How to Change Your Thinking About Anger: Hazelden Quick Guides
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About this ebook
Apply practical strategies from the latest expert research to change the way you think and react to feelings of anger.Do you (or does someone you know) have a problem with anger? Perhaps you've been told you do, but you're skeptical. Anger can be a healthy emotion, but when we direct it outwards towards others, or fail to use it constructively, we cause lasting damage to ourselves and loved ones.Using the research of experts in the field of emotional health, this book outlines a basic understanding of anger and offers healthy ways to process and change our thoughts, feelings, and behaviors to better deal with it. These strategies are based on Rational Emotive Behavioral Therapy (REBT), a widely used method of examining our own thoughts to challenge and change irrational beliefs.In this book, you willGet past common myths surrounding angerBreak down anger into its basic components and learn how they combine to create healthy or unhealthy expressionLearn and identify the four basic anger stylesDiscover your own anger style, and identify what triggers your angerPractice ways to respond to anger more positively by making conscious choices in your thinking, feeling, and actingKnow how and when to reach out for professional help if necessaryAbout Hazelden Quick GuidesHazelden Quick Guides are short, accessible e-books that draw on the original work and best practices of leading experts to help readers address common addiction recovery and emotional health issues. This first four-book collection applies the proven methods of Rational Emotive Behavior Therapy (REBT) to challenge and change the irrational thoughts and beliefs that contribute to the debilitating effects of shame, anger, depression, and anxiety.
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Reviews for How to Change Your Thinking About Anger
7 ratings1 review
- Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5A great self help book. The wordings are all simple and clear, and easy to understand. I especially liked the step by step guide activities.
Book preview
How to Change Your Thinking About Anger - Leading Hazelden Experts Staff
Getting Past Myths about Anger
Of all our emotions, anger is the one that has the most taboos restraining its expression and the most erroneous information concerning what it is and how to use it,
writes Lorrainne Bilodeau in Responding to Anger: A Workbook.¹ Understanding anger starts with letting go of those taboos.
Following are some of the major myths about anger, contrasted with realities and more useful perspectives.
Myth: Anger Is Bad
Reality: Though the ways that we express anger can be constructive or destructive, the fact that we feel anger is neither right nor wrong. It’s just inevitable.
Human beings are feeling beings. At almost any given moment, you feel something. If someone who you love dies, you may feel a sadness that deepens into grief, despair, or depression. If you’re suddenly laid off from your job, you may feel anxious about your financial survival and your prospects of finding work. And if you’ve just discovered that your partner has been having an affair, you may feel betrayed and angry. These are all normal reactions.
Remember that words such as good and bad apply only to things that we can control. An immediate flash of anger is not one of those things. Like any other emotion, anger is an instinctive reaction that’s based in your body. This internal reaction can spark in a split second. You can feel the flame of rage before you even know what’s happening. This emotion can be intense or overwhelming, but that alone does not make it bad.
We’ve been taught to condemn anger because we associate it with destructive behaviors. Examples include shouting, slamming doors, hitting people, and throwing objects across a room. Yet these and other aggressive behaviors are only some of the possible ways to express anger. In fact, we can learn to experience and even express anger without being destructive or violent.
Anger and aggression are two different things. Anger is a feeling that takes place inside us. Aggression is a behavior—a way of acting out the internal experience of anger. Aggression is not inevitable. With appropriate guidance and practice, we can learn to redirect the energy of anger. We can express anger in nonaggressive ways and even use it to achieve constructive goals.
Unfortunately, many of us are not taught the difference between anger and aggression. You may never hear about this distinction from your family members, friends, teachers, or religious leaders. They forget—or perhaps never learned—that anger in itself is not evil. It’s simply an emotion, and emotions are morally neutral. From a moral standpoint, what matters is not how we feel, but how we express what we feel.
Myth: Anger Is Useless
Reality: Anger can serve many useful functions.
All emotions serve a purpose. Guilt sends a signal that our behavior contradicts our values. Fear arouses us to deal with a perceived danger. Loneliness reminds us of our need for human relationships. Anger mobilizes us to protect ourselves.
In fact, anger helped our early ancestors to survive. Back in the days when humans huddled for protection in caves and lived in tribes, they hunted for food. Anger provided a burst of energy and an extra shot of adrenaline—a hormone that temporarily increases physical strength, boosts stamina, and numbs pain. Those physical benefits mobilized hunters to defend themselves against wild animals, kill rather than be killed, and go on living for another day.
In addition, humans are territorial. By expressing anger, the members of a clan could signal an intruder that he’d violated their property and that they intended to protect it. Today, of course, few of us hunt for food or engage in hand-to-hand combat on a daily basis. We protect our personal property with locks, security systems, and lawyers. Yet anger can still serve us in many ways, such as the following.
Anger conveys information. Anger sends urgent messages about how people interpret events and about what they want. An angry teenager wants your attention. An angry customer wants a refund. An angry employee wants a change in policy.
Anger also alerts us to the depth and power of someone’s feelings. This is useful information to have, whether it applies to your own emotional life or the emotions of friends, family members, and co-workers.
It’s true that anger can distort a message. Someone who is shouting at you is probably too agitated to communicate a complex and subtle message. You’re also likely to react defensively, which makes it hard to listen for the meaning beneath the rage. Yet even when a message is distorted by anger, the message is still being sent.
Anger signals us that there’s a problem to solve. If you play a competitive sport and lose a game because the opposing team cheated, then it’s appropriate for you to feel angry. If someone engages you in a heated conversation and then constantly interrupts you, anger is a natural response. If you feel trapped in a dead-end job, then your anger can mobilize you to change careers. In each case, anger can move us into appropriate action—to point out the cheating, to end the hostile conversation, to find a new job.
Anger points out our most valued beliefs and feelings, and the things that make us feel vulnerable. Because of that, it’s important to pay attention to our