Specialism
Therapy for anger
CBT for anger that escalates faster than you can catch it and leaves damage behind — online across the UK, in English or Spanish.
Does this sound familiar?
It goes from nought to everything in seconds. Afterwards you can barely reconstruct how you got there, and what you actually said sounds like someone else. Then comes the shame, and the promising yourself it will not happen again, and it happening again.
In between, you are more irritable than you used to be. Traffic, queues, the way someone chews, a message that is not answered fast enough. You may be holding a lot of it in most of the time, which is its own kind of exhausting, until it comes out somewhere it should not.
The people around you have started managing you a little. That is usually the part that finally brings someone to therapy — not the anger itself, but seeing it in somebody's face.
There is often a second version of the problem that gets less attention: the anger that never comes out at all. Held in for years, it turns into resentment, cynicism, physical tension and a flat kind of exhaustion — and it usually leaks out sideways at the people least responsible for it.
How I work with anger
I use CBT, and the first thing to say is that the goal is not to stop you feeling angry. Anger is a normal, useful emotion that tells you something matters or something is unfair. The problem is the speed, the size and what it makes you do.
We slow the sequence down and find its parts: the trigger, the interpretation that arrives with it (disrespected, blamed, taken for granted, not listened to), the physical surge, and the point — always earlier than you think — where a choice still exists. We work on that window, on the beliefs that make certain triggers so loaded, and on what to do with the arousal once it is up.
Where the anger sits on top of something older — a trauma, a childhood where anger was the only safe emotion, a loss that never got grieved — we work with that too, and EMDR is sometimes part of it. If anyone in your home is frightened of you, I will say so directly and we will make their safety part of the plan, not an afterthought.
A lot of the practical work is about the hour before, not the moment itself. By the time you are shouting, the useful choices are behind you. So we look at the sleep, the alcohol, the hunger, the unspoken grievance carried since Tuesday, the conversation you have been avoiding — the conditions that decide how much fuse you have when the trigger arrives.
What to expect
We start with an honest assessment: what actually happens, how often, and who else it lands on. A typical course runs 10–16 weekly sessions of 50 minutes. You will have practical things to use straight away, and we track real incidents rather than general impressions, because that is the only way to see whether it is working.
You will not be lectured. People arrive at this expecting to be told off, and generally have been telling themselves off for years already, which has changed nothing. What changes it is understanding the sequence well enough to interrupt it.
I work with people who want to change this; I do not provide reports for courts or employers. Sessions run online across the UK and worldwide, or in person at Sanctuary Therapy Centre in Prestwich and Hebden Bridge.
Common questions
Will therapy make me passive? No. The aim is to get the anger proportionate and under your direction, so you can say the difficult thing calmly instead of either swallowing it or exploding.
I only lose my temper at home. Does that still count? It is extremely common, and yes. The fact that you can hold it in at work is actually useful evidence — it means the control exists and we are working on where it goes.
Has someone told me to come? Often. It still works, as long as some part of you wants it too. What does not work is coming purely to prove a point to somebody else.
Is anger a symptom of something else? Sometimes. Depression, PTSD, chronic pain, grief and long-term stress all shorten the fuse, and part of the assessment is working out what is underneath yours.
Do you do court-ordered anger management? No. I do not provide reports or assessments for courts, employers or family proceedings. What I offer is private therapy for people who want the anger to change for their own reasons.
How will I know it is working? We agree measures at the start, and they are concrete rather than impressionistic: how many incidents this week, how long it took to come back down, whether you said the thing you meant to say instead of the thing you regretted. Most people see the recovery time shorten before the frequency drops, and see the frequency drop before the irritability lifts. Knowing that order in advance stops the early progress being dismissed as nothing.
Can sessions be in Spanish? Yes — I offer therapy in English and Spanish.
Ready to take the first step?
Send an enquiry and Gisela will be in touch within one working day.