to find those names, the anger has less to carry, and it usually settles without being forced.
This pattern was learned between people: in families, at school, among other boys. It tends to change between people too, whether that’s in the relationship with a therapist or, in couples work, between partners with a therapist in the room. The man in my example didn’t change by reading about anger. He changed by being angry, frightened and embarrassed in front of someone who stayed, and then trying a bit of that at home.
Does therapy make you feel worse before it gets better?
Sometimes. With this kind of work, the “worse” is usually noticing more. You start to catch the moments you used to miss: the flicker before the outburst, the look on your partner’s face, the feeling of being small just before the temper goes. That can be uncomfortable when you’ve spent years not needing to see it.
That’s different from therapy that isn’t right for you. If sessions keep leaving you overwhelmed, or you feel judged or unsafe, tell your therapist. A good one will want to know.
What’s on the other side
The new autopilot does kick in. What starts out as effort becomes how you are. You stop having to check every feeling, because you know yourself better, and that comes with you without much thought.
What he was afraid of was turning into some careful, controlled version of himself. In fact the old autopilot was the controlled one: the same reactions, the same rows, the same distance, over and over. What he was getting was a chance to be himself, with people who could finally get close to him. Most men I work with say they wouldn’t go back.
Counselling for men with anger issues in Bude and online
If you’d like to look at your own anger first, Why Am I So Angry? is a free ten-minute reflection. It follows one recent moment back to what was underneath it, and leaves you with a sentence of your own.
I work with individuals in person in Bude and online across the UK, with a particular interest in men’s mental health and the ways men are taught to handle, or not handle, what they feel. Some men come on their own. Others come with their partner, and couples counselling can work very well when anger is part of the picture, because its effect on the relationship is there in the room and we can work with it as it happens.
If you’d like to know more about how I work, or just talk it through, the first step is a free phone call. No forms and no commitment beyond the conversation.
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