Individual Therapy: Having a Safety Plan At Home and At Work

I had a really productive session Friday Morning.  We continued talking about the anger issues that I have been dealing with lately and everything kept on coming back to having more and more difficult not lashing out at work.  My clinician asked me last week if my wife and I have a safety plan and we do, but it's not comprehensive.  We have a safety plan if I become unstable at home.  What happens if that happens at work?  That was my homework assignment for this coming week.  I need to think about how I can exit a volatile situation when I am working.

That being said, my clinician was concerned.  She is concerned that I don't understand why and how my anger is being triggered at work and why it is getting progressively harder and more exhausting to control.  In the past the pattern has been that I work somewhere for six to eight months.  Then I get so fed up with something, anything, that I quit.  I know I can't do that now.  In a way that makes it harder to cope with, knowing I have to stick this out.

I need to make this clear, I enjoy my work.  It's not the work that I hate - it's that my ethics and morality are black and white.  I have no room for shades of grey.  The rest of the world operates in gray areas, making life even more difficult for me to manage my anger.

So that's what I am doing this week -thinking about how to create a safety plan that could help to reduce my stress and potential for angry outbursts at work.  Unfortunately, I am at an impasse on this.  Maybe I should sleep on it and see what comes up tomorrow.