Most people who look for help with anger are not angry people.
They are people who are calm nine times out of ten and then, on the tenth, react in a way that does not match what happened - and who spend the hours afterwards going over it. The shouting in the car. The thing said to a child that they can still hear themselves saying. The email sent at eleven at night.
The gap between how you behaved and who you believe yourself to be is usually what brings someone here. It is rarely the anger itself.
What anger usually is
Anger is nearly always a second feeling.
Underneath it, most of the time, is something less tolerable: humiliation, fear, helplessness, or hurt. Anger arrives quickly because it is the more bearable of the two - it is active rather than passive, it gives you somewhere to direct the feeling, and it does not require you to admit you were wounded.
Which is why "count to ten" has limited effect. It addresses the surface. If what is actually happening is that a particular kind of dismissal makes you feel eight years old again, breathing exercises will not reach it.
The pattern is usually specific. People are not angry at everything. They are angry at being interrupted, or at being told what to do, or at being made to look foolish, or at being ignored - and that specificity is the most useful information available, because it points at what the anger is protecting.
When it's worth doing something
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The reaction is out of proportion to what triggered it, and you know it at the time
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Afterwards there is shame rather than satisfaction
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Someone has told you they find it frightening
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Your children have started changing their behaviour around your mood
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It has cost you something - a relationship, a job, a friendship
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You are suppressing it entirely and it is coming out sideways: sarcasm, withdrawal, a permanently short fuse
That last one matters. Anger that never gets expressed does not disappear. It leaks, and it frequently costs relationships more than the visible version does.
One thing that needs saying plainly. If your anger has become physically frightening to someone - a partner, a child - that requires specialist services rather than a general psychology practice. We are not those services, and it would be wrong of us to imply otherwise. If that is your situation, tell us at first contact and we will point you toward the right place rather than book you an appointment.
How we work with it
Not by teaching you to suppress it. Suppressed anger produces the sideways version, which is usually worse.
Understanding what it is protecting. This is where most of the change comes from. Anger that has a shape - always at the same kind of moment - is telling you something specific, and the pattern usually has a history.
Working on the sequence rather than the moment. By the time you are shouting, the useful intervention has already passed. The work is on what happens before: the interpretation, the build-up, the point at which the outcome was already decided.
Where something older is involved. Anger frequently traces back to environments where it was not safe to be angry, or where anger was the only thing anyone responded to. Where a specific experience is driving it, EMDR can be the more direct route.
Where the difficulty is present-day. Where the anger attaches to a current situation rather than to an old pattern, acceptance and commitment therapy (ACT) works on the relationship with the feeling and on acting according to your values while it is present.
Our adult work draws on psychodynamic psychotherapy, Internal Family Systems, EMDR and ACT, depending on what sits underneath it for you.
Children and teenagers
Anger in children almost always means something other than anger.
For younger children it is usually the only available expression for feelings they have no words for - anxiety, confusion, powerlessness, or something changing at home. For teenagers it frequently sits over distress they are not willing to show, because anger feels less exposing than sadness.
Sara Caroppo, Nayla Daou, and Yassine Tayi work with children and teenagers from ages 3 to 18, using cognitive behavioural approaches with older children and play with younger ones. Parents are involved throughout, because the responses at home have a substantial effect on whether a pattern grows or settles.
Child psychology →
Anger and couples
A great deal of anger lives in relationships, and it often has a shape - the same argument, arriving the same way, ending the same way.
Where that is the case, couples work is frequently more effective than individual anger work, because the pattern involves two people and only one of them is in the room otherwise.
Couples therapy →
Common questions
Is anger a mental health condition? Not in itself. It is a normal emotion, and there is no diagnosis called anger. What brings people to therapy is not the emotion but its intensity, its frequency, or its consequences.
Will I be taught breathing techniques? Some of the work involves what happens in the moment, but that is not where the change comes from. Techniques help you manage an episode; understanding what the anger is protecting is what reduces how often it arrives.
My partner says I need this. I'm not sure I do. That is a common way people arrive, and it is worth coming anyway - if only to find out. A first session can be about whether therapy is the right thing, and being told by someone else that you have a problem is a legitimate reason to be sceptical.
Is there a group programme? We work individually rather than in groups. For most people the pattern is specific enough that individual work reaches it faster.
Will you tell me my anger is justified? Sometimes it is. Understanding where anger comes from is not the same as concluding that the way it was expressed was appropriate, and a therapist is not there to judge. What tends to be more useful is separating the feeling, which usually makes sense, from what you did with it, which sometimes does not make sense.
Getting in touch
If you have arrived here after an incident you are still thinking about, that is the most common reason people come.
WhatsApp +971 58 557 6220, email info@clearmindscenter.com, or use the contact form.
Fees and payment → · Meet our team →