Overcoming Passive-Aggression: How to Stop Hidden Anger from Spoiling Your Relationships, Career and Happiness

by Tim Murphy, Loriann Hoff Oberlin, Loriann Oberlin

Book Overview

In Overcoming Passive-Aggression , Dr. Tim Murphy and Loriann Hoff Oberlin provide an in-depth look at a topic we've all faced but haven't always recognized: Hidden anger. When people don't express... This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 1569243611
• ISBN13: 9781569243619
• Release Date: October 2005
• Publisher: Da Capo Lifelong Books
• Length: 238 Pages
• Weight: 0.76 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.7" x 6.0" x 9.0"

Customer Reviews

Packed full of information

This is a very comprehensive book filled with detailed, helpful and clearly laid out information. Professional in its style and well researched a very relevant book both for individuals interested in anger management for themselves or dealing with others, and for those working in therapy/counselling field.

Easy to read, grounded in good science

Highly readable and helpful book on hidden anger. The authors provide helpful methods for dealing with sneaky anger in different settings from work, school, and for couples, parents and employers. I particularly enjoyed the description of four types of angry families, "The troubled family where anger is the voice of pain, the frantic family where anger is the voice of stress, the angry family where anger is the voice of power, the indulging family where anger is the voice of desire." Readers can recognize their own hidden anger, as well as that of others, and learn to react in ways that produce better relationships. The authors do a good job demonstrating the destructiveness of passive-aggressive behavior. I found the chapter "Rewriting Your Own Anger Script" helpful for clients who find it difficult to communicate feelings with others. Readers learn to identify their own feelings and needs, communicate effectively, while taking care of the anxiety this can foster.

Hitting the Nail on the Head

Great book, and very readable. Anyone who has ever come away from a "sneak attack" encounter knowing they've been done in but not sure what just happened will appreciate the explanation of how to deal with hidden aggression. From school bullies to toxic relatives to smile-while-they-stab you co-workers, the book reveals what the tactics are, how hidden aggression works, and most importantly, how to effectively end the abuse. A must-read!

Excellent advice for mixed messages and angry remarks

I've read a few books about how people behave, what they say to each other, and this is by far superior to many. Though other authors get rave publicity on 20/20 and other shows, their books lack substance. I especially liked the childhood component chapter to this as it explains why people might get so angry and hold things in. Then, as the authors show in countless examples, it sneaks out and bites you. What's best, it's not geared to one gender as some books are these days so it helps everyone. I understand passive aggressive people a LOT better after reading this book and highlighting a few sections. I'm sure I'll refer to it next time I'm thrown by a difficult person.

Making passive-aggression clear and interesting

At last, a book primarily geared to telling the layperson all about passive-aggressive men and women. Tim Murphy and Loriann Oberlin's Overcoming Passive-Aggression helps passive-aggressives deal with their hidden anger and offers the targets of passive-aggressives ways to cope with, manage, and help out the passive-aggressives in their lives. There are sections on what creates anger; why anger has to be expressed in an unhealthy, indirect, fashion; what to do to feel less angry, or failing that how to express the anger inside in more effective and less destructive ways; and how to respond in a remedial fashion to others with their own hidden anger problems. Passive-aggressives themselves, and those who live with them on a daily basis will find this book brimming with insights and useful advice-a virtual smorgasbord of ideas that one can seize, make one's own, and put to immediate use. Scattered throughout the revealing and instructive case examples that illustrate the various scenarios of hidden anger in different contexts, discussions of core interactive processes (always sugar-coated to be comprehensible to the layman), and proffered specific remedial tactics are memorable maxims and charming asides that elicit old welcome feelings of familiarity and bring forth new eureka "so that's it" responses of recognition and pleasant surprise. By Martin Kantor, author of Passive-Aggression: A Guide for the Therapist, the Patient and the Victim