Anger Management Retreats

Disengage from negative self-expression

Genuine Life Change Happens at STAR

Extended retreats like those at STAR are an excellent way to re-connect with yourself, find healing, and overcome obstacles to a happy, productive life. Uncontrolled or improperly handled anger is one of those obstacles for many people.

Anger is a natural adaptive response to threats designed to protect and defend us and those we care about. And it is a powerful and valuable tool— when appropriately managed. Unfortunately, our culture doesn’t teach us healthy ways of expressing our feelings, especially anger. So, the issue is not anger itself, but how we learned to express it, and in turn, the challenge is to learn how to express anger positively.

Fortunately, anger doesn’t have to control your life. At STAR retreats, we use the following formula in our approach to healing, wellness, and transformation.

Identify

We help retreat participants identify sources of emotional wounding that contribute to anger management problems. Recognizing self-defeating behavior, destructive patterns, and emotional triggers is also essential for this step.

Explore

Our programs allow retreat participants to explore the inner parts of their consciousness to discover the roots of their anger challenges in deeply held belief systems, unconscious and repressed memories and emotions, and negative imprints.

Connect

Then it is time to connect to your own heart and soul and tap into your inner knowing and truth. When we truly connect, we experience empathy and compassion (for others and for ourselves) and find joy, meaning, and purpose in our lives.

Your future can be bright, healthy, and meaningful no matter what your past tells you. Contact us today for a free, no-obligation consultation to explore what a retreat at STAR can do for you.

Take Back Control: Anger Management Retreats Can Transform Your Life

STAR focuses on four aspects of life and addresses each one on its own and its relation to the other three. Improper anger control can be connected to all four aspects, not just behavioral— which may surprise you.

Personal

Are you experiencing life transitions or a personal crisis contributing to your anger? Perhaps it’s an ongoing issue and the build-up erupts from time to time. You may also feel like life has lost its meaning. With no purpose, many people lash out in rage.

Emotional

Emotional challenges, including those we don’t realize we have, are often expressed as uncontrolled anger. Grief and loss, trauma, PTSD, low self-esteem, depression and anxiety are all emotional issues that contribute to anger problems that a STAR retreat will help you come to terms with.

Relationships

Failure to manage anger healthily often results in damaged relationships. We help retreat participants explore the effect of anger, attachment disorders, and codependent behavior and how relationships from the past, including your family of origin, contributed to this challenge for you today.

Behavioral

At STAR, we guide participants in learning healthy anger expression and find healing from various conscious and subconscious beliefs and feelings. These thoughts and emotions often lead to other negative behavioral expressions. Our goal is to help you move forward with a renewed mind and the tools to handle anger and anger triggers as you return to your everyday life.

It’s time to direct and transform anger into proper channels and take back control of your life. Contact STAR retreats and take the first step toward healthy anger management today.

Experiencing STAR Retreats: Our Features and Amenities

At STAR, you’ll enjoy the benefits of our many features in the setting of a beautiful, tranquil desert sanctuary. Here’s what to expect during your retreat.

Serene Location

STAR retreats take place at Kenyon Ranch, a “people sanctuary” for both body and soul. Kenyon Ranch is nestled in the foothills of the Tumacacori and Santa Rita Mountains in Tubac, Arizona. Experience the beauty of nature and be inspired by the wildlife as you dig deep to heal your anger management challenges. Let the natural world offer its therapy and return you to your balanced center.

Length and Intensity of Program

Rather than limit treatment to once-a-week therapy sessions that may or may not produce the results you want, retreats at STAR are ten days long, immersing you in an environment of healing and recovery. The length of the program allows enough time and the right intensity for true transformation to take place.

Low Staff-to-Student Ratio

At STAR, you won’t get lost in the crowd. Our nearly 1:2 staff-to-participant ratio ensures your unique needs will be met and addressed. The work is focused on your challenges, whether that is the treatment of grief, depression, or anger management. Our groups are typically 15 to 20 men and women aged 18 and up.

Experience of Staff

Our staff consists of licensed psychologists, medical doctors, teachers, lawyers, nurses, and more. All of our staff members work together using specialized training they have received under the supervision of the Clinical Director. They are also all former STAR retreat participants, so they understand what it’s like to experience the program.

Length of Retreat History

STAR retreat programs have been operating for over 40 years. During this time, we’ve fine-tuned our program activities to produce the greatest possible opportunity for our clients to undergo the transformation they seek. Our longevity is evidence of the effectiveness of our programs, and we are proud of our long history and the quality of our therapy.

Individual and Group Sessions

During your time at STAR, you’ll take part in group activities and individual counseling sessions. Group activities include various interactive programs including art therapy and psychodrama, guided meditation, and more. You will learn and grow from other people in your group and receive guidance from our retreat leaders.

Proven Therapies and Exercises

Various therapy programs, exercises, and activities are at the center of STAR retreats. All of them are proven techniques that can produce real, lasting results. We understand that this is an investment in your future, and we use your time at STAR in ways designed to set you free. Our success is rooted in these therapy programs that have demonstrated positive results.

Comfortable Amenities

You’ll experience your time of transformation at STAR in a comfortable, peaceful, and healing atmosphere. Our guest rooms offer heating and air conditioning, hairdryers and other amenities, housekeeping services, snack and beverage service throughout the day, and more. You’ll also enjoy Southwestern-inspired cuisine at meal times.

Community Support

You’ll receive full support from the experienced and devoted staff at STAR. But you will also enjoy the connections you’ll make with the other people in your program. This energy of support and encouragement is a key component to healing and growth at our retreats. Who knows, you may even develop life-long friendships.

Rest and Relaxation

Periods of rest and relaxation are part of restoring your life to health and wellness of all kinds. STAR offers ways for you to relax, find your center, and reconnect with yourself— including a heated swimming pool and loungers to relax and soak up the sun. You’ll have time to engage in quiet meditation on each day’s experiences as you unwind in our serene and supportive retreat environment.

Explore Nature

At Kenyon Ranch, you’ll have ample opportunity to take in the breathtakingly beautiful desert landscape. With easy access from your guest room, you’ll be able to walk, run or hike along the trails, and simply engage in meditation on the beauty of nature. Get some exercise and enjoy the serenity of the desert while connecting with nature, either on your own or with a friend.

Therapeutic Touch

Bodywork therapy is another essential part of the program at STAR retreats. In these therapeutic touch sessions, retreat participants experience the healing power of human touch from our trained and highly skilled therapists. Relax, let go of anger and aggression, and allow the calming energy of this session to guide you on your path of recovery.

Greater mental health and wellness can be yours using the anger management treatment process you’ll experience at a STAR retreat. Contact us today to learn more about our programs.

Explore STAR’s Retreat Therapies

There is a truth in anger that often gets lost in the explosion of emotion accompanying it. Many times that ‘truth’ is connected to a painful memory of feeling neglected, abandoned, or abused. And it is this pain that fuels the anger most people feel. Unresolved anger causes us to react to everyday stressors in an elevated way. Others seemingly always know how to ‘push our buttons.’ Feelings of frustration, annoyance, hurt, shame, helplessness, or disappointment may frequently arise, followed by quick, often loud or aggressive reactions. Your anger may sometimes surprise you as you come face to face with a part of yourself that acts out of control.

Later there are ‘messes’ to clean up: hurt feelings, damaged relationships, or even destroyed property. What may feel like simply expressing yourself can cause others to shut down, turn away, or become aggressive in return. Unresolved anger can also turn inward, and we may find ourselves closing off from others, harshly criticizing ourselves, or self-harming.

To understand this behavior, we must examine our childhood experiences with it. As children, many of us learned to repress our negative feelings and were not granted the opportunity to speak up for ourselves. Or, we were never heard or given appropriate guidance to deal with our feelings when we spoke up. Our parents and other caregivers failed to model or teach healthy ways of expressing emotions. Many well-intended, loving parents simply did not learn these skills themselves. They unintentionally passed the burdens of carrying unresolved anger and unhealthy expression onto their children as a result.

Below are a few forms of therapy employed at STAR to help get to the root of your anger management challenge, heal from the traumas that contributed to it, and create new, more positive ways to handle it when your temper tries to flare out of control.

Cognitive Foundations

In contrast to subconscious operations, cognitive foundations are your conscious-level thinking, reasoning, remembering, understanding, and learning mental activities. By clearly defining and understanding these foundations, STAR created a structure upon which other healing treatments can be built.

Self-Reflective Exercises

Self-reflection gives you a chance to pause, observe yourself, and sort through thoughts and emotions in a calm and relaxed manner. These exercises may ask you to reflect upon an experience you had, your feelings about some subject, or explore your reactions to different scenarios to better understand yourself.

Experiential Therapies

In contrast to talk therapy, meditation, or other types of treatment, experiential therapy focuses on action and immersing yourself in an experience. These programs can be outdoors-based, with animals, music-related, play therapy, or using art and drama. When your body is engaged and acting in a new or different way, it opens up parts of your psyche to healing that can lead to lasting change.

Integrative Breathwork

Breathwork has its roots in many ancient spiritual practices, but scientific research has also overwhelmingly supported its benefits. Controlling and manipulating your breath has a surprising level of influence over emotions, physiological responses, and thought processes. We use integrative breathwork therapy to facilitate all types of healing.

Emotional Release Work

Emotional release techniques are designed to help neutralize negative or overwhelming emotions and damaging thought patterns that tend to keep us stuck. Exercises may include breathing practices, visualizations, or more active ways to physically release pent-up emotions. Emotional release therapy offers techniques to manage emotions and get back to a calm and balanced center.

Psychodrama

Psychodrama is a type of active therapy that includes acting out scenes from your past that have impacted your life. This re-enactment may consist of role-playing and other forms of psychology-based performance. The goal is to help retreat participants gain a deeper understanding of past events and prompt emotional healing.

Birth Psychology

Birth psychology studies experiences that impact the development of your psyche from pre-birth up through one year of age. Traumatic occurrences that took place while you were still in your mother’s womb, during birth, and in infancy can create lasting psychological damage that we need to uncover and heal from to move forward in life.

Guided Imagery

Guided imagery is a mind-body therapy in which a retreat facilitator guides participants in using their mind’s eye for visualization. This therapy incorporates all five senses and often uses story-telling or metaphor to prompt stress and physical tension reduction, emotional healing, and positive anger management. Your inner wisdom often reveals itself during guided imagery therapy.

Ego-State Psychology

The ego state is our combined state of mind, made up of various segments of our personality, that controls our relationship to the outside world and to other people. Working with the psychology of the ego state can help resolve behavioral, emotional, and interpersonal challenges more quickly and effectively than other treatment types.

Family of Origin Exploration

Family of origin exploration is a powerful tool of self-discovery. Many answers to current challenges can be found in our childhood by diving deep into family roots. Coping mechanisms, destructive habits, anger management problems, and how our “stories” are developed are frequently based on our family of origin experiences. When we confront these often painful childhood traumas, it opens the way for healing today.

Art Projects

Art as therapy is not a new concept, and its longevity is due to its effectiveness. Expressing yourself through art, whether that is drawing or painting, creating a collage, sculpture or other media, allows you to explore emotions and gain personal insight. Our art therapy programs can also serve as a positive coping mechanism for stress or treatment for grief. These projects will allow you to find your own individual artistic agent of change.

Bodywork

Bodywork encompasses a variety of different treatment practices, both physical and energetic, which have a relaxing and stress-relieving impact on both body and mind. As therapy, bodywork may include hands-on treatment, touchless energy manipulation, or breathing exercises. Bodywork is considered an essential part of our retreats here at STAR.

Journaling

Far from a laundry list of daily happenings, journaling therapy is a very effective way to learn more about yourself, discover new insights into your behavior, and have revelations that may not come about in other self-work exercises. Journaling may include asking yourself questions about your goals or desires, recording memories, or keeping track of your nighttime dreams.

Writing assignments

Writing assignments are similar to journaling, but with specific topics to write about. Unlike journaling, these pieces of writing may be shared with counselors or other retreat participants. The design of these assignments helps you to dig deeper into your past, your present, and your desired future.

At a retreat at STAR’s Kenyon Ranch, your anger management challenges can become a thing of the past. Reboot your life and get a fresh, focused new beginning using our unique blend of therapy techniques. Contact us and get started today.

Signs You May Benefit from Anger Management Therapy

Sometimes it’s clear. You know when you have a problem controlling your rage. Other times it may be a bit more subtle. Is your frustration, tendency for outbursts, or depression actually the result of an anger management situation? Consider the following signs of inadequate anger control.

Explosive or Violent Behavior

Explosive or violent behavior is the primary sign we think of when it comes to an inability to control anger. Screaming, yelling, outbursts, extreme overreactions, and physical violence are clear signs of losing control. This is the most visible symptom, especially to those around you, and it takes a toll on everyone’s physical and mental health.

Physically Responding to Anger

Rather than letting it out, some people respond by bringing that rage in. This presents with body tension, headaches, temple rubbing, jaw-clenching, or pacing. A racing heartbeat and rapid breathing are also common in this state. Excessive sarcasm and suddenly or inappropriately raising your voice are also signs to watch for.

Too Easily Moved to Anger

If you are easily moved to anger and quick to engage in an argument, this may be a sign of needing help. You may often find yourself ‘on the outs’ with friends, family, or co-workers due to frequent fights. Even everyday activities like driving, listening to the news, or being given tasks at work can become the catalyst for an angry outburst. Quickly becoming irritated and trying to get away from the situation instead of resolving it are common symptoms.

Difficulty Expressing Yourself

If you have a hard time adequately expressing yourself, this can often turn into a fit of anger. Afterward, people frequently feel resentful, anxious, depressed, or guilty. This anger may be especially evident when negotiating or agreeing on a sensitive subject. Anger management treatment can assist you in learning how to express yourself effectively and diffuse that excess anger.

Isolation or Self-Harm

Staying away from people to avoid being triggered or engaging in self-destructive acts is another sign that anger management treatment may be just what you need. These negative behaviors do not address the root causes of anger and only create a more complex situation for yourself and others.

Unable to Diffuse Anger

Do you stay angry once you’re angered, sometimes even for days? Do you hold on to the anger and frustration, unable to empathize, compromise, or exercise patience with others? Not being able to bring yourself back to your center after an emotional outburst and staying in that furious state takes a toll on your mental health, and eventually, your physical health as well.

Poor Relationships

A track record of relationship struggles is another symptom of lack of anger control. Many people who struggle with this have one problem relationship after another, from family and friends to intimate partners or professional and work-related connections. They damage or destroy these valuable relationships due to blaming others, becoming passive-aggressive, or other overt or subtle behaviors.

Legal Problems

Often excessive anger creates legal problems. When out-of-control anger ends with an encounter with the law, it’s definitely time for treatment. Road rage resulting in a traffic ticket, assault charges, and domestic disturbances are just a few examples of situations brought about by excessive anger. The good news is that programs for healing and recovery are out there, even if your behavior has led to legal complications.

If your anger has been destroying your life, the time for treatment is now. Don’t delay – contact us to enroll in the next retreat program.

Getting Started: The Enrollment Process for Our Retreats

When you are ready to say yes to a better future, starting with healing at a STAR retreat, one of our team members helps you through enrollment. Once your deposit and registration forms are received, you’ll have a clinical intake interview with the STAR Clinical Director, Ken Ball, Ph.D., LMFT. The discussion lasts approximately 45 minutes to an hour and will be virtual via Zoom, Skype, or FaceTime. In addition, Ken has created a writing assignment to help prepare you for our process. Your assignment is due three weeks before the beginning of the program.

Your initial deposit will also be due at the time of enrollment (see our FAQ for more information on program costs) and the remaining balance will need to be paid in full no later than 30 days before the beginning of your retreat. Enrollment is on a first-come, first-served basis.

Create a New Life Starting at STAR Retreats

At STAR, we teach healthy ways to harness negative emotions and energy and appropriately express them— without leaving a mess behind. At your retreat, you’ll learn how to use your feelings to gain greater empowerment to experience healing for yourself and repair your relationships. By uncovering the original wounds that created the destructive, emotional patterns that have dominated your life, you can reclaim the repressed parts of yourself hidden due to a lack of understanding and ability to cope with negative and abusive situations effectively.

In the safe, supportive environment that STAR provides, you’ll find that self-expression occurs naturally, affording a freedom to rediscover your innate ability to play, to grow, and to experience a genuine compassion for yourself and others. Here you can disengage from rage and find forgiveness and self-love.

Start your healing journey today. Contact us today for a free, no-obligation consultation.

Healing Happens Here

STAR Can Help

At STAR, we teach healthy ways to harness negative emotions and energy and to how to appropriately express them— without leaving a mess behind. You’ll learn how to use your feelings to gain greater empowerment in order to heal yourself and repair your relationships. By uncovering the original wounds that created the destructive, emotional patterns that have dominated your life, you can reclaim the repressed parts of yourself hidden due to a lack of understanding and ability to effectively cope with negative and abusive situations. 

In the safe, supportive environment that STAR provides, you’ll find that self-expression occurs naturally, affording a freedom to rediscover your innate ability to play, to grow, and to experience a genuine compassion for yourself and others. Here you can disengage from rage and find forgiveness and self-love.

Call us today or schedule a no-obligation consultation with one of our staff members

“I’ll say it… I was a jerk to almost everyone in my life. I didn’t realize that I developed this defense mechanism to protect the wounded parts of myself. I left a lot of emotional ‘baggage’ out there in the desert. Most importantly, the baggage that caused me to be mean spirited and highly intolerant of others. My family is grateful, but none more grateful than me.”

“STAR is invaluable for those that participate at 110%, who are prepared to try everything even though they may be reluctant, and who are willing to honestly participate in the process.”

“STAR is invaluable for those that participate at 110%, who are prepared to try everything even though they may be reluctant, and who are willing to honestly participate in the process.”

“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. This experience is leading me towards the happiness and sense of peace I’ve always yearned for. It’s all up to me now, not the ghosts of my past.”