Anger Management Worksheets

Anger is an emotion that all humans feel at times. It can show up in different contexts and at varying degrees of intensity.  Anger management worksheets can be helpful tools for therapists to help clients better respond to anger. 

You can use these SimplePractice anger worksheets or our coping skills worksheets with your client, to help them regulate their anger. 

For some, anger is a familiar feeling—-an ordinary part of the day that’s easy to manage. For others, anger can be a mystery or a surprise that is difficult to identify or reign in.  

Aggressive outbursts, strong-armed suppression, and assertive expression are some of the ways clients’ anger may present itself. 

Clinicians should be well equipped to help their clients face the challenge of identifying their anger triggers, their reactions to these triggers, and how they can best respond. 

Internal and external triggers

An anger trigger can be defined as anything that induces an anger-based reaction (emotional, behavioral, cognitive, or physiological) within an individual. 

Nearly anything can be a trigger for anger, including people, places, things, situations, circumstances, memories, and thoughts. 

These triggers can be derived from both external or internal sources.  

External triggers for anger are typically more obvious. They are things that happen outside a person’s body in the external world. 

Examples of external triggers can include:

• An aggressive act of another individual
• An upsetting news story
• Being in a physical location where a past trauma has occurred
• A verbal promise that never gets fulfilled

Internal triggers are emotions, thoughts, and physical sensations that happen within a person, such as: 

• Hunger 
• A lack of sleep
• An intense emotion—like shame or guilt 
• Ruminating on a past event or perceived slight 

Every situation or event that an individual encounters is passed through that person’s filter. These filters enable a person to interpret what is happening, make meaning of it, and tell the individual a story about the present occurrences. 

For some people, these filters, or patterns of interpretation and thought, are the main source of their anger. It could be a personal rule that someone has broken, a situation deemed to be threatening, or an interpretation of an event that may be blown out of proportion.  

Anger reactions

Emotions typically express themselves in three main ways: 

• Cognitively, through thoughts
• Behaviorally, through actions
• Physiologically, through sensations in the body  

When a client experiences a trigger from anger, they will respond with some variation of these three anger expressions. There will be thoughts, behaviors, and/or sensations in the body that arise. 

It is important to help clients recognize their own anger reactions.

Helpful responses to anger

Clients are often looking for more effective ways to deal with their anger. 

It is important for them to have awareness about their reactions, but they also need coping mechanisms and tools they can use to foster healthy responses.  

Generally speaking, clinicians try to help clients who are struggling with anger move away from the extremes of explosive aggression or stifling suppression of their anger. These extremes  tend to be problematic. 

In order to facilitate helpful responses to anger, clinicians can guide their clients away from extreme expressions of behavior toward a healthy middle ground. 

This middle ground is an honest acknowledgment of anger, followed by intentional steps to express the anger in a healthy manner or neutralize potentially aggressive demonstrations of it.  

Cultural awareness

The experience and expression of anger for every individual is often deeply rooted in their culture and formative experiences. 

Each clinician comes to sessions with their own culture, beliefs, and behavioral patterns of reaction to anger. It is essential for therapists to be mindful of their own internalized belief systems and tendencies to prevent projecting these onto their clients. 

In addition to considering one’s own background when treating and assessing anger, it is important for a clinician to consider their client’s unique sociocultural background. 

Bringing curiosity and clarifying questions is essential to truly grasping the client’s experience of anger and the impact it has on their lives.  

Through asking questions about culture and experiences, clinicians can help clients determine if they believe their anger reactions are causing any impairment within the cultural, social, physiological, or occupational contexts of their lives. 

Anger management worksheets and activities

When working with clients who wish to learn more effective strategies for addressing anger, worksheets and activities can be great tools to help explore and facilitate anger management. 

Clinicians can use digital or printable anger worksheets in session with clients or give worksheets to clients to complete on their own outside of sessions. 

The goals of these worksheets are to help clients become aware of their own anger experience, to increase their confidence in managing their anger, and to help establish new behavioral, emotional, and cognitive patterns in their lives. 

CBT anger worksheets

Cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT) has been one of the most commonly used treatments for anger management. 

CBT lends itself well to anger management worksheets, as it’s common to use CBT anger worksheets during and outside of therapy sessions. 

Thought records and journals are often used as ways to help clients build insights around their thoughts, feelings, and behaviors in a given situation. 

On the attached “Anger Record” worksheet, clients are given a space to identify the event/trigger and their thoughts, physical sensations, and behaviors related to their anger. 

They are also prompted to identify helpful alternative thoughts and behaviors that they can use in a similar situation.  

Helping clients to review these moments retroactively and come up with plans for future situations can create much greater capacity to respond effectively down the road.  

Fun activities found in anger management worksheets

This may sound strange or surprising, but managing anger does not have to be presented as a dreary and highly disciplined endeavor. To that end, believe it or not, clinicians can provide“fun” anger management activities for adults as a way for them to cope with anger. 

Clinicians can offer a menu of options as alternative actions to mitigate clients’ anger or aggressive urges. Found in the SimplePractice “Fun Activities for Anger Management” worksheet, these activities can be great distractions from high levels of anger, and they can help forge a path for different emotional responses.  

Some activities will be more fitting than others, depending on the circumstance and the intensity of the client’s anger at the time. 

The downloadable anger worksheet also helps clients identify when those activities would be most appropriate to employ and how to remind themselves to use the activities while they are feeling angry. 

Anger worksheets for teens

Clinicians should ensure that worksheets for teens are easy to understand, engaging, evocative of the client’s own processing, and relevant to what the client is struggling with.  

To make anger management worksheets for teens more engaging, it can be helpful to utilize fun accents or images to make the worksheets more visually appealing.

The set of three anger management worksheets you can download in this article includes an anger worksheet for teens called “The Path of Anger.” This anger worksheet gives a view of a road that illustrates the emotional processes of anger—from the trigger to the behavioral expression.  

Clients are prompted to identify their triggers and reactions to their anger, as well as the outcomes and consequences of their anger.  

On the right side of the worksheet, clients are prompted to think of a way to “Exit” that road on “The Path of Anger” by identifying an alternative coping skill they could use in the future, and predicting the outcome of using that alternative coping mechanism. 

Takeaways of using anger worksheets

Coping with anger can be a challenging road for clients to navigate.  

Having a compassionate and skilled therapist can make the difference in helping a client find their way out of repeating damaging patterns.  

Anger management worksheets and coping skills worksheets, such as those offered with this article, can be supportive tools to aid clinicians in this endeavor.  

Assisting clients to increase their insight, lessen unhelpful anger reactions, and pursue healthy alternative responses to anger will enable much of the change that they seek. 

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