When Someone You Love Is Angry: A 7-Step Program for Dealing with Toxic Anger and Taking Back Control of Your Life

by W. Doyle Gentry

Book Overview

Clinical psychologist and anger expert W. Doyle Gentry offers compassionate, practical insight to those with angry loved ones, providing coping strategies that help strengthen emotional intimacy and establish boundaries-and avoid being held hostage to a partner's angry words and behavior. When Someone You Love Is Angry combines the latest research with real-life testimony, resulting in a survival guide for those exposed to toxic anger, outlining a...

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0425198111
• ISBN13: 9780425198117
• Release Date: September 2004
• Publisher: Berkley / Nal
• Length: 208 Pages
• Weight: 0.56 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.5" x 6.1" x 9.1"

Customer Reviews

assessing and dealing with anger in others

this book is a great tool for assessing your own or someone else's anger and learning how to deal with the latter. it starts out defining toxic anger in terms of personal and interpersonal consequences via a couple of quizzes to help you get started. next, the book takes a look at what gentry calls "loving but angry" (LBA) relationships and tries to help the reader understand why certain people are so angry. there is also a section on assessing damages which forces the reader to look at the reality of the relationship he is in to decide what to do next. the next chapters are spent looking at the seven steps for dealing with the anger and moving forward, reviewing various possibilities in terms of what that might look like and how to take the next steps. these steps include concepts such as soliciting support, ensuring that perceptions are accurate, setting limits and discontinuing enabling patterns, avoiding the rabbit hole of toxic anger oneself, strengthening one's coping skills in the face of stressors such as toxic anger or other abusive patterns and taking steps to move on if nothing else is working. gentry calls it like it is and provides a great deal of information and answers in less than 200 pages. in a world full of multi-step self-help programs, it's not easy to stand out; but this book does. it's a concise manual for dealing with a loved one's anger and saving yourself from the negative effects. since these relationships can be overwhelming for those in them, the simple, step-by-step approach and guidelines given in this book are great.