The Anger Habit

[trickykitty]

I picked up this book at my local library while looking up books on anger management. I was curious in general, as I normally don't bother one bit with self-help books. I have recently found that my passive-aggressive tendencies are called into the open a lot more with certain people I hang out with. I know I am passive-aggressive and have the normal problem of misdirecting my anger, but I've never really noticed exactly how much until recently. I looked up anger management first since everything ties back to "anger" and I also have friends and family members who are overly angry all the time. I just figured that reading up about it may help me learn how to bring fourth and focus my anger in a more constructive way while also helping me to understand why others are just so damned angry all the time. I picked this book first just because it was shorter. I may not even bother with the other books I found.

The reason why I'm mentioning this here is because there is a passage I wanted to quote for my own reference and to make a quick comment about said passage.

The Anger habit is kept up in dozens of little ways on a daily basis. We are continually warming up to attack others by thinking critical thoughts, fantasizing about getting even, second guessing other people's behaviors, critically judging other's lives, and a host of other warm-up exercises that we practice on a daily basis.

The thing I find interesting from a psychological background is that most of the examples mentioned above are also a necessary part of living as a successful, adaptive (human) being. It is important to be able to "read into" people's behaviors so as to not get taken advantage of. It's especially important that we think critical thoughts about the world around us so as to make it a better place rather than just accepting it as sheep, and it usually takes getting into an angry state before someone will actually speak out and do something about it. However, I can also see the darker side to these. Critically judging another person's lifestyle is what creates bigotry and hate, but I'll be the first to say that I can easily dislike how another person lives his/her life - my sister is a perfect example. I critically think and then I get asked stupid questions by seemingly everyday, ordinary folks while I'm at work answering the phones. It's frustrating as hell.

Well, we'll see how the rest of the book goes.