Dr. Ryan Fuller and I practice in New York City. So a question I get a lot is, "how do I avoid
things that make you angry." The first answer is not one many people like which is probably,
"you don't.” Because the bottom line is lots and lots of things can upset us. It's a stressful
world which in fact lowers our threshold for getting upset. And so that's not going to happen.
I will say in anger management, one of the first tools we teach early on to clients is in fact to
be able to contract with people in their lives for a timeout where if in fact they're getting
incredibly angry and they're afraid they're going to say something they might regret or
do something they might regret, they in fact signal their partner. For instance,
if it is a romantic partner that we're talking about, they're going to in fact step away
to avoid the situation that's triggering the anger, calm themselves down and then reengage.
So avoiding anger triggers at first or escaping from them can be a useful short term strategy.
But ultimately in anger management what we want to do is we want to teach people to be able to stay
engaged and cope and either prevent themselves from becoming as angry in the first place but to
learn to be able to modulate and decrease their anger in the moment when the crisis
is there and assertively then communicate and problem solve actively as they need to.
So again, in the short term it might be okay to avoid things that make you angry depending on
the certain circumstance, certainly we don't want to make something worse than it has to
be. But eventually we want to really learn the strategies and the tools so that we can
in fact engage the very things that upset us before and deal with them in pro-social ways.