Anger Management

A Practical Guide for Teachers

Adrian Faupel, Elizabeth Herrick, Peter M. Sharp

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781351616645
• Edition: 3
• Topic: Didattica
• Subtopic: Didattica generale

Do you work with angry children? Are you wondering why young people don't listen when they are angry? Are you exhausted from trying to understand angry behaviour? Are you having difficulty finding specialist help as soon as you need it?

Anger Management is a practical guide that will help you to stay calm in the face of angry outbursts from children and young people, and support them in learning to manage their anger better. Written by chartered psychologists with extensive experience in the field, this helpful book will:

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• increase your understanding of anger;

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• offer you a range of practical management interventions;

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• help you to manage your own behaviours to build more effective relationships;

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• reduce the stress experienced by staff and parents who lack confidence in the face of aggressive behaviour.

With stress and anger levels amongst young people at an all-time high, this third edition of Anger Management is particularly timely. It reflects significant developments in the fields of neuropsychology and our understanding of the physiology of emotions, as well as updated research into attachment theory, resilience, Acceptance and Commitment therapy and positive psychology. New sections include the importance of teaching forgiveness, gratitude and compassion, Mindfulness, the benefits of exercise, practical advice for Teaching Assistants and a 'how to' guide to managing risk. The book also discusses the revised Code of Practice for children and young people with Special Educational Needs and Disabilites (SEND 2014) and explores the implications of these changes for practitioners.

Containing helpful worksheets, examples, explanations and practical advice, Anger Management provides targeted support for anyone working directly with children and young people to enable you to cope with angry behaviour in the best way possible, which is crucial for the wellbeing of adult and child alike. This book will prove invaluable to teachers as well as parents, teaching assistants, carers, psychologists, social workers and health care workers.

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PART I

What do we mean by anger?

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Chapter 1

INTRODUCTION

I get angry when I want to,
I get angry when I don’t,
I’ll get angry when I’ll try to,
I’ll get angry when I won’t.

I get angry when I’m threatened,
I get angry when I’m sad,
but I get angry when I’m happy,
and that just makes me mad!

Anger is a good thing,
and then again it’s bad,
so now we’ve got it sorted,
I’m really feeling glad.

(PM Sharp)

The importance of promoting emotional wellbeing in all spheres of life has become an area of increasing interest over recent years. Within their academic and practical work the authors have defined emotional literacy as: “the ability to recognize, understand, handle and appropriately express emotions” (Faupel et al., 1998). Work to promote emotional literacy has been undertaken by the authors in over 60 Local Authorities and at a national level across Britain.

The underlying concerns about increasingly disruptive and aggressive behaviour mean that anger management has become a key area for Senior Managers in schools, Teachers, Teaching Assistants, parents and other professionals. It is important as an integral part of developing a planned approach to developing the social and emotional aspects of learning and wellbeing. Effective management of emotions is a necessary part of growing and developing as a human being.

Within the authors’ work on emotional literacy, Goleman’s (1996) five key dimensions have been adopted as a model to promote understanding, development and management of emotional responses (see Figure 1.1). Anger management has links to all the five domains, but of all the domains, this book focuses particularly on the development of skills and strategies to manage feelings, and especially feelings associated with problem anger.

Anger engenders mixed emotions. It often leaves us feeling wrecked, or racked with guilt. There is a view that to optimise emotional wellbeing we must express a whole range of feelings, but that anger is potentially our most dangerous emotion and, at its most extreme, can lead to death. Contrast this with Freud’s view that unexpressed anger actually causes depression and it becomes clear that the contradictions in the poem above are very real for us all.

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So what is anger?

When anger is defined as “extreme displeasure” (Concise Oxford Dictionary), it fails to convey the full force of the effects of anger, both on the person being angry and on anyone on the receiving end of the anger, or merely witnessing it as a passive observer. To compound the confusion, anger is taken to be an emotion, and hence is further defined by the Oxford Dictionary as an “instinctive feeling as opposed to reason”. Add to this a widely held view that anger is a negative emotion and it is perhaps easy to see why children may be bewildered by adult reactions to their anger, which are usually to extinguish it, or to punish them for having the feeling in the first place.

Anger and our basic human needs

In this book we are making a distinction between emotions and feelings (see Chapter 2). Anger can be thought of as a feeling that may arise from a primary emotion such as fear. Fear may, in turn, be bound up with embarrassment, disappointment, injury, exploitation, envy or loss. All of these feelings represent a threat of some kind, though we often don’t recognise this while angry. They can be interpreted as a threat to our ‘belonging’, which is being increasingly recognised, since Abraham Maslow’s (1943, 1968) work, as being our fundamental human need. “Social connection is the bread and butter of human life and rejection strikes at its very core” (Baumeister, 2005). The importance of identifying basic human needs that are not being met was also a building-block of William Glasser’s (1986) Choice Theory discussed further in Chapter 8.

Figure 1.1 The five dimensions of emotional literacy (after Goleman, 1996)

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Children may demonstrate inappropriate behaviours in an attempt to get their needs met if they have not learnt how to do so effectively. In turn, children who have little or no anger control are less likely to meet these needs without violating the best interests of others. Beyond the needs outlined above are ‘higher-level’ needs as described by Abraham Maslow (1968). Specifically, these include ego needs, which encompass self-respect, self-confidence, achievement and competence. At the top of Maslow’s hierarchy is self-actualisation, which occurs when a person realises his or her full potential, a relatively rare phenomenon. For very angry children, the reality is that Maslow’s ‘lower-level’ needs are the likely focus for any support work offered by responsible adults, including parents, carers, teachers and other professionals. These needs include:

● physical – air, food, rest, shelter;

● safety – protection against danger, threat, deprivation, freedom from fear;

● social – belonging, association, acceptance, giving and receiving love and friendship.

Maslow’s hierarchy has been related to a hierarchy of emotional motivators, (Zohar and Marshall, 2004). It is not appropriate to examine this theory in detail in this book, but it is helpful to see how it might help us to understand children’s behaviour when their needs have not been met. Maslow’s ‘lower-level’ needs are described by him as deficiency needs. Zohar and Marshall’s motivators that are associated with these include:

● guilt;

● fear;

● anger.

Sadly, there are significant numbers of children who are so troubled that immediate support and direction may be necessary to ensure their own safety or the safety of others. The necessarily intrusive management of behaviour in these circumstances is described in the context of crisis management in Chapter 9, ‘The explosion’. Such reactive strategies designed to manage dangerous behaviour are only acceptable as a short-term expedient and should be a prelude to moving children on to becoming more receptive to understanding and helping themselves.

When anger becomes significantly disruptive in a child’s life, it may lead to mild, moderate or severe difficulties in managing their emotional and social life. This, in turn, could escalate into mental health problems, which could necessitate more intensive levels of intervention over time. It is well known that mental health problems in children and young people can lead to difficulties managing adolescence and are likely to persist through adulthood unless support is offered and accepted. This inability to manage emotions will frequently manifest itself in adult life as one of the factors contributing towards a failure to form, or sustain, meaningful relationships, and at worst may lead to a vicious circle involving violence to self or others.

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Anger will also be considered as a reflection of emotional difficulties that may lead to, or arise from, emotional disorder, for example, attachment disorder. For children, the roots of such disorder are often known to teachers, parents, carers and others, but less frequently do they receive a planned and sophisticated response. Institutionally, we have become increasingly adept at identifying, assessing and responding to academic learning difficulties but are far less adept at doing the same for social, emotional or behavioural difficulties.

Finally, anger will be considered as an instrumental behaviour that achieves particular outcomes and may be part of what some writers describe as conduct disorder. It can be seen as attention-seeking behaviour, or perhaps better described as attention-‘needing’ behaviour, since the anger expressed is usually a result of a lack of positive attention in a child’s formative years. The authors consider behaviour to be a form of communication. Children and young people who have not learnt how to express their needs verbally may use behaviour as an alternative. This can provide us with valuable insight into the underlying difficulties the child or young person is managing.

So anger will be considered an essential part of being human, and accepted as having an evolutionary or adaptive significance, and a recognition, too, that anger can be either useful and positive, or harmful and negative. Aristotle’s challenge, as quoted in Daniel Goleman’s book Emotional Intelligence (1996), perfectly describes this perplexing and fundamental dichotomy:

Anyone can become angry – that is easy. But to be angry with the right person, to the right degree, at the right time, for the right purpose, and in the right way – this is not easy.

(Aristotle, The Nicomachean Ethics, cited in Goleman, 1996)

Aristotle’s challenge is to manage our emotional life with intelligence, and Goleman eloquently argues that “we have gone too far in emphasising the value and import of the purely rational – what IQ measures – in human life. Intelligence can come to nothing when emotions hold sway.” Whilst one angry child may resemble another at the level of physiological response, the way in which each adapts to and controls their feelings of rage differs widely according to the level of skills in the other domains as identified above. This, in turn, will be affected by upbringing and personal traits. This means there is interaction between inherited and acquired characteristics, and we can certainly influence behaviour through teaching and learning. Currently, still too little work is done with parents to make them more effective in nurturing emotional development, and, arguably, even less with teachers to help them in their work with children. This book seeks to offer advice and guidance to professionals and practitioners working with children and young people as well as parents and other readers who are interested in managing anger effectively both for themselves and others.

Anger as a firework

Figure 1.2 is a useful model for understanding anger. It is adapted from Novaco’s Model for Anger Arousal (in Feindler and Ecton, 1986). The firework model has proven particularly accessible and memorable to young children, adolescents and, indeed, the adults that we have worked with in running anger management groups over many years.

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Figure 1.2 The firework model (after Novaco)

When presented with a three-dimensional representation of the firework model, even quite young children seem able to grasp the notion of either avoiding matches or triggers (such as people, situations, times, words), or else minimising or reducing their impact, by being able to rethink or reframe their reaction to the triggers, and either lengthen their fuse or extinguish it before exploding! Later in the book we will return to show how this model may be used to support anger management group work with children and young people.

The assault cycle

Figure 1.3 The assault cycle (after Breakwell, 1997)

The stages involved in an aggressive incident can help us to understand how and when to intervene effectively and also how our own reactions will affect the direction of the incident. The assault cycle (as described in Breakwell, 1997) has five stages or phases:

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● the trigger stage;

● the escalation stage;

● the crisis stage;

● the plateau or recovery stage;

● the post-crisis depression stage.

The trigger stage can be related to the firework model and is an event that ‘ignites’ a person’s fuse, stimulating thoughts and feelings that lead to problem anger. It is the stage at which a pupil perceives, imagines or remembers an incident or event as threatening.

The escalation stage is the time at which the body is preparing itself physiologically for ‘fight or flight’. When under attack, we share the same mechanisms as lower animals, using parts and functions of our brain that we have inherited from our biological ancestors. To prepare the body for violent action, either to fight or to flee, adrenalin is released into the body, the muscles tense, breathing becomes rapid and blood pressure rises.

Figure 1.4 The overall plan for managing anger

These two stages will be looked at in more detail in Part III, Chapter 8, ‘Working with angry children’. The crisis stage is when the pupil is so aroused as to be completely unable to make rational judgements or to demonstrate any empathy with others. The post-crisis/depression stage is the phase in which the body needs to rest and recover from the high state of arousal that it has been in.

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Anger as a storm

Figure 1.5 ‘The storm’

If the firework model is a schematic representation at the individual level, showing what happens to me when I get angry, then the metaphor of a ‘storm’ may help to describe anger in terms of the ‘bigger picture’, where environmental influences are as important as the reaction of the individual. Storms occur, and will go on occurring, but there are ways to avoid storms or to minimise their impact, and certainly to weather them and deal with any aftermath.

Some meteorological storms are heralded by well-understood indicators, such a...