TUBAC, AZ – March 14, 2022 —
For over 40 years, STAR Foundation has been offering anger management retreats to help individuals with anger management issues. Learning to skillfully manage anger and express it in a healthy way can markedly increase the quality of a person’s life.
Anger is a natural emotion, which arises from hurt, frustration, and wounds which have occurred during our lives. Those who cannot effectively manage their anger may find it challenging to readily access a variety of other positive emotions. In this sense, anger acts as the cap on the bottle of emotional expression. If one can express and move through anger, a pathway may emerge to greater emotional expression. After getting in touch with anger, one might find that below this emotion lies a layer of sadness, grief, and disappointment. There may be feelings of shame buried beneath this layer. Stay with the feelings long enough, and eventually one may work all the way down to calm, peace, acceptance, and even joy. However, for many people, it has become impossible to achieve those other emotions without first moving through the anger that’s been stored up for years.
People may be afraid of their rage, the historic anger they’ve repressed for years. Some are concerned that if they raise their voice or yell, or begin to open the lid on their anger, they’ll never stop. They’ll be unable to contain the storm. They perceive anger as an all or nothing emotion. This fear of expressing anger and being unable to contain it can keep people bottled up.
People may store the anger in their bodies, creating tension and tightness and a kind of armor. Trying to stuff anger down may lead to the emotional energy coming out sideways, indirectly, creating chaos and hurting people who are closest to us. We don’t need to stifle anger or amplify it and rage around hurting people close to us. The expression of anger doesn’t have to be binary, with an on or off switch. We can learn healthy and adaptive ways of expressing our feelings and anger, across the full spectrum of the emotion. There are productive and healthy ways to process what happens to us, to take care of ourselves and maintain good boundaries, without slipping into rage or repressing our feelings.
STAR has been helping men and women develop their own personal constructive strategies for expressing and releasing anger for four decades. Men and women have saved marriages and relationships through learning how to do this work: learning how to tune in to our adult selves before we rejoin a situation marked by conflict. This leads to expressing a more appropriate level of anger or upset when we are hurt, because those years of pent up and unexpressed feelings are no longer simmering under the surface, ready to erupt in the present moment in ways that only escalate and increase the possibilities of conflict and hurt. Our wise adult selves know that it’s not fair to unload on someone in the moment for things that happened to us years or decades ago, because of an emotional echo or shadow from the past feeling experience. With these strengthened insights and emotional skills, people can learn how to feel and express their feelings, without doing damage to others who are close to us.
A STAR healing retreat provides a rare opportunity to explore the emotional body, the emotional self in a nurturing, validating, caring, healing setting. Those voices of hurt and pain that live within us, those wounds that may be decades old, and may even stem from our earliest experiences, can be explored and better understood in the safety STAR offers. The STAR process is designed to address those old hurts and wounds.
STAR focuses on the pairing of vulnerable, wounded parts of ourselves with the more developed, centered, mature parts of ourselves. There is a path towards self-nurturing and acceptance, but to arrive there we must first get in touch with our emotions and feelings, many of which are buried deeply or hidden behind varieties of adaptive masks and behaviors. STAR participants examine old destructive patterns and work to find better ways forward. To return to their lives with new insight, most individuals need to take a step back into their life history, into earlier experiences. Participants may be terrified of their own anger and allowing its full expression, as they’ve only seen anger expressed in a destructive way, including their own. They’ve never seen anger expressed in the mature, healthy ways that are constructive for healthy relationships. At STAR, participants spend the retreat with daily experiences that lead to developing and maintaining healthy boundaries, internal and external.
Following the completion of the 10-day intensive STAR process, one STAR graduate reflected on his new relationship with anger and other emotions: “STAR was the best therapeutic process I have ever been to. It stripped away years of crusty layers of pretended indifference to reveal my repeated cycles of anger, abandonment, fear, and despair. It may very well lead me to the happiness and sense of peace I’ve yearned for. It’s all up to me now, not the ghosts of my past.”
If you are interested in working through unresolved anger issues and improving your relationships in your life, A STAR retreat may be the right path forward for you.
Please use their contact information below to reach out to learn more about STAR Foundation’s Therapy Retreats.
Contact Info:
Name: Kimberly Doughty
Email: Send Email
Organization: STAR Foundation
Phone: 1-888-308-4898
Website: https://starfound.org
Release ID: 89070385
