Not a class, and not court-ordered. Individual therapy about what the anger is actually doing.
Anger has a worse reputation than it deserves. It's a normal emotion with a real function — it registers that a boundary got crossed, that something isn't right, that something matters. People who can't access it at all tend to struggle as much as people who can't contain it.
The trouble is usually intensity, timing, or aim: it arrives at ten when the situation called for a three, it fires at the wrong person, or it turns inward and runs as self-contempt. Suppression doesn't fix any of that — it just changes where the pressure goes.
Not a diagnostic checklist, only an evaluation can do that. But these are the things people describe most often when anger is what they end up working on.
Anger is often the emotion that's permitted when others aren't. For a lot of people — men especially, though not only — it's the one feeling that was safe to have out loud. Fear, grief, humiliation, and need get routed through it because they had nowhere else to go.
It also tends to travel with a trauma history. A nervous system that learned to move fast to danger doesn't stop doing that when the danger ends, and what reads as a temper is sometimes a threat response with nothing left to respond to. That's covered in more depth on the complex trauma page.
We'll start with some education about anger: how it shows up in your body, how to catch it early, and what grounding skills get you back to steady.
Then we'll get curious about where it comes from. What sets it off? Why does it feel so overwhelming? When did this start, and why?
The goal isn't to turn you into someone who never gets angry. It's to put some room between the feeling and what you do with it. We'll look honestly at how it's been landing on the people around you, and we'll do that without piling on. Shame is fuel here, not a brake. If beating yourself up worked, it would have worked by now.
And if you're here because someone else thinks you should be, say so. We can start there. You don't have to agree with their read to get something out of looking at it.
What usually changes first is the seconds before it fires. Noticing it in your body early enough to use a skill instead of already being in it.
In our first few sessions I'll ask questions so I can actually understand you, not just the anger that brought you in. We'll talk about why you reached out, what happened along the way in your life that contributed to how you got here, and other parts of your world so I can see the full picture.
We'll also talk about how therapy works with me, and I'll answer any questions you have. Then we'll start discussing goals. If you don't have clear goals yet, that's completely fine. We'll figure that out together.
No. I don't offer court-mandated anger management classes and I don't provide completion certificates or progress reports to courts, probation, or employers. What I offer is individual therapy, which is a different thing with a different purpose.
Anger management is typically a structured, time-limited class focused on behavioral control, and it's often court-ordered. Individual therapy takes longer and goes after the question of what the anger is doing — what it protects, what it covers, and where it learned to fire that fast.
We'll talk through your experience without judgment and look at what feels true to you. Sometimes the people in our lives can see things about us we can't see ourselves. You don't have to accept everything someone says about you. We'll just take an honest look at the feedback that matters to you and see whether it tells you something worth knowing.
Yes. Anger turned inward is just as common and much less discussed — contempt for yourself, a running critical monologue, resentment that never gets said out loud. It doesn't have to be loud to be worth working on.
No, not always. But a lot of the time, yes. When it shows up more than you'd like, there's usually another reason for it. Fear, shame, pain you've kept quiet, or something else entirely underneath. What's on the surface is the anger. What's under it tends to be a whole lot more.
Yes, as individual outpatient therapy. See the insurance and fees page for the ten plans I'm in-network with.
A free 15-minute call. Not a class, not a lecture, and nothing gets reported to anyone.
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