Maryland Anger Management: Triggers

Understanding your triggers is an important part of the Maryland anger management class.The question is why do I have a different set of triggers than you?

It all goes back to your neurology, i.e. how your brain functions. The part of your brain that controls emotions is basically a memory processing machine operating in the background telling us how to respond to situations.It makes a quick check of things you have stored in memory and asks “have things like this in the past been safe?”. We all have different triggers because we have all had different negative experiences.

For instance, John loses it when Mary is running behind which she almost always is.For John this is not some minor irritant.He feels she does deliberately to “get” him.Mary truly doesn’t understand what the big deal is, so she runs late, it’s a little bothersome but nothing to make a federal case out of. She thinks he is a prime candidate for the Maryland anger management class.

John’s anger is only the tip of the iceberg. Every time John finds himself waiting for Mary he basically has the same conversation with himself about how she does this over and over again and if she really loved him and had any respect for him she would not do this.

Love and respect? Where did that come from. When he is mad about her being late, John never talks love and respect. Its all about what a horrible person she is for doing this to him.Digging a little further, we find out that John's mother was always the last to pick him up from school and that he never knew when she was going to come. The take home message for John was that he wasn't important to his mother and he even wondered if she loved him as much as the moms who picked their kids up on time loved their kids.It now makes sense that a women he loves that is not punctual would be an anger management trigger for John because of what happened with his mom.

This is a good example of why the Maryland anger management class should help you to understand why your anger management triggers are so powerful for you.