Act on Life Not on Anger: The New Acceptance & Commitment Therapy Guide to Problem Anger

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.

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All Customer Reviews
Average Customer Review:
1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:

Acceptance Commitment Therapy, 2008-11-26
this is a great guide to using acceptance commitment therapy to control anger. it includes exercises that are useful for personal or clincial work (if you're a psychologist).



10 of 10 people found the following review helpful:

A great addition to psychotherapy or mindfulness meditation, 2007-02-05
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



5 of 5 people found the following review helpful:

Destructive anger destroys lives. Here's what to do about it., 2007-01-23
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).


21 of 21 people found the following review helpful:

Transformational, 2006-04-13
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.


17 of 17 people found the following review helpful:

Don't let anger destroy your life and your relationships!, 2006-03-21
This book will help you release from the anger that's ruining your life.

Many of the patients I've worked with have let their anger destroy their lives. And then the harder they fight to control their anger, THE MORE ANGRY THEY GET! It's easy to see how this can quickly become a self-destructive cycle.

What I love about "Act on Life Not on Anger," and what my patients find so helpful, are the techniques drawn from Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT). If you're like my patients -- and me -- ACT will help you relax, learn to become an observer of your own mind, and help you develop skills to avoid getting hooked into every anger-provoking situation that comes along in your life. 'Cause lets face it, there's certainly a lot of them, and in the end, the only thing that any of us can really control are our own reactions to those situations.

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