Anger Management

I hit the Yellow Pages again to find an Anger Management counselor, as instructed by my attorney. I picked one close to home so I wouldn’t be driving all over the various Roquefort suburbs as my case progressed. I found one close to my attorney’s office and made an appointment.

I’ll call him Alfred Glasser. I was about 45 years old, and he was maybe 55 or so. During this first session I gave him an overview of my situation: marital stress, drinking too much, blacked out and I did something bad, not yet certain exactly what, but ended up arrested and a bit roughed up by the sheriff’s deputies. (I had realized by now that things could have been a lot worse, and had a perhaps Stockholm Syndromish feeling that the cops may have even gone easy on me: nothing was broken.)

I’m a bit odd; sometimes I’m quiet, sometimes talkative. Alfred brought out my talkative side, and I told him everything I could remember, while he took some notes on his laptop. After a while, he made the business proposition: yes, he would agree to take me on as his anger management patient. We would do hourly sessions once a week to start, and make changes as we felt appropriate. Then he said something which I hadn’t even thought of: “I think you’re better off with one on one counseling for your anger issues. Since you’re already doing group therapy with the substance abuse program, you don’t want a second group therapy setting. You need to focus on yourself, and not get caught up in the problems of others. You will see anger and other emotions in the substance abuse group. Here we can focus on you.” Hmm… so I had a choice. I wondered what my attorney had expected. Was I supposed to do group or solo anger management? I decided to give Alfred Glasser a try.