Anger: How to Live With and Without It by Albert Ellis

Author:Albert Ellis
Language: eng
Format: mobi
Tags: self help, psychology
ISBN: 9780806538129
Publisher: Kensington
Published: 2017-02-28T05:00:00+00:00

Pout, pout, pout! Shout, shout, shout!

Make the biggest mess!

Rip, rip, rip! Slip, slip, slip

Into rabid craziness!

Think, think, think! Drink, drink, drink

Only of cruel fate!

Beat your breast and be obsessed

With just everyone you hate!

Since I have done marriage and family counseling for more than thirty years, people frequently ask me how they can check or control their anger at their spouses or at others with whom they have a close relationship. Well they might! As another well-known marriage counselor, Dr. David Mace, pointed out in an article in the Journal of Marriage and Family Counseling, overt or covert feelings of anger probably interfere with love and disrupt more intimate relationships than do any other causes. Dr. Mace rightly takes to task the “marital fighting” concepts of George Bach and his followers and points out that if you tend to argue and fight with your mate, you can use the REBT approach of dissolving your anger, rather than palliatively expressing it or diverting it.

More concretely, he outlines three main methods of doing this:

1. Acknowledge your anger. Tell your partner, “I feel angry at you,” just as you would say, “I feel tired,” or “I feel frightened.”

2. Renounce your anger as unhealthy. Even though your mate has treated you badly or unfairly, face the fact that you create your own anger, that you need not do so, and that you usually harm your relationship by feeling it and by expressing it against your partner.

3. Ask your partner for help. Show her that you have a problem in dealing with your anger, and see if she can suggest some plans to help rid you of it and to make your relationship better.

David Mace has some wise suggestions, and I highly endorse them. In a follow-up article, also published in the Journal of Marriage and Family Counseling, I add these additional REBT methods to help you deal with your anger at anyone with whom you have a close relationship:

4. Acknowledge your anger to yourself. Don’t merely inform your mate about your angry feelings, but frankly tell yourself, “Look: Let me face it. I really feel angry at my partner. Not merely displeased; not merely annoyed at his behavior. I feel angry at my mate as a person. I am condemning him.” Unless you do something like this, you will not tend to feel in touch with your anger and will merely give it lip service. Once you acknowledge your rage to yourself and work at defusing it, you may then choose (or not choose) to express it to your mate—depending on his vulnerability.

5. Assume full responsibility for your anger. Do not hesitate to admit that you created it, that you angered yourself. Say to yourself something like: “Yes, my mate may have acted bad and treated me unfairly, but she only frustrated me, gave me what I didn’t want. I made myself feel healthily annoyed and irritated about her bad behavior, because I honestly want her to act differently and feel sorry when she doesn’t.

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