Kelsey is the author of When Anxiety Makes You Angry and provides adolescent counseling and therapy for college students at Compassionate Counseling St. Louis.

What is anxiety-driven anger?

Anxiety-driven anger is a term coined by me and my awesome publishing team that identifies the type of anxiety that can lead to a FIGHT response. You feel anxious, but you look angry.

We’ve all heard of fight, flight, and freeze before. It’s the emotional reaction your body and brain has in situations that make you think you’re in danger! But it gets activated even when we’re totally safe.

It’s easy to recognize that running away or freezing and being shy are anxiety-related.

It’s also easy to miss that FIGHT is an equally valid response that’s also due to anxiety.

That FIGHT response looks a lot like anger, even though it’s due to anxiety and stress.

You may be shouting on the outside, or tensing up, or getting really sharp and stern with other people, but inside you’re feeling all this anxiety.

How do you treat anxiety-driven anger?

If we just focused on the anger management part of therapy, we’d help you build some awesome tools, but we wouldn’t actually be treating the root cause of your explosive outbursts. It’d be like taking off the top of the dandelion, but not digging out the roots. You may have temporarily dealt with the problem, but it’s going to keep coming up, again and again.

Instead, you need to focus on anxiety management techniques, and learn about how internal anxiety can look like external anger.

Just like in my book, When Anxiety Makes You Angry, we want to build up these skills one on top of the other.

We start with learning about the problem and how anxiety and anger can often overlap. We want to build information on your affective expression and learn about cognitive coping. We need you to start building in some relaxation skills, and then you’ll be able to train your brain on impulse control - recognizing when your anxiety is getting bigger and more proactively treating it before it leads to an explosive outburst.

(Learn more: Chapter Outline of When Anxiety Makes You Angry)

Because I’m a CBT-based therapist, I want to teach you how to take a step back and explore how your thoughts, feelings and behaviors are all informing and impacting one another. That way, at each point of the triangle, you can learn how to change your thoughts, change your feelings, and choose more helpful behaviors - instead of a behavior that’s gotten you into trouble in the past.

Best coping skills for anxiety-driven anger

When you have anxiety that looks like an anger problem, you need some totally rad coping skills. So here are my favorites:

Progressive Muscle Relaxation: If you feel a lot of tension in your muscles when you get anxious, using a PMR can help you to release the tension before it gets to an explosion point
Guided Meditation: You can practice relaxation skills before you need them - because it helps to lower your stress elevator even before something bad happens. Meditation skills are great to use at home, before bed, or before you head to an event that’s making you feel nervous.
Heart and Belly Breathing: Connecting with your breathing helps take the heat out of your overwhelming emotions.

Anxiety and anger counseling for adolescents, kids, and college students

The therapists at Compassionate Counseling St. Louis specialize in work with anxious, angry kids, teens, and young adults. We understand that anger is often masking other underlying issues, like anxiety, stress, or even trauma. Our counselings take the time to dig in to what’s going on underneath the surface, and focus on building concrete strategies to help you and your child manage overwhelming emotions.

If you’re interested in learning more, let’s schedule a free phone consultation and chat more.

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Kelsey Torgerson Dunn, MSW, LCSW is the author of “When Anxiety Makes You Angry: CBT Anger Management Strategies for Teens With Anxiety-Driven Anger.” She’s also the owner of Compassionate Counseling St. Louis, a therapy practice in St. Louis, MO dedicated to helping kids, teens, and college students with anxiety and anger management issues. You can learn more at www.kelseytorgersondunn.com, and purchase her book here.