what is the best way to treat anger/sadness?

- thanks

As a psychologist, I practice using an emotional/body focused approach to assist individuals to heal and change through feeling and expressing their emotions, including sadness and anger. I have found that if you can feel and express your emotions, you are less likely to become depressed(collapsed) or to attack/blame others when you are angry.

The initial approach I take is to have people sit on the floor with a large floor pillow in front of them and ask them to feel into their anger and then to hit or squeeze the pillow and to hiss or growl as they are doing so. It is important to keep your eyes open during this anger/passion exercise and to express the anger from your body(preferably breath deep into your abdomen and express from there). This approach is not just one of releasing anger into the ethers, it is to express the anger and then to take it back(receive) into yourself, so that once you have finished you can close your eyes and feel your body and check into see what other emotion is there(by releasing the anger you have created space for another emotion to come up). Often, once someone expresses their anger(which is simply a movement of energy and not an aggressive, out to hurt someone kind of action), they go a little deeper into themselves and discover feelings of hurt or sadness and it is important to feel and express these feelings as well. Anger can often be a defense as people unconsciously protect themselves from feeling hurt, scared or sad. Once you have felt, expressed and received your own feelings, it is important to continue sitting and to comfort yourself, just as you would comfort someone else or perhaps similar to how your parent comforted you as a child.

I do not recommend this practice of anger expression if you have difficulty controlling your anger and have a history of verbally or physically harming another person. Otherwise, feeling and expressing emotions allows you to release pent-up emotions that will ultimately lead to either a form of emotional collapse or a place of attacking others, neither of which are helpful in your relationship with self or others.