Managing Anger
Simple Steps to Dealing with Frustration and Threat
Gael Lindenfield
To Stuart, my husband, whose love, courage, honesty and humour have enabled me to take so many strides forward in my struggle to manage my own anger more positively and constructively.
Table of Contents
ONE Understanding More About Anger
CHAPTER 1 Anger’s Journey from Stimulus to Response
CHAPTER 2 Anger and Our Bodies
CHAPTER 4 Anger and Our Behaviour
CHAPTER 5 Personal Anger Patterns
CHAPTER 6 Step 1: Challenge and Change Your Attitudes
CHAPTER 7 Step 2: Take Control of Your Fears
CHAPTER 8 Step 3: Face the ‘Beast’ Within Yourself
CHAPTER 9 Step 4: Deal with the Backlog of Unresolved Anger
CHAPTER 10 Step 5: Learn to Express Feelings Appropriately and Skilfully
CHAPTER 11 Step 6: Find Constructive Channels for Your Anger Energy
THREE How to Deal with Other People’s Anger
CHAPTER 12 Facing an Angry Outburst
CHAPTER 13 In the Wake of the Outburst
CHAPTER 14 Dealing with the Chronic or Repressed Anger of Other People
CHAPTER 15 In the Face of Violence
CHAPTER 16 Strategies for Yourself
CHAPTER 17 Strategies for Others
Please use the search facility on your reading device to locate the exercises
| My Rights |
| The Price of My ‘Niceness’ |
| Dealing with Irrational Fears |
| Handling Rational Fears |
| Exploring My Darker Side |
| Uncovering Childhood Wounds |
| Identifying Your Inner Child’s Anger |
| Healing Childhood Wounds |
| Unresolved Anger from Adulthood |
| Assertive Anger Scripts |
| Action for Justified Anger |
| Positive Self-talk |
| Self-protection Techniques for Criticism |
| No Excuse |
| Sounding Out My Self-esteem |
| Stress Monitoring |
| My Stress Alert Chart |
| Challenging My Blinkers |
| Improving Communication Skills |
| Analysing My Relationships |
| Management Spot-check |
To most of us, the word ‘anger’ conjures up fearful and unpleasant images. In our minds, this is an emotion we generally associate with scenes of abuse, hurt, violence and destruction. But this dreadful reputation is very unfair to this natural, basic emotion. After all, it is actually designed to be a positive and constructive aid to survival. Its function is to provide us with vital boosts of both physical and emotional energy, just when we are most in need of either protection or healing.
But it is hard to remember the positive nature of anger today. Not only are we bombarded by media stories depicting the awful power of uncontrolled anger, we are also surrounded in our daily life by examples of people desperately trying to pretend that they have risen above this primitive animal emotion. This is not surprising when we consider that most of us were brought up to believe