How Family Therapy Can Help Manage Anger While in Recovery

When working through your recovery journey, there are many feelings that you will experience. At times these emotions can feel overwhelming and out of control. A common feeling that a lot of people experience is anger. While your anger can be targeted at yourself, your actions, or the treatment center, you may sometimes take it out on your family or loved ones.

Feeling anger or resentment toward family members or loved ones can be expected. For some, it can be anger toward them for “forcing them” into treatment. This can be especially true in the early stages of treatment when you have not learned accountability. Anger can also be a way to protect yourself when experiencing feelings of shame or guilt. Blaming others and getting angry can feel much “easier” than taking accountability and acknowledging you have made mistakes.

At Healing Pines Recovery, we are here to help you manage these feelings and any anger you may feel toward your family or loved ones. We offer family therapy sessions that help build stronger relationships and deeper communication. When you can share your feelings with loved ones in a safe and guided environment, it can feel easier to open up and be vulnerable. This also helps lessen your anger and keep it from building up inside you.

How Anger Can Have an Impact on Your Recovery

Harboring a lot of anger can make being open to treatment overwhelming. Accepting that you need help can be challenging in the early stages of addiction recovery. Anger only makes this harder because it can make you less open to being vulnerable and honest with your true feelings.

Dealing with overwhelming anger toward loved ones can also impact your recovery regarding communication. Having your loved ones as a support system can benefit your recovery. When you don’t have open communication, deepening those relationships and building a healthy support system can be hard.

Anger can also be targeted at your therapist. If you can’t talk to your therapist honestly, it can hurt your recovery process because they cannot provide you with the best care. We at Healing Pines Recovery seek to provide you with the best possible care and recovery plan.

What Is Family Therapy? What Are the Benefits?

Family therapy is a type of psychotherapy that allows family members or loved ones to be involved with your recovery. This therapy will enable you to build open communication in a safe and guided environment.

At Healing Pines Recovery, we take family therapy one step further and implement CRAFT services. CRAFT stands for “community reinforcement and family training.” The goals of CRAFT are:

• Teaching family members/loved ones to adjust their usual behaviors and expectations toward the identified client
• Decreasing the use of substances and addictive behaviors of the identified individual
• Motivate the identified client to seek treatment
• Demonstrate to the client the importance of self-care

This type of family therapy allows us to help you and mainly help your loved ones understand what treatment is. It also allows us to give your family the tools they need to support you. With a healthy support system and the guidance of a professional, you will be able to learn tools and techniques to let go of your anger and cope with it.

The type of environment that family therapy brings can also help your family understand the stigma behind addiction and substance use disorder (SUD). Family therapy can help your family understand how these stigmas are inaccurate and how addiction affects you as an individual.

How to Let Go of Your Anger

Letting go of anger can feel impossible, especially during the early stages of treatment. However, learning how to acknowledge and cope with your anger is the first step that needs to be taken. In the article “Coping With Anger,” the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration (SAMHSA) provides tips on how to keep yourself calm. One of their tips is to pay attention to what cues make you angry and learn to step away from them.

Another way to let go of your anger is to notice how it makes you feel. Anger doesn’t typically make you feel good, and if you acknowledge that, you can begin addressing it. Anger can also make you feel physical responses, such as a clenched jaw or fists, stiff shoulders, and a racing heartbeat. When you notice these signs, you can slow your breathing and try to navigate away from anger.

Feeling overwhelming anger can be exhausting when it is not addressed. It can cause a lot of harm to your recovery journey. While it may seem easier to get angry about things and take it out on your loved ones, it is not healthy. At Healing Pines Recovery, we aim to help you build deeper connections with your loved ones and learn to manage feelings of overwhelming anger.

Throughout your recovery journey, there are going to be a lot of different overwhelming emotions that you experience. A common feeling that many people feel is anger. This can be anger directed at yourself, your therapist, or your loved ones. For some, it can often feel like family members or loved ones forced them into treatment. One way to combat these feelings is through family therapy. At Healing Pines Recovery, we offer family therapy sessions that allow you to express these feelings in a calm and safe environment openly. If you identify as male and seek help with addiction recovery and anger, please reach out to Healing Pines Recovery at (720) 575-2621.