Anger Management?

The Luton Churches Education Trust (LCET) therapeutic team have always been in high demand for their Anger Management groups, which they run in schools for pupils over an 8 week course.

After reading Nick Luxmoore’s book “Working With Anger and Young People”, and of course having other conversations, we decided that perhaps the groups we run as they stand were not meeting enough expectations for us, the young people attending them and the people who work with these young people.

We came to the conclusion that many of the young people do not actually really think they have a problem with their anger. They are happy with how they deal with it or do not even realise they have a problem with it, so this month we are changing our approach.  We will now be running two groups for young people with a problem with their anger.

One is called Anger Awareness which will be for those exploring what anger is and how it affects them and the people they share life with. The ones that always say I do not have a problem, but Mrs X says that

unless I do this course I will be excluded so tell me, show me, help me see if there is a problem.

During this course we will look at some of the headings in our previous groups such as ‘who and what makes us angry’ and how they respond to that, but also other topics such as mixed emotions and influences. We will also be trying to include more activity based therapeutic explorations than before to increase the chances of growth in the group member’s self awareness.

The second option will be called Managing Conflict and is for those who know they have a problem. They accept they need to do something about it and they want to see change in this area of their life, but are unsure how to go about this. During these sessions we will hopefully go deeper into understanding about how to change behaviour and what that involves as well as looking at individual group member’s coping mechanisms. During this course we will also look at some of the topics in the original course but expanding the coping section and exploring areas such as: change and how that happens as well as different ways of working with anger.

Well this is the beginning of the term and the start of something new for me and us as a team. Watch this space for updates of our progress.

Wendy Budwal