Counseling professor awarded grant to expand Anger Works website and app

Counseling professor awarded grant to expand Anger Works website and app

Have you ever wished you could harness the power of anger to work toward your goals instead of against them? Carol McGinnis, Ph.D., associate professor of counseling in Messiah University's Graduate Program in Counseling, has focused part of her career on creating anger management techniques to do just that. She developed the “’Amazon’ Warrior Theory” (AWT), which approaches anger as an innate emotion and provides a template for anger processing that can be used with any theoretical counseling approach. In conjunction with Messiah University, McGinnis created the Anger Works website for the free distribution of resources related to AWT.

McGinnis was recently awarded a $7,000 grant for her project, “Anger Works SIP Psychospiritual Interventions,” from the Association for Clinical Pastoral Education (ACPE). The grant will be used to develop and launch an app that will mirror the Anger Works website and bring resources, interventions and tests to the public for free. A children's coloring book will be ready for publication this summer to provide a tangible resource for children who are struggling with anger and that content is planned for an interactive game that will be included in the developing app.

Inspired as a child by Christ's anger in the temple (John 2:13-17), McGinnis realized that the emotion could be used to create positive change. “My hope is to inspire others to engage with their anger in a way that will promote peaceful outcomes and help us to model Christ,” she said, “even when we are angry.”

Anger Works currently offers Spiritually Integrated Psychotherapist (SIP) training, which teaches licensed mental health practitioners to ethically incorporate spirituality in counseling. The next SIP training with McGinnis is April 5-May 31, 2021. Other training sessions are being developed for practitioners who wish to become certified in AWT and for people seeking online anger management classes who would like to learn to use their anger more productively.

Visit the Anger Works website.

Register for SIP training with Carol McGinnis.