Before I became interested in teaching anger classes I was actually kind of hip. I know, hard to believe but I was a total music freak and knew bands and artists that no one ever heard of and would go to concerts several nights a week. Now that I’m nearing the ripe old age of 50 my idea of underground and hip has pretty much become limited to Arcade Fire (strange – I saw them live a couple weeks ago and most of the members of the audience were 10 – 20 years older than the people in the band) and Phoenix.
All this is an introduction to my learning that there is a very popular artist going by the name of Plan B who I had never heard of until I came across a recent interview in the News of the World recently. In a very candid interview, Plan B talks of how anger management therapy helped him to trace the source of his rage to his childhood when his dad left the house when Plan B was 6 years old leaving him to fend for himself in a multi-racial neighborhood full of street fighting. Plan B realized he had a problem after being given a suspended sentence after a bar fight at the age of 26. So he took it upon himself to look in the Yellow Pages under anger classes and found himself an anger management specialist.
What really impressed me about the article was the following quote : “Those layers were an act. By the end, I stopped feeling angry and, when I built my layers of confidence back up it was in the right way”
I think that is such a great quote because it hits at two essential elements of an anger problem : 1) anger is usually a protective mechanism to protect us against some hurt or sense of inadequacy. Men are especially likely to deal with situations that they don’t know how to deal with through anger. 2) Our anger management triggers usually have their roots in childhood. While you don’t have to spend years in therapy to process the roots of your triggers it does help to understand that they very often have more to do with the past than the present.
12 video lessons
