Anger management counselling

Violence is not the threshold. If people go quiet when you walk in, if your children read your mood before they say anything, if you are apologising for the same thing every few weeks, or if you have frightened yourself with how far it went, that is enough. Most people who come here have never hit anybody and have still done real damage with a voice and a look.

Usually something else, and this is the part that surprises people. Anger is fast, it is loud, and it arrives on top of something slower underneath: exhaustion, humiliation, fear, grief, pain, or years of not saying anything until it all comes out at once over a small thing. Working only on the shouting is why anger courses so often stop holding after a month.

First, mapping your own sequence: what sets it off, what happens in your body in the twenty seconds before, what you do, and what happens afterwards. Then practical work on interrupting that sequence early, because once it is running it is very hard to stop. Then the slower work on what is feeding it. Counting to ten is not the plan.

No. These are one-to-one sessions, which means the work is on your actual triggers and your actual household rather than on a general curriculum. Sessions usually run for about an hour.

It is how a lot of people arrive, and it is a perfectly good starting point even if you are not convinced. Turning up under protest and deciding after two sessions whether any of it is useful is entirely reasonable. What tends not to work is coming purely to be able to say you came.

Not to start with, in most cases. The individual work comes first, because sitting a couple down together while one of them is still going from nought to sixty tends to reproduce the problem rather than solve it. Later on, couples sessions can be useful, and they are available. There is one exception below.

Yes. Your therapist will prepare a letter for a court or an employer if one is required. The cost depends on the report type and is discussed with you in your session.

What we can provide:

• A counselling progress report
• A factual summary of sessions attended
• Observations made during therapy
• Clinical impressions that fall within the therapist's qualifications and scope of practice
• Recommendations for ongoing counselling or interventions
• Information about your engagement, attendance and therapeutic progress

Often it is not, and being straight about that matters more than taking the booking. Where there is violence, intimidation or fear in the home, the recognised pathway is a men's behaviour change programme, which is a different thing with different accountability built into it, rather than individual anger counselling. The Men's Referral Service on 1300 766 491 can talk it through with you and point you to a programme, and calling them is a serious step rather than an admission of anything. If someone in your household is not safe, they can call 1800RESPECT on 1800 737 732, and in an emergency call 000.

Yes, by secure video anywhere in Australia, and for shift workers and tradespeople that is often the only way it happens at all. In-person sessions are available in Bankstown.