Excessive anger is a problematic factor in many disorders, especially in the syndrome known as borderline personality disorder. Along with splitting (seeing others as all good or bad, angels or devils) and creating chaos by making everyone fight, tantrums are a major contributor to the tendency of people with borderline tendencies to sabotage their relationships by “holding too much.”
Do you feel like you get angry too much?
The anger treatment options I describe here can also help if you tend to verbal abuse, narcissism, paranoia, or other excessive anger habits.
In my clinical practice, the first key to change that I will help you with if you are my client is to make sure that you understand how your anger is a problem. Because tantrums provoke hostility from friends, coworkers, and family members, they can leave you feeling lonely and fearful of being abandoned. This realization empowers you to want to change your anger patterns.
Fortunately, anger habits can be changed if you decide that you want to change your ways.
Here’s a three-pronged treatment strategy.
Here are the top three anger-reducing techniques for people with borderline personality disorder and other anger-prone personality types.
- Energy therapy to reduce anger tendencies.
Traumatic events such as sexual assault, bullying, adoption, and other intense emotional experiences appear to have occurred in the early years of many, though not all, individuals with borderline personality disorder.
Energy psychology techniques like the Emotion Code can access, identify, and neutralize these early life factors. The result of these revolutionary diagnostic and therapeutic approaches is a calmer person. For a video example of this technique, albeit for a different problem, go to the Energy Therapy section of my new website, watchpsychotherapy.
One of my Psychology Today blog posts is called “Your Mind Has Extraordinary Powers.” This article explains some of the basics of energy therapy techniques. By accessing and neutralizing early traumatic experiences using these advanced techniques, it may be possible to calm the tendency of borderline personality disorder to be overly emotional, although this is a hypothesis that has not yet been researched.
Another hunch I have from my work in energy psychology is that people with borderline personality types are often psychologically reversed. That is, they tend to be miserable rather than happy. I would love to see research on this hypothesis, especially since it is a condition that can be easily treated with an intervention that generally takes less than half an hour. “My post on this topic is “Bad Luck or Psychological Reflection.”
Finally, Dale Peterson, the energy healer I’ve been writing about, and I are working on new techniques to reduce amygdala hyperactivity. So far, these results look very promising as well.
(2) Psychoeducation to build healthier anger management and conflict resolution skills.
Angry Man, Angry People
Individuals with borderline personality disorder use anger to get what they want.
The bottom line is that individuals with borderline personality disorder use anger to get what they want. I go into more detail about this explanation in my book, “Prescriptions Without Pills: Relieve Depression, Anger, Anxiety, and More.” The key, once you understand that the goal of anger is to get what you want, is to find alternative, less harmful strategies to achieve that goal.
What habits can accomplish the same goal without bullying others and getting angry? If you’re going to give up the painful and annoying strategy of getting your goals through anger, what better options can you learn to replace the old method of exploding and coercing to get what you want?
First, learn how to step back and calm yourself down. Step out of a frustrating situation at the first warning signs of anger. Calm down. Then come back into the conversation ready to continue the conversation more calmly. This is a vital skill set.
“Take the pot off the stove” by going to another room or going for a walk. But make sure to focus your thoughts on other things after you leave the aggravating situation. If you bring the other person with you in your thoughts—“He shouldn’t have…!”—you’ll continue to stoke the fire.
Put a quiet chair somewhere in your living space, a place you can go to breathe deeply and distract yourself with reading or something similar when you’re feeling stressed.
Also, check out my short blog and video on time tapping for a quick alternative way to calm down.
Learn collaborative communication and conflict resolution to replace old ways with new, better ways. I call this collaborative problem-solving “win-win waltz.”
Learning how to get out of situations at the first warning signs of anger, calm yourself down, and then return to the conversation ready to continue with it more calmly is a vital skill set. Fortunately, in addition to joining an anger management group or enrolling in therapy to learn these techniques, self-help is also available online.
(3) Zero tolerance for family members’ temper tantrums.
The Borderline Little Girl
Angry children can become adults with borderline personality disorder.
One treatment approach teaches parents to establish zero tolerance for tantrums. They are taught to immediately exit any situation in which the overly emotionally connected child or teen begins to show the first signs of anger. Parents are taught to go to another room when anger begins to interfere with enjoyable interactions. If the angry child (or adult) follows them into the other room, leave the house. If the angry child follows them again, drive out. Explain in advance that you will return as described above in x amount of time (this can be 15 minutes, half an hour, or more, depending on the circumstances).
With anger no longer an effective means of controlling others, children quickly stop using it to get what they want. This same technique can be used to treat severe anger in adults.
Conclusions about Treating Borderline Personality Disorder
Dialectical behavior therapy is generally considered the “empirically proven” treatment and the gold standard for treating borderline personality disorder. It helps many people, so it is an option in addition to the ideas above.
I also liked Rich Simon’s article in Family Networker that describes an example case of using Richard Schwartz’s internal family systems therapy techniques.
This article aims to expand on these options, particularly by focusing on reducing the excessive anger component of BPD functioning.
Also note that some, but not all, people with BPD also have narcissistic, psychopathic, paranoid, abusive, alcohol/drug, and other pathological tendencies, especially as they experience stress. The treatment described above is unlikely to affect these tendencies.
However, many people who experience chaos and division in their relationships as aspects of their anger-controlling pattern want to change. If so, they can grow significantly with this three-pronged approach to BPD therapy.
