My therapist's focus was to stop me from breaking the dam (and causing the flood). When my sleep isn't clean for any reason, I get pretty irritable. Lots of small things combined and I'd chip at the dam.

The first part I learned about frustration tolerance was to figure out what was really bothering me. There are a lot of layers to that onion, which is why anger management takes so long.

Here's an example of the layers I'm talking about... I am visibly and irrationally upset when my computer stalls (harmlessly) even for a second. Here's what I learned I'm really thinking:

- It's my connection to the world and the tool I use to feed myself.
- I keep my computer *tuned*, and it still turned out badly.
- Why the heck does that happen to me? That's not how it should be.
- Stalling for too long means I'll lose my work.
- I spent hours on it, and I'll never do it as well the second time.
- If I don't do spectacular work, then how am I going to eat?
- If I don't eat, something bad will happen to me.
- That's going to be really painful.
- My life is going to be eternally painful.

I actually get kind of laugh reading it . After a while, you learn to go through the entire thought process and get to the core emotions. In my case: fear, unfair expectations and catastrophization. All in the 30 seconds of watching my highly-tuned race car, through no fault of my own, take a coffee break.

We used CBT as the framework. Basically name it, rate it, question it. With "it" being the feeling at the time. I know a person who's had a lot of success with DBT.

I prefer CBT because you can basically fit the steps on a single sheet of paper, flag your feelings during the day and go to therapy with what you've noticed. My friend prefers DBT because it's a detailed and highly-structured framework. Really depends on how you want to approach things.