Anger Management Therapy in Bergen County, NJ

Anger is a normal emotion, and feeling it is not a problem to be fixed. Anger management therapy helps when the intensity, the frequency or the aftermath has started to cost you relationships, work or your own peace of mind. Our licensed clinicians work with anger using cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT), motivational interviewing and solution-focused and supportive therapy, with medication management available from our prescribing providers when another condition is part of the picture. Most major insurance plans are accepted.

Anger is not a character flaw and it is not a diagnosis. The ABCT anger fact sheet describes feeling irritated, annoyed or angry after being criticized or ignored as a normal reaction, and says that anger experienced and expressed appropriately can lead to healthy coping and constructive change. The same fact sheet draws the line clearly: anger that is frequent, intense and enduring can be quite harmful.

There is a structural point worth knowing, because it explains why anger can go unaddressed for years. APA guidance on anger points out that unlike depression, which can be thought of as a dysfunctional form of sadness, or anxiety, a dysfunctional form of worry, uncontrolled anger does not have a name or an official diagnosis. There is no single condition to be screened for, so the problem often only gets named when someone else names it.

That is also why anger tends to be judged by its consequences rather than by the feeling itself. The question is not whether you get angry. It is what your anger is costing you.

This is not a test and there is no score. It is a list of the signals that clinicians and researchers treat as meaningful, drawn from the APA signs list:

• Friends or family have told you they think you have an anger problem, or have pulled away from you because of your behavior
• You have ongoing discord with coworkers
• There are places of business where you are no longer welcome
• You feel angry a lot of the time
• You are nursing a grudge, or thinking about getting even
• You have been aggressive or violent when angry, or you think about being so

To that we would add the pattern we hear most often in a first appointment: the anger passes quickly, and then the regret does not.

Anger does not look the same in everyone, and the shape of it changes what helps.

Anger that sits close to the surface all the time. Small frustrations land as though they were large ones. Often this pattern travels with poor sleep, chronic stress, or a mood or anxiety condition underneath it.

Anger that arrives fast, escalates quickly, and is out of proportion to what set it off. What people describe afterwards is usually not the outburst itself but the sense of having watched it happen.

The ABCT fact sheet makes the point that anger is not limited to shouting and yelling, and that not all angry people show it outwardly. Some people harbor fantasies of getting even instead. Held-in anger shows up as withdrawal, sulking, brooding and inner turmoil, and the fact sheet reports that people who keep it bottled up tend to develop lower self-esteem, more anxiety, and more alcohol and drug problems than people who are less angry.

Most anger difficulty is not a disorder, and as noted above, the APA describes uncontrolled anger in general as having no name or official diagnosis. There is one narrow exception. Intermittent explosive disorder is a recognized diagnosis describing repeated, sudden outbursts that are out of proportion to the situation that triggered them. It is not a label for a short temper, and it is not something to settle by self-assessment. If you think it may apply to you or to someone in your family, the right first step is a clinical evaluation, and that is something we can carry out.

Anger is one of the concerns covered on our therapy for men page, which is written for men deciding whether to start.

APA guidance on anger reports that hundreds of research studies have examined therapies for anger, and that several large analyses of the published research suggest approximately 75 percent of people receiving anger management therapy improved. It also states that the majority of research on anger treatment has focused on cognitive behavioral therapy, in which people learn to identify unhelpful or negative thought patterns and change inaccurate beliefs. One CBT-based approach it names is stress inoculation, which involves working through imagined provoking incidents in order to practice coping methods. The APA notes that there has been less research on other methods, and names family therapy and psychodynamic therapy as approaches that appear to show promise.

A meta-analysis of 96 studies and 139 treatment effects examined nine categories of treatment for anger, including cognitive, cognitive behavioral, exposure, psychodynamic, psychoeducational, relaxation-based, skills-based, stress inoculation and multicomponent approaches. Its authors concluded that there is strong evidence that treatment of anger is moderately successful at reducing anger problems, reporting an overall weighted standardized mean difference of 0.76. They also reported real limits on that finding: considerable variability between treatments, and an overrepresentation of undergraduate student volunteers among the participants, which restricts how far the results generalize. We report the caveat because it belongs with the number.

The practical implication is the one the ABCT fact sheet draws. It describes angry behavior patterns as habits that are developed, repeated and reinforced over a lifetime, states that these habits can be changed, and adds that much anger is an automatic emotional response that can be reduced with practice.

CBT is our primary approach, and it is the approach with the largest research base behind it. Work usually begins by mapping your triggers and the thoughts that run just ahead of the anger, then testing whether those thoughts are accurate readings of the situation. From there the work moves to what you do differently in the moment. You can read more on our behavioral therapy page.

Anger is unusual among the reasons people come to therapy, in that it is frequently someone else who wants the person to come. Motivational interviewing is built for exactly that situation. Rather than arguing you into change, it works with your own reasons for it.

Not everyone wants to spend months on origins. Solution-focused work concentrates on what a better week would actually look like and what has to change to get there. Supportive therapy gives you a place to bring the situations as they happen.

Recognizing your own early warning signs, interrupting the escalation, and having something to do with the physical surge rather than nothing. These are learned skills and they are practiced between sessions, not just discussed in them.

Anger is rarely contained to the person feeling it. Where the difficulty is concentrated in a relationship or in family life, couples therapy or family therapy may be the better setting. Where it is concentrated at work, our Employee Assistance Program offers a separate route in.

Adolescent anger is often the visible part of something else: anxiety, low mood, a learning or attention difficulty, bullying, or a change at home. You can read more about our work with younger clients on our child and adolescent services page.

There is no medication that treats anger itself. Where anger sits on top of depression, an anxiety condition, bipolar disorder, ADHD or a sleep problem, treating that condition can reduce the pressure the anger is running on. Our prescribing providers include a board-certified medical director and two board-certified nurse practitioners with prescribing authority, and they work alongside your therapist rather than separately from them. See our medication management page for how that works.

The APA notes that anger often goes hand in hand with other problems, naming post-traumatic stress disorder, depression and alcohol problems, and that these conditions can be treated alongside the anger.

Anger and anxiety travel together. The ABCT fact sheet reports that people who keep anger bottled up tend to develop more anxiety than people who are less angry.

The APA names depression among the problems anger often accompanies. Low mood does not always present as sadness, and for some people the shortened fuse is what the people around them notice first.

Post-traumatic stress disorder is the first condition the APA names among the problems anger often accompanies.

Many of the adults and teenagers we see with ADHD describe a short fuse and a low tolerance for frustration, and the anger is often what finally prompts them to seek an assessment.

The APA names alcohol problems among the difficulties anger often accompanies, and the ABCT fact sheet reports more alcohol and drug problems among people who keep anger in.

Anger can be part of the picture after birth, and it is easy to miss when the symptom people are told to watch for is sadness.

Chronic pressure at work or at home is worth naming separately as well.

The first appointment is an evaluation rather than a treatment session. We ask what the anger looks like, how often it happens, what usually comes before it, and what it has already cost. We ask about sleep, alcohol, medication, pain and stress, because all of them change the threshold. We ask what other people in your life have said, since that is often the most accurate information available.

By the end of it you and your clinician agree what you are working on and how you will know it is working. Sessions are available in person in Englewood Cliffs and by telehealth across New Jersey. Individual work is the usual starting point.

If you are at risk of hurting someone, or someone is at risk of hurting you, call 911.

If you are in emotional distress or crisis, call or text 988 to reach the Suicide and Crisis Lifeline.

If you or someone in your home is experiencing domestic violence, please seek help from a service set up for it rather than from a therapy waiting list. Further contacts are on our emergency resources page.

Anger management therapy is outpatient care. It is not a substitute for emergency services, and it is not the right first response to an immediate safety risk.

If getting to Englewood Cliffs is difficult, or if you would rather not sit in a waiting room to talk about this, sessions are available by telehealth anywhere in New Jersey. Online anger management therapy uses the same approaches as in-person work, and for skills that need practicing in the situations where anger actually happens, at home and around your own week, some people find it fits better. See our online therapy in New Jersey page.

Our office is at 560 Sylvan Avenue, Suite 2115, Englewood Cliffs, NJ 07632, and we see clients from across Bergen County and the surrounding area. If you have been searching for an anger management therapist near me, anger counseling near me, or a therapist for anger issues in New Jersey, you can read about our clinicians before you book on our clinicians page. We work with adults, teens and children, and seniors, in English, Spanish and Russian.

Office hours are Monday to Friday, 9:00 am to 6:00 pm, with Saturday by appointment only. Full details are on our contact page.

We serve clients from communities throughout Bergen County, including:

We are in network with most major plans, so anger management therapy is often covered as a standard outpatient behavioral health visit.