Four Lessons from Children Concerning Anger Management

Lesson # 1 Acknowledge that the simple, pure emotions of anger and sadness that children express are at the root of more complicated adult feelings.
 
When children are traumatized, they heal from it naturally as long as there is a safe environment to do so. Many children experience a wide range of traumas like sexual abuse, death of a loved one, divorce, moving to a new neighborhood, or being teased at daycare. As surprising as it may be, I have observed that there are only two emotions which children express to help themselves heal. These two emotions are ANGER and SADNESS. In affirmation of the wisdom of this natural choice by my young clients, I have noted a similar pattern among my adult clients. Those who make the most progress are those who get in touch with these primary emotions of sadness and anger.
 
Lesson # 2 Express your feelings. Don’t repress them.
 
As adults we develop defenses such as depression, anxiety, phobias, worry, stress-induced illnesses, and a myriad of other non-healing ways of trying to cope with emotional pain. In contrast to children, some adults never cry or display anger. Most adults take repression too far. While doing Anger Work, both children and adults learn to express their anger in safe environments. The following case of Shawn and Jaime are good examples of how children use their sadness and anger to heal themselves. (Please note that names and details have been changed to protect the confidentiality of my clients).
 
Once when I was directing a day care center, the parents of a two-year old child named Shawn was left with me by her parents. It was the first time in her life she had ever been separated from them. As I took Shawn from her anxious parents, she immediately started crying. Shawn cried off and on for the entire three hours. She never did let go of me, though I tried to set her down a couple of times. By the time her parents returned, my shirt was soaked.
 
The next week Shawn returned and of course started crying the second her parents left. I held Shawn for about five minutes and then she stopped crying. After watching the other children playing all around us, she slowly made her way out of my arms. Though she kept a watchful eye out for me for a few minutes to make sure that I would rescue her, Shawn began to play. She never cried again when her parents left her at childcare with me. Shawn’s tears of sadness helped her heal from the emotional trauma of leaving her parents for the first time in her life.
 
As the case of Shawn demonstrates, experiencing and expressing your sadness through tears can be an effective tool for healing. However, I find that children between the ages of two and seven primarily express one feeling during their treatment: that is anger. They rarely cry about their trauma--they just get angry, sometimes very angry. Afterward they leave the session feeling better, and over time the symptoms which brought them into therapy go away. Children like Jaime in the following story have taught me that anger heals.
 
Jamie was a two-and-a-half year old girl with whom I worked for a year. She was brought to therapy because she had been sexually abused by a man and woman at a day care center where she was being watched for a few hours. Evidence of this crime was her radical behavior change after the incident. She regressed to soiling her panties, began playing with her private parts, started pinching and biting her younger brother, and did not want to return to the daycare. When I saw her, she appeared to be a sweet little girl who just wanted to play. During all the sessions with Jamie, her mom or dad stayed with us in the same room, reading magazines or books, so that Jamie would give me her full attention. Quickly Jaime began displaying intense anger towards toys as she played with them. She would growl at them, hit them, throw them, and even try to destroy them. Jamie had told her parents what happened at the daycare, but she never verbalized anything about the abuse during therapy. Her play clearly displayed that she was angry at
the abusers who had fondled her private parts.  The parents were instructed not to let Jamie aim her anger at them or her younger brother. Gradually during the year, Jamie’s behavior improved until she was back to her old self. Therapy was terminated and Jamie has never returned. She is reported to be doing fine.
 
Lesson # 3 Have an appropriate object for your wrath. Acting-out on people or animals takes you backwards.
 
Tony was an eight year old bully. He was always getting in trouble at school for teasing and tripping younger kids. Other times, he would take strings that had bells or forks attached to them and tie them to the cat’s tail in order to torment the poor old cat. Once Sam, the family’s golden retriever who loved people food, had to be rushed to the animal emergency hospital because he had suddenly become deathly ill. After surgery, the veterinarian found a cactus spine in Sam’s stomach. Tony confessed that he had given the cactus spine to Sam covered in butter. His parents were very concerned and did not know what to do.
 
First I helped them to come up with rewards for when Tony was behaving appropriately, and taught them to use time out for when he was taking out his anger on others. Having his parents reinforce appropriate behavior at home, in addition to bringing him to therapy was very helpful. Very shortly, Tony began to love coming to therapy, because here he and I had lots of toys and he could do whatever he wanted. He was free to express his anger, as long as he did not direct it at me. His favorite “toy” was my couch. He loved to throw things at it, jump on it, hit it whatever he wanted. When Tony first came to see me his anger was a constant threat, boiling just beneath the surface. He was expressing his anger at people and animals, and his problems only snowballed. His self esteem was very low and he felt that nobody really liked him. He was ostracized on the playground because he had done so many mean things to his classmates that most of them stayed away from him out of self-protection. In therapy he expressed his anger by directing it at
inanimate objects and his life began to transform. He was now releasing his anger regularly, instead of letting it build up. Without all that repressed anger, he didn’t feel as many impulses to do mean things.
 
Lesson #4  Stay active and use your body to express yourself, especially when you’re doing Anger Work.
 
If you think about it from a historical perspective, it has not been long since our world was much more physically active, like our children’s world. In the past, people did more physically demanding work for a living. They spent 5-12 hours a day doing something physical, like chopping wood, harvesting fields, hand-washing the laundry or grinding grain. This type of work provided more natural opportunities for letting off steam. Today our lives are often more sedentary. We need to be proactive in creating opportunities for exercise and include a healthy expression of anger at the same time. My young clients are almost always throwing, shooting, or hitting something during their sessions. Combining physical work with anger work is not only good for the body, but for the psyche as well. Today we must work to add that additional activity to our daily lives.