Doing good science around this kind of stuff is extremely difficult ...
My personal experience with Psychodrama and Gestalt in the late '70s and early '80s was that for someone like myself who was very much 'in my head', it was an opportunity to acknowledge my own repressed anger. But in retrospect, it was/is also behavior rehearsal for bad behavior in the rest of my life. More effective was modern Somatic Experience techniques where the impulse to respond in anger is explored with a lot of inner attention and slow-motion movements of pushing away and/or striking back. I would call it more grounded and more present. There is dissociation that occurred for me with so-called cathartic anger.
The variation in 'venting' adds to the complexity of the conversation. Physical venting vs naming sources of anger/frustration. Based on my personal experience, physical venting is far less effective than verbal venting, and of course verbal venting is massively variable. Naming the exact source of frustration strikes me as more likely to be usefully defusing than just shouting that someone is an f-ing a*hole. I can imagine the inclusion of humor, for example, would have a huge impact.
My personal experience with Psychodrama and Gestalt in the late '70s and early '80s was that for someone like myself who was very much 'in my head', it was an opportunity to acknowledge my own repressed anger. But in retrospect, it was/is also behavior rehearsal for bad behavior in the rest of my life. More effective was modern Somatic Experience techniques where the impulse to respond in anger is explored with a lot of inner attention and slow-motion movements of pushing away and/or striking back. I would call it more grounded and more present. There is dissociation that occurred for me with so-called cathartic anger.
The variation in 'venting' adds to the complexity of the conversation. Physical venting vs naming sources of anger/frustration. Based on my personal experience, physical venting is far less effective than verbal venting, and of course verbal venting is massively variable. Naming the exact source of frustration strikes me as more likely to be usefully defusing than just shouting that someone is an f-ing a*hole. I can imagine the inclusion of humor, for example, would have a huge impact.