[00:00:00] Speaker A: Hey, thanks so much for listening to this message. My name is Jason and I'm one of the ministers here at the Madison Church of Christ. It's our hope and prayer that the teaching you hear today will bless your life and draw you closer to God. If you're ever in the Madison area, we'd love for you to stop by and study the Bible with us on Sundays at 05:00 p.m. Or Wednesdays at 07:00 p.m. If you have questions about the Bible or want to know more about the Madison church, you can find us
[email protected] dot. Be sure to subscribe to this podcast as well as our Sermons podcast Madison Church of Christ Sermons. Thanks again for stopping by. I hope this study is a blessing to you.
[00:00:37] Speaker B: Tonight's class is going to be on anger management, so we're going to have a little fun here in the beginning, and I'm going to do an anger screening with you. So if you did not pick up a pen or some paper, if you will do that. Okay, so here's how you're going to give your answers. One is for never, two is for rarely, three is for sometimes, four is for frequently, and five is for always. Okay, so just tally your score. When I ask the question, you're either going to answer 1234 or five. As to how your experience is, you don't need to spend a whole lot of time on it.
Just kind of think whatever comes to mind, just go ahead and go with it. That way you get a pretty accurate assessment of maybe where you are with anger. I'm going to give these ladies just a couple of minutes to come in. If you'll look at your sheet, your handout, page three, the seven principles of marriage that I did last week. I just kind of gave you that. So you kind of have a little outline.
And then the fourth sheet was the four horsemen with the antidotes and communicating. Okay. Those are great for all levels of communication.
Okay, so we are about ready to get started. So let me get my phone ready.
Yeah, just put it anywhere you can even keep up the score in your head either way, but.
Okay, we won't do that then.
All right.
All right. Let me give one more chance and I promise we're gonna get started. Okay. I won't wait anymore. All right, so question number one. And remember, your scoring is up on top. I get angry with little or no provocation.
Number two, I have a really bad temper.
Number three, it's hard for me to let go of thoughts that make me angry.
Number four, when I become angry, I have urges to beat someone up.
It happens.
Number five.
When I become angry, I have urges to break or tear things.
Number six.
I get impatient when people don't understand me.
Number seven, I lose my temper at least once a week.
Number eight, I embarrass family, friends or coworkers with my anger outburst.
Number nine, I get impatient when people in front of me drive exactly the speed limit.
Uh oh.
Guilty.
However, I leave an hour early for work and it's no longer a problem.
Number ten. When my neighbors are inconsiderate, it makes me angry.
Number eleven.
I find myself frequently annoyed with certain friends or family.
Number twelve.
I get angry when people do things that they are not supposed to, like smoking in a no smoking section or having more items and marked in the supermarket express check out lane.
We gotta get everybody in there.
All right. Number 13.
There are certain people who always rub me the wrong way.
Number 14, I feel uptight or tense.
15, I yell and or curse.
16, I get so angry I feel like I'm going to explode with rage.
Number 17, I get easily frustrated when machines or equipment do not work properly.
18, I remember people in situations that make me angry for a long time.
I won't disclose.
19, I can't tolerate incompetence. It makes me angry.
Almost there, guys. And number 20, which is the final question, I think people try to take advantage of me, so I'll give you some time to add that up.
For those of you that came in late, I'll go ahead and read the first eight real quick. I think that's what I counted, so you could start there.
Number one, I get angry with little or no provocation.
Number two, I have a really bad temper.
Number three, it's hard for me to let go of thoughts that make me angry.
Number four, when I become angry, I have urges to beat someone up.
Number five, when I become angry, I have urges to break or things.
Number six, I get impatient when people don't understand me.
Seven, I lose my temper at least once a week. And number eight, I embarrass family, friends or coworkers with my anger outbursts. Okay? So if you've got those added up, here's where we go. So if you scored below 30, below 30, congratulate yourself. You are likely in a good comfort zone.
I didn't make that one. All right, the next one. If you scored 30 to 50, you're probably getting angry as often as most people. Monitor your episodes of temper and see if you can lower your score in about six months, and we usually reevaluate.
50 to 60, you have plenty of room for improvement.
Reading a self help book on anger control could be beneficial.
60 to 80, you may not need professional help, but you need to work on controlling your anger in a very deliberate manner.
And then 80 to 100, you need to come see me for sure. Okay.
Your anger expression is likely getting into serious trouble with others, and it would probably be worthwhile to seek professional help. Okay? So just a little fun. That's the screening that we do. It's not 100% proof. Okay. But it's just something for you to kind of base where you might be in your anger. Okay. And I'm not going to ask you to raise hands, it's just for you to know. Unlike me telling on Jennifer. So.
So it didn't move. I gave you this handout, and if you'll look, it's the very first page. I believe this is, I bet, one of the, a lot of my kids that come in, one of the biggest things that we use. I even have adults, but this is a huge, huge psychotherapy that we use with them because oftentimes what you see in an iceberg is you're going to see the expression of anger.
But anger isn't really the problem. I mean, it is, it's presenting as your presenting problem, but underneath it, if you'll look, there are so many things, embarrassment, distrust, feeling attacked, guilt, y'all can kind of go through this. I won't spend a lot of time on it, but just know if you kind of take a look at that and you can spend some time, what we oftentimes do, what I do with my clients, I'll go through and I'll kind of check what they have, and then we'll individually kind of go after that emotion and see how we can maybe dig a little bit deeper and see what we can find out to do with that. Okay. To help them work through it a little bit easier. So, okay, so anger, it is a surface emotion. It is designed to protect us from perceived threats characterized by antagonism towards someone or something you feel has deliberately done you wrong.
It can have a positive effect because it can cause you to change or even motivate you to do a different thing that's going to help you navigate this world or even conversations and relationships a little bit differently. Excessive anger can cause problems, obviously increase blood pressure and other physical changes associated with anger make it difficult to think straight and can harm you, your physical and your mental health. We're going to get a little bit more into that here in just a minute, and I'll go over some. Some things with you.
Perceived threats are what is driving anger. Anger is an emotional and a sensory response to a threat. The perception. Remember, this is what we're feeling, how we're taking it of those threats drives how angry you might feel and even how you will act on those feelings. So you kind of think about the conversations with those four horsemen that I gave you. If you're in conversation with your spouse or even a friend, sometimes we take things wrong or we think we understand it, but we're going to take our experiences, and that's how we're going to perceive it. So when you think of a marriage, someone's coming from one family that yells and screams another, they didn't talk at all about their emotions. Imagine putting those two together in a home, and that makes it really difficult. So they're each going to take it differently. And sometimes there may be triggers or words that you say that set that in motion for anger. Okay. So just kind of be mindful as you kind of evaluate how you present yourself. It does not exist separate from other emotions. That's obvious.
So, anger management, a person needs to slow down and know what's happening in their body, in their minds, in the environment around them. So, with kids, I often say, what does anger look like? It's big. It's big. You know, what color is it? Red. It's typically always red. That's why I use red. You know, what would its name be? They even name it. So you go shape, size, color, anything like that. So they can kind of express what anger feels and looks like for them. And it kind of gives you an idea of kind of where they are with it.
The big thing with anger management is to have self awareness, be aware of how you're responding, even your facial expressions, your body movements and things like that. You have to have the ability to calm yourself down. That self regulation, that to me. And I'm going to have fun teaching you all that in a little bit. Towards the end, we'll do a little bit of self regulation. And it is. I have a lot of fun with the kids to teach them that.
Creating positive actions, so you just kind of change things so they become a little bit more productive and positive and perspective taking, which is what we talked about a little bit ago, so that you understand that and I can't. Oh, yeah. Here we go. Becky. I'll wear my glasses. So on the bottom, I put how much more grievous are the consequences of anger than the cause of it. I love that saying. So just wanted to read it to you.
So society's faster pace is fueling anger. Exponential rates of technological changes and accessibility infused in our lives. Everywhere you look, guys, the other day I was at Burger King and there was a tv. There were two tvs in Burger King. And I thought, we cannot get away from the screens. They're everywhere. If you look around you, you're going to see people even going out to dinner with their spouses or even with their family, and you're going to see almost a nosedive into their phones. So no wonder we're just not connecting. Well, the pace of life. We have far more choices.
Screens seemingly everywhere. Like I said at Burger King, social media, we all know that. I don't need to say any more about that.
Much more open society, about mental health. And this one, Becky, I don't know. You may deal with this where people come in and say, well, my husband is borderline, or my friend is a social path, or they're whatever, because they see it on TikTok. So they have become those who can diagnose. And guess what, guys, it's not always true. There may be tendencies of that, but that doesn't necessarily mean that's who they are. So then they begin to live in it, because that's what they're called. You're narcissistic. And yeah, maybe there might be some tendencies, but that doesn't mean that you exactly are okay. So social media is really promoting a lot of that.
Anger is a challenging problem for our youth. Anger exposure is more prevalent in this generation than any other. I found that on a source down there on the bottom.
We don't talk about it and we don't teach how to cope with anger. So when my kids come in and parents are coming in and they're saying they have so much anger, I mean, what do I do? How do I help them control anger? So I start with them, probably should start with the parents, but I go ahead and start with the kids. When the kids are modeling, pretty good self control and regulation, then I bring the parents in and I ask them, what do your kids get to model? What behavior? How is your anger expressed? And sadly enough, oftentimes you'll find that it's one of the parents and they're yelling or they're throwing or screaming or intolerant of their behavior, even though they're kids. So, you know, that's where our kids are modeling. So we need to be careful because those little eyes are always watching us.
Most believe that we should not feel it. So no wonder we are not good at managing it. I worked with a client just before I left for the evening today, and anger is her number one thing that she's dealing with. And she doesn't know how to express it, so she just feels it. But she doesn't feel safe to express it in her home because mom and dad are far more angry than she is. And so as a result, we're getting a lot of anxiety and a lot of social interaction. Poor social interaction because she does not know how to interact with others because of those deep feelings of anger that she has.
Nearly two thirds of adolescents in the US have a history of anger related aggressive behaviors. Did y'all hear that? Two thirds. That's a lot.
One in twelve young people, close to 6 million teens, meet the criteria for a diagnosis of intermittent explosive disorder, which is a syndrome. Syndrome. Sorry. Characterized by persistent, uncontrollable anger attacks not accounted for by other mental disorders.
I didn't know that, did you? No. Yeah, that's new. That was new for me. So all children experience anger, but they will typically outgrow tantrums. Okay, here are the four r's to create emotional safety to engage our kids.
So relay and intent to understand. A simple, caring statement versus false intent to understand. We're going to do exercise in a little bit, and it's really going to hone in on this to let you know what that's like. But meet them where they are. You know, it's not about immediately telling them you can't feel, you shouldn't, you can't try to get to the core of what it is that they're experiencing and what's making them experience that.
Realize that anger may suggest what a child or teen feels is important.
Number one thing I deal with, mom and dad do not understand me. Mom and dad do not listen.
Huge guys. So if your kids are telling you, you know, or kind of keeping it to themselves, try to soften that and try to open up those lines of communication.
Remember that underlying anger may be fear, guilt, resentment, shame, and all those others on that anger iceberg that I showed you. So it could be a lot of that going on. Sometimes they're being bullied at school and they have no means to protect themselves because if they go, like, I'll hear that they go to the PE teacher and the PE teacher says, just get over it, it's fine. And tells the other kid, don't do it again. We didn't deal with the problem. It wasn't resolved. Then they come home, and they tell parents, and they're like, well, it'll be fine. Maybe tomorrow will be better. Well, you really kind of need to spend some time with it. Reinforce any efforts to disclose real time to help them feel better about sharing. Okay.
What makes anger such a unique emotion?
Anger bubbles up from your reactive brain. Becky, did you do the fight or flight? Y'all remember that, where you. Part of your brain and the amygdala goes off and go offline with your prefrontal? If you don't know it, it's. I'll go over it at the end. Say again?
Yeah. Dan Siegel. But, um. But, you know, think of a bear coming in. What are we gonna do? All of us are gonna go into fight, flight, or freeze. We're gonna do something.
I think we're gonna fight it, aren't we?
So just remember, that's where it's coming from, that part of the brain where you go into fight or flight, you will not be able to. And this is kind of good for you all to know. If you're in the midst of a fight, even with your spouse, not a good time for you to try and resolve things. You need to go and get calmed down with either the breathing, the grounding that we've talked about, and then come back in 15 to 30 minutes and still have that conversation when you're calm, because when you're reactive, you're in an unsafe place and you're trying to get safe.
The emotion of anger is very different from anxiety and depression, which we experience as more of a sense of feeling internally weighed down. Okay.
In contrast, anger is usually a reaction of wanting to express yourself or act in response to a threat which may be real or imagine, again, that comes to your perception depending on the circumstances that evoke it. Anger, like other emotions, ranges in its intensity. And so we kind of use an anger meter zero to ten so that they can kind of let us know where they are on their anger and how big anger is, and you can just kind of have that scale. So, you know, and even for yourselves, you know, kind of evaluate, am I going into that? Seven, eight, nine, and ten easily. Then, you know, you may want to find other things that will help you calm or even have a different perception on how to handle it.
So here comes this activity. Okay. I want you to think before you read it. I want you to think you are off to work. And, no, that's for this. If I want you to think your kid is furious. They're so mad. We call them tantrums. We call them just this fit, whatever that is. Okay. And what's the first thing that we tell them? You need to calm down. Calm down. Settle down. Okay. Now imagine this is going to help you imagine what they're experiencing. So imagine you have lost your keys and. And cannot track due to a dead battery on your tracking device that you were too busy to replace and are late for work.
Think about how many times you look for the keys in the same place. Five to ten, even 20 times. You have really gone through there trying to find them. You panic.
You no longer think with your cortex. You are thinking with your emotions.
Remember how it feels if someone tells you to calm down and think sensibly about when you last had them.
Any reaction to that? I would not do well in that moment. That is how your teenager feels when they are running on their emotions because their brain hasn't developed that linkage. Okay?
So that will help also with your perception of what they're experiencing.
Effective anger management. We need to be able to express it. Coping strategies, mindfulness. There's tons of apps where you can listen to a lot of the mindfulness things that are going on.
Self awareness about big thoughts and feelings learn and grow from moments where you have hurt so, or others.
And I can't believe I already put that, but the key is self regulation. Okay? If you can self regulate, which is the key thing that I teach my kids, or even teenagers and even adults that come in, if you can self regulate, then you can control your anger.
So here's one of my favorites. So I always have.
I can't believe I didn't put my stop sign up. But the first thing I do is I always tell them, have a stop sign. You know how a big stop sign, and it says stop. So as soon as you begin to feel that emotion, some of you might say, well, you know, I really don't know. Pay attention to when you get angry. You might get tense. Some people make a fist. Some people clench their teeth.
You might even feel a little sweaty or an increased heart rate. Kind of pay attention to what your bodily responses and when you begin to feel that, imagine that stop sign that I just talked about, and ask yourself two questions. Is what I'm about to do or say going to make things better, or is it going to make things worse? And if we can think our way through it, we can begin to self regulate with our responses.
I do red light, green light with the kids. If you've got littles or even grandchildren play red light, green light. You have to be able to stop. You're running, and then you're stopping. Does everybody know about red light, green light? Okay. We all played it when we were little. And then one of my absolute favorites, Monty Python. And you can look this video up on YouTube. And I was not going to play another video after it didn't go so well for me last time. So what he does when he walks, and I should have gotten one of y'all to model this for me. I forgot.
But what I do is I go from zero to 100, and I take the kids out in the hallway, and what we do is, I'll say, okay, show me 10% silly. And so maybe they'll lift their leg up real high. Okay. Kind of like you see there.
If you give me 20%, you might lift your leg and throw your arm out. Do 30%. You might shake your head. In addition, y'all get the image of what we're doing. And so by 100%, they're pure silly. I mean, the walk is hilarious. They're loving it, they're laughing. And then I'll say, okay, give me zero.
So they got to go all the way from 100, pure silly, having a great time, down to zero. And you can try this for yourselves. It's really kind of fun. A lot of the staff that I'm with, they see me doing this, and so we did it one day at lunch, and we just laughed and laughed because it was really funny. But it really works to help you self regulate. Okay.
Discipline without desperation. Okay? So, rigid or harsh consequences make a defiant child's or teen's behavior worse.
I think that kind of speaks for itself.
Mindful of a child or a teen's emotional temperature, you can easily confuse the difference between punishment and discipline.
Punishment, you're presenting a negative consequence. Okay. With discipline, you teach how to make better choices, and that's ideal. That's what we want to go after.
So the self discipline approach needs to be firm but calm and non controlling.
Boy, that's a lot of stuff to try to do all in one shot. But if you practice that and you practice that, it really, really improves the ability to help them calm and to keep control of a situation.
Yes, ma'am. What do you mean by non controlling? In this, where you are not allowing them to express themselves, they're allowed to feel whatever emotion they feel. So instead of saying, you can't, you shouldn't, you know, they threw something. Let's find out what made you throw that. You know what happened? Did you feel that you couldn't control or what did that do to you? Or how does that help you? Does that make sense? So we're not just telling them, no, you can't or you shouldn't, but we're actually walking them through the process of what's going on. Does that help?
So there's my stop sign.
I did put it up. So the stop sign is one of the key things that we use.
So these are tools for calming anger. Okay. So I'm gonna kind of walk all of you through it so that you'll know you can calm yourself. Did I do this with y'all last time? The calming. Any of you? Okay, so I'm going to teach you how to do the calming techniques. What we're going to do is you're going to breathe in for four through your nose. And the breath is going to be so not chest breathing, but all the way down to your gut. So when it comes down to your gut, your gut, if you put your hands on your tummy, your tummy is going to come out. So you're gonna in, you're gonna inhale for four. If you'll go ahead and put your feet down as well. Sorry for that. Tell you that this is gonna help you and you'll feel it instantly. Okay? But you're gonna take in for four, hold for four. And then you're gently gonna breathe out for six. And when you breathe out, it's not like in yoga.
It's a very gentle.
And what it's doing is if you have had a candle and you just kind of blow and it flickers, that's the idea of what you want to be doing. Okay? So do it with me. In two, three, four. Hold, two, three, four.
Exhale through your mouth, 23456. Let's do it again in two, three, four.
Hold, two, three, four. Exhale. 23456.
If you will teach yourselves to do that breathing throughout the day, what you're teaching your body to do is how to go to calm, okay? So when you're kneading your body, let's say you get anxiety, you get anger, whatever feeling that is. If you will do this, it'll help calm you back down and your body will know how to respond to it because you've been practicing it.
Then we teach grounding. Becky, I don't know about you, I used to teach that you would pick an object and that you would describe it. But what I have found is that when people would describe it, it was adding to their anxiety because they would say, well, I really don't like that color or that shape is kind of. And I thought, I got to do something different. So I looked up, and I've really gone with the senses. Okay. Four of them are on your face, seeing, smelling, tasting, hearing, and then your hands for touching. Okay. So you do a 54321. And what you're gonna do, and I want you just to practice.
I want you to think of five things you can see that you enjoy seeing. It could be the ocean, your children, your spouse, flowers, whatever that might be. Kind of go through that, and I won't walk y'all through the rest. Let's do four things that you can feel.
Could be your favorite things to touch, or four things you enjoy feeling.
Let's go to three things that you can hear, and these are things you enjoy hearing. Guys.
Two things you can smell and one thing you can taste.
So let's say you go to bed at night and you're feeling anxious, thoughts, are ruminating, you can't get rid of it if you will do the breathing, and if you do this grounding, and you can do it with your senses, because if you come to my bedroom, it is jet black, and you will not be able to see a thing. So I have to use my senses. I've got a surgery coming up, and last night I was awake, and I was thinking of a million things, and I said I started my breathing. By the third breath, I was already asleep. So if you will honestly implement this, it works. Okay.
It's really, really good, but just change it. Instead of memorizing and saying, what are five things I can see? Kind of do five things I like to taste, four things I like to hear. Just mix and match them. Okay.
But let's say you're out. Let's say you're driving, and there's lots of colors. There's stuff everywhere. You can do the 54321 with colors. So you can say, what are five things I can see? Four green things, three, yellow, whatever. If you'll go through that, that also helps calm you down.
One of the things that used to really make me angry is if a car cut me off. I don't know why that made me mad, but I didn't like it when I learned to do this. You can cut me off now. I don't care. I won't like it, but I'm not gonna get mad, because I immediately know to go to this, and I can calm myself down again. Remember what I told you? That self regulation that you do, it works so for some reason, I can't read that top one. Okay, so we did the breathing. We did that. You know about the stop sign. Can anybody guess what that middle picture with the chair and little things are? You can't answer.
Calming corner. Calming corner. Listen, you can have it for you. You can have it for your kids.
It works. It is one of the things. It's a definite go to with the kids.
I'll ask them, what's your favorite toy? What's something that you really enjoy playing with? A stuffed animal, Legos. It doesn't matter. But something that helps them feel better. A toy they can hold onto, their favorite pillow, a blanket, anything like that, or even pictures or something. You can put maybe the breathing techniques up for your kids on. How do you calm yourself down through the breathing? Have a model of that. Have, you know, maybe even different colors. So if they're needing to calm, they can look at the colors and do the things. Okay.
And I do believe that was my last slide. I really think so.
