Customer Reviews

The Anger Habit

5 star:		(9)
4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(3)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(3)

 

 

I intend to suggest this book to my counseling clients. The Anger Habit showed me many things about behavior that I had never associated with anger. The discussion of self-importance and its contribution to anger gave me much more than my money's worth by itself. The book also makes clear how anger requires people to feel invulnerable and how this leads to anxiety in people who have the anger habit. Feelings of alienation, aloofness, and depression are clearly spelled out as among the fruits of anger. The book culminates in a description of what the authors call "voluntary living." I know of no more cogent description of how anger traps people and robs them of their sense of freedom and what to do about it.

This book was full of useful insights about the different forms of anger and how they manifest themselves in different types of relationships. I thought the ties between anger and attempts to control were particularly useful. However, since the book was written in a case study format, the reader is left to some heavy-duty extrapolation in order to extract some "how to's" out of the advice geared toward other people's problems. The response scenario examples seemed extreme, and (to me) unrealistic, but did serve to get the point across. I would still recommend this book as a great resource for understanding anger, but I will be looking for a supplement for more direct guidelines.

Reading The Anger Habit was a big surprise. It showed me the conection between anger and lots of other aspects of my life. I've made changes in my marriage, at work, and with my children that have really made a difference. It showed me that what I thought was my self-esteem was really my self-importance. What a relief I've felt not having to control how others think of me and respond to me. I never thought reading and studying a book could actually change my life, but this book did. Thank you so much Dr.s Semmelroth and Smith

AN EXTREMELY INSIGHTFUL AND HELPFUL BOOK. I CONSTANTLY FIND MYSELF REFERRING PEOPLE TO THIS BOOK AND AM GETTING WONDERFUL FEEDBACK. THE LENGTH AND FORMAT (ESPECIALLY THE LETTERS TO CLIENTS AND ALTERNATIVE RESPONSE EXAMPLES) MAKE THIS BOOK VERY HELPFUL TO A WIDE VARIETY OF PEOPLE. I USE THIS BOOK ESPECIALLY WITH CLIENTS REGARDING ANGER MANAGEMENT, DEPRESSION, ANXIETY AND PARENTING/CONTROL BATTLES. I CAN'T WAIT FOR THE AUTHORS' NEXT WORK.

Although the book has many helpful ideas, it isn't what I call straight forward. I prefer clearly deliniated principles that can be applied to unique situations. Many principles can be extracted here, but are buried in a format that is not to my liking. One could take the "alternative" responses Semmelroth and Smith give to the various scenarios they have chosen too literally as the "correct" or "only" responses, rather than as a guide, which I think is their intent. I found Semmelroth's The Anger Habit Workbook much more useful. It can be used as a stand-alone book that doesn't really need this book as a first-read.

Dr. Semmelroth and I have very divergent views of anger. He begins his book by stating that anger is a form of insanity. Once he takes this shaming and distorted view, he has some mildly positive suggestions on how to attend to the most aggressive forms of anger behaviorally. I define anger as "the natural healing energy the body generates to respond to injury." This is a compassionate view of anger, which I believe is a normal human emotion. If you are looking to understand and heal your anger instead of trying to get rid of it, don't look here.

This is a huge book in only 150 well-written pages. Thinking readers will be thrilled by insight after insight concerning the relationship of their anger to their anxiety, depression, feelings of alienation, parenting, teen depression, and of course family relationships. I suspect many mental health professionals who have a blind spot for the less obvious forms of anger will be offended by this book. Therapists who truly experience their clients as equals will love it, and so will their clients.

I had a hard time reading this book. The points expressed by the authors are interesting but I like books that spell things out more clearly. I found this book hard to read and I didn't find any useful suggestions on how to control anger. I also did not like the format that was used of showing example "letters" from the authors to fictional patients. I like a more factual books without human-interst stuff. That's just my opinion.

This short book offers a solution to a difficult and dangerous problem: habitual, uncontrollable anger. Such anger, explain authors Carl Semmelroth and Donald E. P. Smith, is a bad habit, and other habits may trigger it. Just as smokers get the urge for a cigarette at certain times, such as after a meal, while having a drink or while socializing, angry people assert their anger according to repetitive patterns. They may explode, for example, in response to inconsiderate drivers, disobedient children or perceived slights from employers. They stoke their tantrums with feelings of frustration and negative interpretations of the conduct of others. They fantasize frequently about how they will get control over those they see as their antagonists. Semmelroth and Smith do not tell anger addicts to temper their outbursts. Instead, they believe angry people must break the habit altogether, by replacing rage with reason and trying to understand the deeper side of their own feelings. Although this idea has merit, the authors offer their prescription with, perhaps, less than fair warning of just how difficult it is to change habits as deeply rooted as those that nourish anger. With this caution, we suggest that people whose rages have become uncontrollable - or those who have to work or live with them - may benefit greatly from the ideas in this book.

this is an eye-opening book. I'm a therapist and highly recommend it to anyone interested in grappling with one's own(or others') anger. I found some of the writing perhaps needlessly dense, but much of it was compact and eloquent. The letter-writing format, in my view, worked; it was a novel approach to a subject that's been rendered dry and dull in more conventional structural formats. In a word, this is just a flat-out, great book--a profound, startling meditation on anger.