The Anger Fallacy

by Steven Laurent, Ross G Menzies

Overview

Featuring the wisdom and wit of: Confucius, The Bible, Yoda, Billy Connolly, George Bernard Shaw, Jerry Seinfeld, Dale Carnegie, Ricky Gervais, Larry David, and many more.

Back in 2013, this ground-breaking, best-selling book told us the inconvenient truth that anger is such a toxic human emotion that we should try to avoid it at all times - even when we think it might be helpful!

Today, this book's message is as vital and relevant as ever.

Anger and division on matters such as health, sex, gender, politics, climate, race, religion, and culture are expressed so freely across social media that we can feel swept up in the emotion, compelled to take our own stand and join our angry voice with others. After all, how else do we create the change we want to see? It is our right, is it not, to state our claims with force, use anger to drive action and strongly oppose those who disagree? 

Well, actually, all anger does is hurt both your mental health and the health and wellbeing of those around you. It is rarely ever helpful to one's own benefit, let alone any discussion, debate, argument or conversation. Its destructive effects are much more toxic than previously acknowledged. In fact, when we are angry, we hold an irrational mindset that blinds us to self-righteous judgements propelling our behaviour in the wrong ways.

But it isn't always easy to avoid getting angry. We need to learn a lot more about anger, its uses, its origins, and how we might substitute empathy and understanding in its place. We need to learn why we get angry and how to try and remove our anger. And you can do that right now by simply reading this book. 

And that's no hollow advertising pitch by the way. The Anger Fallacy was written by clinical psychologists Ross Menzies and Steven Laurent and has been successfully used in therapy.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781922117205
Publisher:	Australian Academic Press
Publication date:	02/03/2016
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	100
File size:	785 KB
Age Range:	10 - 18 Years

About the Author

Steven Laurent is a clinical psychologist with extensive experience in treating psychiatric disorders. He is a regular guest lecturer at the University of Sydney, where he has taught on Mood Disorders, Anxiety Disorders, and Drug and Alcohol Disorders. At present he works in private practice in the Inner West of Sydney. Steven completed a Masters in Clinical Psychology at UNSW, where his thesis centred on emotion perception in ‘psychopaths’. Laurent’s interest in anger arose in the 1990s during the completion of undergraduate degrees in Philosophy and Formal Logic at the Sorbonne in Paris.

Ross G. Menzies has been providing cognitive-behaviour therapy for anxiety, depression, couples conflict and related issues for over two decades and is currently Associate Professor in Health Sciences at the University of Sydney. He is an active researcher and currently holds over $5 million in national competitive research grants. He has produced four books, over 140 international journal manuscripts and book chapters and is regularly invited to speak at conferences and leading universities and institutions around the world. He continues to attract patients from across metropolitan Sydney, rural NSW, interstate and from overseas, with many individuals and families travelling thousands of kilometres to receive treatment at his private practice. The present book is his first major work on anger.

Read an Excerpt

Constructive anger?
There’s an alarming number of popular books on anger describing a certain kind of anger expression (usually the polite, moderate kind) as ‘constructive’. Anger’s constructive, they say, when it’s framed as a mutual problem.
What?! Mutual problem? Constructive? Anger? Bollocks. Anger is in its essence adversarial. In a conflict, focusing on mutual problems, or common interests, is a very smart tactic, but it is the very antithesis of expressing anger.
Think about what a mutual problem looks like (in the absence of anger); for example, when you and a friend work together on a crossword puzzle, or when a husband and wife discuss what to do about a leaky roof.
Passing off your anger at someone as an attempt to solve a mutual problem is usually a little manipulative:
[A mother to her son] When you spend two hours on Facebook, it really ticks me off. You don’t want to tick me off now, do you? No. So it seems we both have a problem here.
Can you see how this is not an example of a mutual problem in the same manner as the crossword and the leaky roof? The mother is trying to frame her angry response as part of the hard landscape of the Facebook-problem. But it’s not. It’s obviously not. She just added it. If your son is obsessed with Facebook, and this angers you, then strictly speaking: you’re the one who has a problem with it. This doesn’t mean it’s your fault; it just means you’re the one bothered by it and wanting it to change, not your son. From your son’s perspective, you’ve added a problem (an angry mother, an impediment to Facebook usage) that wasn’t there before. So now you both have different problems, not a mutual problem. Don’t get us wrong here: your son’s excessive Facebook use may well have negative repercussions of which he is unaware (e.g., sleep deprivation, repetitive strain injury, early onset myopia, narcissism), and these are well worth pointing out to him; but then your problem is ‘how to communicate these ill effects to my son’ or ‘how to persuade him to stop using Facebook’. Similarly, giving a student a detention may be constructive; but feeling angry at him hardly is.