Mary knew she had a problem when she found herself screaming at her university professor. He had caught her having an aggressive argument with a classmate and, after several complaints from other students, spoke to her about it.
“All my life I’ve had a temper,” she admits. “I
got into fights at school and university, and would
lose control over little things.” When the tutor said Mary would have to
look for professional help or leave the course, she went to see the university counsellor. It was a decisive moment for Mary, who had arrived in the UK at the age of 10 while trying to recover from her sister’s death.
“It changed my life,” she says. “Suddenly I was speaking about things I had never talked about, such as how I was bullied at school when I first came to the UK because I couldn’t speak English and how I had watched my sister die months before. My mother sent me back to school that day. We never spoke about it again. Now, if I get angry, I can talk about it.”
Many are not so fortunate. “We suspect that anger in our society is reaching dramatic levels, but there’s very little help available,” says the director of the British Association of Anger Management. Last January, his association, which operates several clinics across the UK, received an unprecedented number of reservations for its courses, despite January traditionally being its quietest month. “This could mean more people are seeking for help; nowadays, domestic violence is increasing—eight women on average are killed every month—and workplace stress is also rising. Everybody knows that where there is stress, there is also anger,” he says.
