You Don’t Have to Be Happy to Not Be Angry

This is an Anger Management Page. Our goal here, may I presume, is to discuss ways and means of preventing angry outbursts; you know, those ugly episodes that cause Angry People to be referred to Anger Management Therapy. Good Anger Management only requires that we find a way of ‘keeping the lid on’. Once we can stay calm like everyone else in the room, well, we have done our Job (and no small Job is that, as many of us can testify).

Yes, sometimes the reason we blow up is because we are interpreting Reality in some mistaken or exaggerated or delusionally negative way, and if only we come to a more likely or more rational interpretation of events, then we would find that we have no solidly valid reason that could provoke our anger in the first place. So, yes, it is valid to evaluate our perceptions and our interpretations of our perceptions -- to do Reality Checks on our Thinking, as they say. So of course we encourage people to do that here.

But I find that some people on the fringe want to take Exaggeration and Delusion and carry it off into the Other Direction – to Pretend things are Positive, when they are really not, and to Exaggerate the Good in Things, when they are not very good at all, and to constantly focus on the Delusion that everything is really quite okay and that there are no negatives in Life that require our ‘serious’ attention, as being serious would only be interrupting our Perpetual State of Happiness.

Well, I am alarmed that we here should ever encourage people into deliberately taking false or mistaken Views of Reality. Is promoting Self Deception EVER a valid path to take in Anger Management?. Well, Extreme Cases could be said to call for Extreme Measures, and so I suppose that if a new Client were to login and complain of constant homicidal rage, then I suppose the “Pretend You Are In a Bed of Roses” Therapy might be called for… but only as a Stop Gap – an Emergency Measure to prevent Slaughter and Mayhem. But when we could stabilize and calm down the New Client, well, we would have to eventually wean him back into Reality. I think it would be unethical to simply leave people in a state of self-delusion. Eventually Good Mental Health requires that people be able to Cope in the Real World, and that requires that people readily deal with the Bad as well as with the Good, with no undue reluctance or hesitation. As the Saying goes, “one must take the good with the bad”.

But by insisting, here, on our Pages, that An Uninterrupted Happiness is some kind of important or even achievable goal in Anger Management, we cause our Clients to feel guilty about dealing with their real ‘problems’ (as they must see it as Negative and an Unhappy Thing even to recognize it as a ‘Problem’), and not only will they become reluctant to address their real problems, but they will learn to avoid the unpleasant, procrastinate and even ignore worsening situations in their Lives – which could adversely affect their Careers or Relationships.

We need to give responsible advice.