Have you found your emotional temperature rising into the red zone more rapidly than usual since March 2020?
The grief over everything that COVID has stolen from us, and the feelings of powerlessness and anxiety it’s brought with can fuel feelings of anger and frustration.
At the same time, we have far fewer opportunities to engage in many restorative activities that can help buffer those emotions, while spending many more hours a day either cooped up, either alone, or in close quarters with the same one or two people.
So, small wonder if you find anger rising up in situations to which, in the Before Times, your reaction might have been only mild irritation. And since it’s the people closest to you who are in the blast zone, this can strain or harm those relationships.
Now more than ever, then, we need to find healthy ways of handling this emotion. For my latest Good Times wellness feature, ‘Managing Your Anger’, we asked three therapists to suggest strategies for doing just that.
I couldn’t do the work that I do without the generosity of subject matter experts. Thank-you to:
- Laura Devlin, a therapist at Beaches Therapy in Toronto.
- Dr. Mamta Gautam, an assistant professor in the department of psychiatry at the University of Ottawa, a psychiatrist with the Ottawa Hospital’s Psychosocial Oncology Program, and president and CEO of PeakMD Inc.
- Alistair Moes, owner of Moose Anger Management in Vancouver.
Image by Gerd Altmann courtesy of Pixabay