Product Description

If you’d tried to control problem anger before with little success, this book offers you a new approach to try. Instead of asking you to struggle even harder with anger, this book helps you to drop the rope in your tug-of-war with anger using a new set of principles and techniques: acceptance and commitment therapy (ACT).

You’ll start by learning how to accept your angry feelings as they occur, without struggling to alter or impede them in any way. Then, using techniques based in mindfulness practice, you’ll find out how to watch your anger without identifying with it. Value-identification exercises help you decide what matters most to you and then commit to short- and long-term goals that turn these values into reality. In the process, anger simply loses power over your life—in the process, you’ll gain the most profound control, accomplished by simply letting go.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #54520 in Books
• Published on: 2006-03-03
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 179 pages

From the Publisher
From the best-selling author of When Anger Hurts, Matthew McKay, and ACT-experts Georg Eifert and John Forsyth, comes the first book to adapt acceptance and commitment therapy principles to dealing with anger. It teaches readers how to change their relationship to anger by accepting rather than resisting angry feelings and learning to make values-based responses to provocation.

From the Inside Flap
"Anyone who sees their anger as a struggle, as something to confront, suppress, control— or, worst of all, ignore—will find this book to be a gift of life and hope. The authors offer practical ways of understanding the problem and debunking the myths of anger, all with genuine acceptance and compassion. This feeling is translated into practical exercises which are easy to use, and most importantly, they really work! I have been fortunate to witness this in my own practice, even with clients with severe trauma histories and self-destructiveness. Use these techniques on your own, use them in therapy, but by all means use them and find a gentle path toward healing in the presence of anger." —Francis R. Abueg, Ph.D., founder and owner of TraumaResource and former associate director for research for the National Center for PTSD at the VA in Palo Alto/Menlo Park, CA

"Empowering and compassionate, this book was written for people who struggle with anger and who find it hard to control their feelings of rage. The book describes a counterintuitive and extraordinarily insightful approach to living effectively with anger. In a lively and accessible voice, the authors describe scientifically based behavior therapy skills for letting go of our futile struggle to control anger and offer strategies to promote ‘response-ability’ for the one thing we can truly control: our actions. Through real-world examples, creative metaphors, and powerful experiential exercises, the reader learns to practice acceptance at even the most trying times. This book essentially is about love and freedom from unnecessary suffering––it teaches us to open up fully and to live compassionately with what is." ––Laurie A. Greco, Ph.D., assistant professor in the Department of Pediatrics at Vanderbilt University Medical School and John F. Kennedy Center for Research on Human Development

"It is possible to find a place from which you can patiently and compassionately ride a wave of anger as it rises and falls inside you and simultaneously choose to live a valued life with your hands, feet, and mouth. This book will show you how to do that with patience and compassion for yourself and others. If you regularly practice what it teaches, you will find yourself having more LIFE in your life." ––Hank Robb, Ph.D., ABPP, past president of the American Board of Counseling Psychology

"Looking for another way to help your clients with their anger? ACT on Life Not on Your Anger is the book for you. This book adds significantly to the therapist’s options for helping clients cease battling their anger and the other vulnerable feelings it covers and instead come to terms with them as part of themselves and their lives without judgment, evaluation, and self-condemnation. This book helps people understand and accept the function of their own anger, the vital difference between feelings and actions, and the responsibility we all share to live our lives to the fullest, with respect and dignity even when we don't "feel" like it. I have already begun using this work in my own practice!" ––L. Kevin Hamberger, Ph.D., professor of family and community medicine at the Medical College of Wisconsin

"As an educator committed to the value of nurturing emotional intelligence in the school environment, I recommend this book particularly to students as a trustworthy life raft for navigating the endless adolescent seas of painful thoughts and confusing feelings, including one of the most burdensome and prevalent experiences of adolescence: persistent anger. As readers progress through the book, they learn––and experience––that anger need not be a provocation to destructive actions with negative consequences that are some sometimes irreversible. ACT on Life Not on Anger’is an excellent and life-affirming resource with clear, accessible prose, engaging illustrations, and carefully explained practical exercises. This highly readable book deserves a place in every national curriculum program." ––Gary Powell, MA, head of German and 6th Form tutor at Trinity School in Croydon, England

From the Back Cover
Drop the Rope in Your Tug-of-War with Anger

If you've tried to control problem anger before with little success, this book offers you a fundamentally new approach and new hope. Instead of struggling even harder to manage or eliminate your anger, you can stop anger feelings from determining who you are and how you live your life. Based on a revolutionary psychological approach called acceptance and commitment therapy (ACT), the techniques in this book can help you let go of anger and start living your life to the fullest.

Your path begins as you learn to accept your angry feelings as they occur, without judging or trying to manage them. Then, using techniques based in mindfulness practice, you'll discover how to observe your anger feelings without acting on them. Value-identification exercises help you figure out what truly matters to you so that you can commit to short- and long-term goals that turn your values into reality. In the process, anger will lose power over your life—and, amazingly, you’ll gain control over your life by simply letting go of your anger feelings.

Customer Reviews

A great addition to psychotherapy or mindfulness meditation
This book could be a great addition to anyone's therapy or meditation practice. For some, it can be therapy in itself. Anger can be the most troubling and still elusive feeling to understand and deal with. The more you try not to have it the more you will as so many of us have seen and experienced in our lives. The authors of this book guide our minds with simply and effectively while based upon current research. Once the reader can accept anger as a normal and natural but uncomfortable feeling, then the path to living life more fully opens up. The authors teach us that observing without acting out on these feelings helps us to gain control by letting go. The exercises are challenging but essential to the reader's success in using this profound little book. There is a wealth of wisdom and compassion expressed here so gently and deeply about all of life's challenges.

--Robert A. Naseef, Ph.D., psychologist, author of Special Children, Challenged Parents, and co-editor Voices from the Spectrum
Special Children, Challenged Parents: The Struggles and Rewards of Raising a Child With a Disability

Destructive anger destroys lives. Here's what to do about it.
With so many people acting destructively under the influence of anger these days the need for the methods and concepts outlined in this book is urgent. Of course anger is a normal human emotion that serves a real purpose. The problem is not anger itself but the dysfunctional expression of this common emotion. With the huge costs associated with the destructive expression of anger -- for the individuals involved and society as a whole -- it's hard to believe there's no mention of pathological anger in the DSM-IV, the medical establishment's bible of psychiatric diagnoses. This glaring error of omission means anger research doesn't get funded and therapists are ill-equipped to effectively treat clients presenting destructive anger. Eifert and co-authors present a wonderfully simple and effective approach based on the principles of ACT. This book should be required reading for all mental health professionals (and especially the individuals on the advisory committee for the DSM-V).

Transformational
This highly readable book is so much more than simply a resource for transforming the reader's relationship with problem anger. It contains a wealth of insight into what life is like for the vast majority of human beings, whose daily struggle with painful thoughts and feelings obscures the truth about their deepest sense of self. The good news is that people's most fundamental sense of self can eventually become successfully untangled from burdensome thoughts and feelings, to make possible a meaningful life enriched by the pursuit of freely-chosen values. With clear, accessible prose, engaging illustrations and carefully explained practical exercises, this work is infused with the dynamism and excitement of specialists who are aware of the potential for their truly original approach to transform the quality of the reader's life, whether in the realm of personal psychological experience, relationships with others, or meaningful actions. Through the experiential development of `willingness', `cognitive defusion', the identification of values, and the development of self- and other-directed forgiveness and compassion, the reader is led to the discovery of a new and invulnerable source of identity that can act with unfettered freedom and restore to the suffering individual a fundamental sense of dignity and power. I am convinced that the development of emotional intelligence should have an equal place in the school curriculum with the development of academic intelligence, and an accessible book on anger of this kind has the potential to really challenge and transform the thinking of the (many) adolescents who (understandably) spend a lot of time struggling with angry feelings and ceding to the impulse to act on them, sometimes with devastating consequences. There is a wealth of wisdom and potential to improve human experience in this book.