Anger Management and Counseling in Lakeland, FL.

Children ages 3-11display anger by acting out. This anger may be due to other underlying issues, such as depression. I use client-centered play therapy in a safe environment, enabling the child to express his/her emotions and thoughts through play. Play Therapy uses play, a child's natural medium of expression, to help them express their feelings more easily through toys instead of words.

I often coach men on how to better regulate their emotions, including anger. I can teach you strategies from Cognitive Behavioral Therapy, provide relationship insights from the Gottman Method, and help you practice calming strategies to take control back. You might have every right to be angry. But if it’s making things worse, it’s time for a change. At Lion Counseling, our mission is to help you escape the cages that hold you back and become the lion God created you to be.

We help our clients to have greater understanding of themselves and their interactions with others to improve the quality of their relationships. We utilize mindfulness, self-exploration, and self-soothing techniques to help improve clients' emotional regulation skills. Dialectical Behavioral Therapy, EMDR or ART, Trauma-Focused CBT, and Existential Therapy are especially helpful for healing trauma and improving interpersonal interactions with others.

In my experience as an EMDR therapist, I pay close attention to the links between past and present. I’ve seen time and time again how unhealed emotional wounds resurface and come out sideways. While anger management can provide helpful strategies, they don’t get to the heart of the issue. Often, anger is what we see on the surface, but the real problem is what’s underneath the anger. Negative beliefs like “I’m helpless,” “I’m out of control,” and “I’m a failure,” start to bubble up, and anger comes to the rescue. It can get us in trouble, but at least it gets the blood pumping. With research-proven EMDR therapy, I help men heal anger at its source so it doesn’t have to be managed.

As a culture, we do not do well with healthy expressions of anger. Often we are raised to suppress it and then we have limited practice at dealing with big emotion. There is a spectrum of healthy aggression- to keep us safe and to maintain boundaries- and rage- our body's strategy for safety. Anger management is about applying the right "dosing" to maintain boundaries yet not fracture relationships or suffer other losses. I am able to help you learn to regulate your body to be able to apply the appropriate "dose" to be effective and not destructive.

Grey Matters International and the work of Kevin J. Fleming, Ph.D approaches issues of anger management in a very humane yet fresh perspective. You see, anger is a normal emotion but it is the valence (intensity) as well as the coupling choice of what one does with this that is the problem. Telling someone to "not" do it or modifying behavior with a trite psychological plan that only breeds a compliant response is not the way to change anger. Brainwave optimization is a new cutting edge technology that allows one to rewire circuitry responsible for reactivity driving the anger. Contact Grey Matters International, Inc now at kevin@kevinflemingphd.com or 877-606-6161.