3 Ways to Cope with Family Caregiver Anger

Don’t underestimate the power of taking a few breaths or briefly leaving the room when you’re irritated. Here are a few other strategies to help you further understand and manage anger as a family caregiver:

1. Name Your Emotion, Then Try to Process It

As with any strong emotion, anger is an outward symptom of what you’re feeling deep down. Get curious about what’s causing your anger. Is it fear? Grief? Fatigue? Isolation? A therapist can be incredibly helpful in identifying this. I know therapy can feel like one extra thing piled on top of all your other duties, but there are wonderful techniques you can learn and use for dealing with anger.

The type of therapy we hear about most often is Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT), which teaches you to recognize negative thoughts, so you can try to understand how they relate to and influence your feelings and behaviors. CBT is great for uncovering unproductive thinking patterns and helping you reframe the situation.

Here’s a DIY approach to this work: Start by keeping track of situations that arouse your anger for a week and identifying thoughts, the intensity of feelings, and behaviors for each situation. You might identify a pattern of unhelpful all-or-nothing thinking such as, “If I’m impatient with my mom, I have failed her as a daughter.” You can then work on increasing your awareness of these thoughts and challenging or reframing them as they arise. For example: “I was impatient with Mom today when she kept asking what time it was, and yet I am trying and learning every day in this new role.”

2. Sit in Your Emotion—Alone or with a Professional

Another form of therapy that may be useful is called Acceptance and Commitment Therapy(ACT). This mental work focuses on learning how to accept difficult emotions like anger without judging them—or yourself—for having them. The key here is to accept what you can’t change (“My loved one has a progressive illness and this is hard”) and change what you can (“I never talk to my friends anymore and I’m lonely, which is upsetting, so I will commit to making plans with friends twice a month”).

Other types of therapy can be helpful, too. If time constraints are keeping you from seeking therapy, consider teletherapy. You and your therapist can connect via videoconference, so you save the time you’d normally spend driving to and from an office. There are also many wonderful workbooks that can introduce you to different styles of therapy. Try searching online for “ACT workbook for anger” or “CBT workbook for anger.” I also recommend Dr. Kristin Neff’s books on self-compassion.

3. Find a Community That Gets It

For a lot of family caregivers, snapping at the person they’re caring for is what ultimately pushes them to seek out the extra support they need. They recognize, “This isn’t the way I want to show up for this person. I want to do better—for them and for myself.” Support groups can be a wonderful way to feel less isolated and keep anger at bay. Hearing how others in similar situations cope can be incredibly helpful. The Alzheimer’s Association can connect you with a virtual or in-person support group.

You can also reach out to TheKey to learn more about our person-centered approach to in-home care. We customize plans to fit your care needs, be it companionship, support with daily chores and errands, or simply giving you a break from caregiving duties through our respite care services. Learn more about TheKey’s senior care services.

Bottom line: It’s not about not experiencing anger. It’s about having the insight and skills necessary to pause, make space for that anger, and make an intentional choice rather than react.