“I sat with my anger long enough until she told me her real name was grief” – source unknown although often attributed to C S Lewis

Anger or sadness, or fear, or a sense being unseen and unheard, or misunderstood, or hunger, or …. The underlying reason for anger is unique to the angry person and can be hard to tease out for an adult, never mind a child or young person. Anger takes over; it’s what’s known as a primary emotion (one we’re hard-wired for), and it serves a purpose. It energises us – its evolutionary purpose was probably to eliminate threats, kill prey, and defend ourselves. “Anger management” isn’t just about taking a deep breath when we feel angry (even assuming that we’ve noticed the anger building in time to take that deep breath, which isn’t always easy) but it’s about gaining an understanding of what might underly that anger, and the particular circumstances that trigger it.

Here at Maundy Relief we offer anger management services to both adults and young people; this article focuses on what we’re doing for young people between 11 and 18 as part of our dedicated counselling service for young people, The Bridge. We’re particularly proud of our work in this area, as supporting young people to learn how to deal with their emotions in a healthy way is key to enabling them to develop into well-adjusted and happy adults. Nobody can have failed to be aware of the news reports about the increasing number of young people who are experiencing mental health problems, particularly since the Covid pandemic. Poor mental health affects young people’s education, and then their ability to to find work and live independently as they grow into adults.

“Mental health problems are blighting young people’s education. An estimated one-in-eight (12 per cent) of 11-16-year-olds with poor mental health problems missed more than 15 days of school in the autumn term of 2023 compared to just one-in-fifty (2 per cent) of their healthier classmates” (“We’ve only just begun” – report from Resolution Foundation, February 2024 ^[i])

For those young people for whom anger is their way of expressing their distress, learning to recognise and deal with their anger without acting out is a necessary stabilising step before they’re ready to engage with counselling or other support for underlying relational or mental health issues, and this is where our anger management groups come in.

Most of the young people we help are referred to our service by their school or wellbeing services, and initially at least they will be part of a group with other young people. They meet together for 6 sessions, either after school or during the school day, and we often find at the start of a new group that a lot of the kids know or know of each other already, because they’ve been moved around different schools after being excluded, or have been in a pupil referral unit together. Our experience is that most of our young people have ADHD, although not always diagnosed.

So what would a fly on the wall at one of our young people’s sessions see? The focus of the groups is therapeutic rather than explicitly educational, so it wouldn’t look like another version of school. The group members will certainly learn – about themselves and about anger and other emotions – but learning is experiential and shared. Young people learn that the underlying reasons for their anger are more normal than they might have thought; there are other people like them, and they experience being accepted by others in the group, including the facilitator, rather than being shamed. They learn to identify their angry feelings at an early stage, by being more aware of bodily sensations, and they learn strategies to defuse their impulses to act out either verbally or physically.

Our group facilitators are experienced counsellors, and if during the group sessions they identify that a young person would benefit from more focused one-to-one counselling, they can arrange for this at The Bridge.

A local secondary school referred three pupils into our young people’s anger management groups as they were all disruptive in lessons. After completing the course, the referring teacher commented that there had been a marked improvement in behaviour for all three and no further incidents of verbal or physical aggression had been noted. One of the students commented: ‘It’s good to meet up with other people and talk things through – I understand myself better now’.

In 2023, we saw 166 people across our anger management and young person’s counselling services, and importantly, 83.5% of them reported improved outcomes as a result of the intervention.