Your teen explodes with anger over minor incidents. They seem to go from 0 to 60 in an instant. When something doesn’t go their way, you see them escalate to a level of anger and irritation that your teen can’t seem to manage.
Teen Anger
Your teen has a hard time pulling themselves back together once they’ve gone over the edge, and it’s really starting to impact the tone of your home. Your family walks on eggshells for fear of making your teen angry.
The level of tension both in and surrounding your family is nearly unbearable. You are distressed, but you also feel terrible that your other family members have to deal with the fallout of your teen’s behaviors. You wish you could wave a magic wand and restore a sense of calm to life, but you can’t seem to imagine how that life can ever be possible at the rate things are going.
Lately, you wish you could just disappear for a few days or weeks for peace and quiet where you aren’t waiting to batten down the hatches until the storms pass. You truly want to help your teen feel less angry, but you now recognize that your teen’s issues go deeper than you can manage.
So, here you are, ready to reach out to see if therapy can help your teen control their emotions and restore a sense of order in your home.
A lot of the time, your teen feels so overwhelmed by the emotions inside of them that they take their anger out on everyone else.
You truly want your teen to find relief from the internal pressure that seems to make their emotions so ready to erupt. But you have no idea what else to do for your teen to help them overcome their highly volatile temperaments. You never imagined it would get to this level. And, you certainly didn’t expect that you’d need to reach out for profession help.
Signs That Your Teen Might Be Struggling with Anger
- Behavioral: your teen is seen clenching their jaws or grinding their teeth, often has frequent anger outbursts due to frustration with others or life, has withdrawn from engaging with others
- Cognitive: your teen blames others for their own mistakes or thinks everything is unfair
- Mood: your teen often feels angry, irritated, guilty, sad, or resentful
When You Seek Support for Teen Anger from The Center for Anxiety and Behavior Management
- Your teen will learn to identify triggering situations and thoughts associated with anger
- Your teen will learn how to frame thoughts in ways that make them less angry or no longer angry
- Your teen will learn anger control strategies so that they will not later regret their actions
- Your teen will learn to tolerate the feeling of anger and irritability
- Your teen will learn that intense emotions will pass if they just “ride the wave”
The Anger Counseling Process
Therapy for teens dealing with anger is intended to help teens overcome the obstacles getting in their way of developing healthy relationships, social functioning, and school success as well as to help them feel better in their own skin. Together, your teen and their therapist will work to understand the root of the symptoms and to effectively utilize the most current and powerful scientifically-backed, evidence-based therapies to tackle their anger and irritability when it arises.
Therapy for teens with anger issues is focused on uncovering the underlying beliefs and emotions leading to the emotional overload. Sessions will help them learn proven techniques that can help them to more effectively manage the overwhelming feelings and respond more positively to such emotions through their behavioral choices and symptom management.
Here’s what to expect…
FIRST CONTACT: Free phone consult
Prior to beginning treatment with us, we want to make sure that we are a good fit for your teen’s needs. For this reason, we offer a free 15-minute initial phone consult to learn more about your teen’s current circumstances and to determine if we are the best resource for you. Assuming that we are a good match, you will then schedule an intake session.
WEEK ONE: Intake Session
During this first session, the assigned therapist will meet with you as the parent(s) or guardian(s) to gather background information on your teen and have you fill out rating scales to provide an assessment baseline upon which to build our treatment plan and goals.
WEEK TWO: Teen Intake Session
During this 45- to 60-minute session, the therapist will interview your teen as well as meet with you as the parent(s) to ask any follow-up questions which may be helpful in treatment planning and goal-setting to best meet your teen’s needs.
WEEK THREE: Feedback Session
Now that we’ve thoroughly assessed your teen’s needs, we will meet with you to discuss the diagnoses, identify starting goals, and provide education on the apparent causes and factors which are leading to your teen’s troubling thoughts and behaviors.
WEEK FOUR and Beyond: Teen Anger Therapy
At this point, your teen will attend regular weekly therapy sessions. A typical course of treatment calls for 12 to 16 weeks of therapy sessions, but treatment length depends on many factors and, therefore, could require more or less weeks. Additionally, your therapist may determine that your teen need to come more or less frequently, depending upon your teen’s presenting symptoms.
Together, in each subsequent session, your teen and their therapist will use evidence-based psychotherapy models to help your teen learn to identify and address the challenges they experience. This typically includes the integration of techniques from Cognitive Behavior Therapy (CBT), Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT), Mindfulness-Based CBT, or other evidence-based modalities.
Your teen’s therapist will help your teen learn positive coping skills for emotional regulation so that they can better ride the waves of emotion that are causing them distress. Lastly, they’ll learn how to gain control of their responses through the use of more helpful replacement behaviors.
TERMINATION: The Final Sessions
As your teen gets closer to their therapy goals, we will develop a plan for successfully transitioning them into a life without weekly therapy. This often means moving sessions from once a week to every other week, to monthly sessions, or to finishing out services completely. We also work with you and your teen to develop a relapse prevention plan at this time. Our goal is for your teen to be able to retain what they’ve worked on and to implement all that they have learned in therapy outside of sessions in their everyday life.
Are we the right providers for you?
Click below to request more info, and we’ll be sure to give you all the details about how we can help you take back control of your life.
More About The Center for Anxiety and Behavior Management
As a team of licensed therapists, we are experts at teaching you to make the behavioral choices that get you closer to your goals.
We work from an evidence-based perspective. This means that our job is to help you understand your struggles and provide solutions proven to be very effective. Negative thoughts, distressing feelings, and unhelpful behaviors don’t have to be part of your life, and anger therapy at The Center for Anxiety and Behavior Management is about changing the way you think, recognizing how your beliefs are holding you back, becoming informed, seeing the world more accurately, and engaging in behaviors that you won’t regret later.
We make it our mission to help you regain control of your life by providing effective strategies supported by science. We are dedicated to being on top of the most recent knowledge and helping you solve problems based on what the research says is effective. It is our passion to educate you on what is and isn’t working in your life so that you can get back in the driver’s seat and take yourself where you want to go.
Who Benefits Most from Anger Counseling
Therapy for teens with anger management issues is best for those who need to replace behaviors that are negatively affecting their relationships with others, their own happiness, and their success in life with better coping skills.
Often, anger is a secondary emotion, one that helps to cover up the real root of the issues. Anger often masks sadness, hurt, or confusion and masquerades as control and power when we are feeling the exact opposite inside. Anger counseling will help your teen to discover the emotional root of the problem so that they can better learn to deal with their feelings, self-soothe, and therefore, better interact with others.
Your teen will benefit from anger counseling if:
- Your teen is ready to learn how to better manage their emotions
- Your teen is motivated to get control over emotional tirades
- Your family can commit to weekly sessions with the therapist
- You and your teen are willing to practice helpful techniques outside of sessions
- You and your teen are willing to collaborate with your therapist
There are certain situations where your teen might not be ready for counseling sessions with us.
These include, but are not limited to:
- Situations where your family’s schedules are too busy to commit to weekly therapy
- Situations where the teen or parent does not want to practice the techniques outside of session
- Situations where parents are not committed to the process
- Situations when teens or parents want a quick fix
If you are currently experiencing any of these issues, we can provide you with appropriate referrals for your level of care.
Frequently Asked Questions
Some increase in irritability, disagreement with parents, and emotional intensity can be a normal part of adolescence. Anger becomes more concerning when it is happening frequently, seems much bigger than the situation, is difficult for your teen to regulate, or begins interfering with family relationships, school, friendships, activities, or daily life. Professional support may also be appropriate when anger leads to aggression, destruction of property, significant consequences, or when you’ve been trying different approaches and nothing seems to be helping.
Yes. Anger is often only one piece of the puzzle. A teenager may become angry when they’re anxious and facing something they don’t know how to handle, feeling depressed or overwhelmed, struggling with attention or impulsivity, experiencing problems with peers, or dealing with other stressors. How a teen interprets a situation can also influence how they react to it. Rather than focusing only on the anger itself, a thorough evaluation looks at what is contributing to the behavior so treatment can address the underlying problem.
During an intense outburst, the first priority is safety. Try to remain as calm as possible and avoid lengthy arguments, lectures, or attempts to reason with your teen while emotions are running high. When appropriate, giving everyone some space and returning to the conversation once things have settled can be much more productive. Afterward, it’s important not to simply move on because the outburst is over. Parents and teens can look at what led up to the situation, address any inappropriate behavior or consequences, and identify more effective ways of responding the next time a similar situation occurs.
It’s not unusual for a teenager to resist therapy, particularly if they believe they are being sent because they’re “the problem.” Rather than presenting therapy as a punishment or focusing only on their anger, it can be helpful to talk about the specific things that are difficult for them, whether that’s conflict at home, stress, relationships, school, or feeling like they’re always getting in trouble. If your teen continues to refuse therapy, parents can still meet with a therapist to better understand the behavior, look at patterns that may be contributing to conflict, and learn strategies for responding differently at home.
Anger should be taken particularly seriously when it involves threats to harm themselves or someone else, physical aggression, significant destruction of property, access to weapons, or behavior that puts your teen or others at risk. Statements about suicide or self-harm should also always be taken seriously, even when they are made during an argument or angry outburst. If you believe your teen or someone else is in immediate danger, call 911 or go to the nearest emergency room.
Anger counseling for teens is a fee-for-service program which means that we require payment at the time services are provided. We would be considered an out-of-network provider and would be happy to provide you with receipts which include all of the information you’d need for submitting directly to your insurance company for your own reimbursement.
Our office is conveniently located at 259 Main Street in Chester, NJ, 07930.
Sessions are currently held by appointment only Monday – Saturday.
Your Next Steps
Your family absolutely can stop having to walk on eggshells around your teen. Your teen will learn the strategies they need to effectively manage their overwhelming emotions.
Knowing how much your teen is struggling with anger and irritability, it may seem like household peace is a long way off, but that doesn’t mean that there aren’t proven, scientific ways to get your teen the help that they need to be better able to control outbursts and negative reactions. They just need the support of a caring professional while they figure it out.
They will start to feel more in control of their responses to the frustrations of life. And, they’ll also be able to engage better with others and feel better about themselves.
Ultimately, they will learn to self-manage their emotions in a better way. We can help.
Call or text (908) 883-4173 or book an appointment to schedule your 15-minute phone consult to see if we’re a good fit for your teen’s anger needs today!
Our Team
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Our therapists’ commitment to providing quality treatment and giving you practical, action-oriented strategies are why we are one of the most sought after mental health practices.
