Content area
Full Text
Cognitive-behavioral therapy (CBT) is the most common approach for the treatment of problematic anger today. CBT embraces an epistemology of control, which requires a dualistic separation of cognition from emotion and problem from self, and sets up an oppositional relationship between the client and his or her anger. This article offers a systemic alternative, a unique relational orientation that helps clients develop a different and more flexible relationship to their anger, one that restores a connected sense of self. To illustrate this distinctive approach, we present a case study of a young woman referred for explosive anger.
Terry1 contacted our university-based family therapy clinic in search of an anger management class because, "I want to get rid of my anger before I kill someone." Terry's lawyer had recommended therapy following her arrest and a charge of terroristic threats resulting from a physical fight with her boyfriend, Mike, and his parents. Her attorney, preparing her for her first court appearance, suggested that the judge would look upon her more favorably if she were already involved in anger management work.
During her first session, Terry described years of destruction wreaked on people and property as a result of the rage that had been blazing inside ever since she could remember. With each story of injury and damage, she also told of efforts to stop being "an angry person." But it was getting worse. Nothing worked, and as the years passed, each new episode only highlighted her failure to control her anger, and, along with the people in her life, she was feeling increasingly anxious about her inability to get rid of her anger. Now, as she told her therapist, she was itching to kill something. She had her eye on the neighbor's cat. By the time Terry came to our clinic at the age of 27, she identified herself as hopelessly angry and dangerously out of control.
Had Terry gone someplace other than our family therapy clinic, she likely would have been treated with a form of cognitive-behavioral therapy for an anger management problem. However, the relational orientation that guided our work with Terry and what we offer in this article, is not a model of therapy or a technique but, rather, a way of thinking...