Anger management
Since anger can be felt coming on – tense muscles, shallow breathing, rush of warmth through the body sometimes causing excessive sweating – teens can learn how to better control their anger before it gets out of control. Teenagers are self-aware of their bodies and emotions. They perhaps just have trouble dealing with their reactions to certain situations.
The first thing to remember: talk to them as adults. Avoid infantilizing your teen. Communication will be much easier. If the teens sense they are not taken seriously, all hope of helping them goes down the drain. Since controlling one’s temper is a sign of maturity, encourage them in this vein. Teenagers’ emotions may appear to be exaggerated or overblown, but the hurt behind all the anger is real and needs to be dealt with.
Ignore passive-aggressive behavior: by ignoring the aggressive comments murmured by your teen or the banging of closet or cabinet doors, as with all negative behavior, the passive-aggressive anger usually will reduce once the parent does not get involved. The teen is still releasing some anger by doing this and, if the behavior is ignored, will stop more quickly than if the behavior is fueled by more parent intervention.
Avoid power struggles: when the parent or adult in charge jumps in with threats of punishments, the teen’s anger will escalate and so will the adult’s. In the end, nothing is resolved. The teenager feels treated unfairly, and understands that the anger felt is wrong and should not be expressed, thereby encouraging the build-up of underlying anger. The parent or adult feels its authority threatened and cannot back down at the end. The answer is of course not punishment, but if the threat was made, the adult better see it through. Communication gets more difficult in power struggles and no one gets anywhere.
Try to avoid, diffuse potential situations before they escalate into a fight: if you know that every morning you get into a fight because your teen won’t have breakfast or will wear what you perceive as inappropriate clothing, try ignoring the irritating behavior for a while, thereby depriving it of its importance. Somewhere along the way, if the teenager is hungry, he will eat something perhaps a little later, and if she decides to wear warm clothing on a cold day, she won’t feel like she’s losing a battle if you don’t make a comment.
There are many things teenagers, like adults, can do to alleviate stress and create more endorphins in their brain: exercise like yoga, meditating, walking; or listening to music, writing journals, drawing, meditating, deep breathing, talking about feelings with a trusted person. These are all activities teenagers can enjoy that can also help with their moods, and maintaining a healthy stress level. Their lives are full of pressure from parents, teachers, principals, peers; they need something of their own that will help them cope better with stresses and conflicts of everyday life.
So how do we start? By being available, by listening and by being open. Make your teenager feel comfortable talking with you without being afraid of being judged. They are just starting in life and will have to deal with conflicts for the rest of it, by helping them with their anger and frustrations now; you are helping them become better-adjusted adults. In the book “Solving Teenage Problems” a model to have an effective discussion with your teenager has been provide along with option of an exercise, which can help you prepare for all the possible scenarios.
