Mentoring Young Adults
with Anger:
Turning the Heat into Fuel
By Ken Rabow
For young adults with anger issues, we first teach how to ask for a break when they are overwhelmed and come back when they are calmer. Then we build new communication skills.
Most angry young adults feel frightened, overwhelmed, and deeply frustrated but lack the ability to communicate their pain and frustration.
When we listen to what is beneath the anger, everything begins to change.
What lies beneath:
1) The unheard young adult. Many have spent years feeling talked at, corrected, and managed. Anger is what finally gets a reaction. When they become truly heard, the volume reduces on its own.
2) The overwhelmed nervous system. For a young adult carrying anxiety or sensory overload, one more demand can tip them over. The anger is a boil-over, not a decision. We build a daily routine that lowers the baseline pressure so there is less to boil over.
3) Negative Self-Speak (NSS): That inner voice telling them they are failing, that it is hopeless, that everyone is against them. Anger turned outward is often that inner critic turned inside out. Naming it, and separating the young adult from it, takes away NSS’s power.
My work is about what is beneath and working to heal those issues in real-life day-to-day work. I teach them how to communicate. How to take time off when things are getting heated but promise to come back when they can find a way forward, listen and be heard. Once they feel genuinely heard and start to see real progress, the storms grow further apart and shorter.
If you have lived through those storms, you know the part nobody outside the house sees. Afterwards, they are often more frightened by it than you were.
That is the whole reason we work underneath the anger instead of at it. Consequences and rules address the volume. They do nothing about the young adult who has spent years being talked at, or the nervous system that had nothing left, or the voice inside telling them they are a failure.
The storms do not stop overnight. They get further apart, then shorter, then they stop being the thing your family organizes itself around.
You may not want to talk today, especially if today was one of the hard ones. That is completely understandable. If it would help to know what this costs before anything else, our Pricing Page is plain and honest. If you would like to see who would be sitting across from them when it rises, Meet Our Mentors, or keep reading about depression: The Quiet That Comes After the Storm