Anger Onion Exercise

Great exercise for getting at those unmet needs of the 'victim' who has moved to persecutor

Exercise

Think of a time when you felt angry. If it helps, put your hand to your heart, close your eyes and look down. This enables you to sink within and block out your conscious mind which may be making excuses, explanations, causes such as ‘but he/she did …….’ Which will I think remind you that anger is a response.

Now complete this sentence,

“I felt angry when………………………….”

Try to focus on observable behaviour rather than jumping ahead to what you think their intention was or what you assumed. In other words, instead of,

“I felt angry when Benjy deliberately pushed Annie on the floor and hurt her arm”

Imagine you are a CCTV camera and what it sees. This is called disassociating and it takes our mum assumptions out and just sees what actually happened. This is then,

“I felt angry when I saw Benjy push Annie and it looked as if she hurt her arm.”

You have now removed your assumptions. My experience of children is that the ‘hurt’ child will definitely play it up to get their sibling into t…