Never Get Angry Again: The Foolproof Way to Stay Calm and in Control in Any Conversation or Situation

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Let’s face it: if anger-management techniques were effective, you wouldn’t be reading this book. These clumsy attempts to maintain calmness are usually futile and sometimes emotionally draining. The fact is, either something bothers us (causing anxiety, frustration, or anger), or it doesn’t. A state of calm is better accomplished by not becoming agitated in the first place. When we fight the urge to blow up or melt down, we fight against our own nature. Responsible (soul-oriented) choice leads to self-esteem increasing, which leads to ego shrinking, which leads to perspective widening, which leads to undistorted reality, which leads to seeing and accepting the truth (even when difficult or painful) = positive emotional health leads to acting responsibly As I said, I am still working on my anger management, and I have another book to go through before I can feel I’ve done the best I could for myself. However, I doubt that the other book will be as good as Lieberman’s, Never Get Angry Again, which for me is a game-changer like no other and one of the best books I’ve read this year 2021. Has some religiosity that I found annoying. Mostly in chs. 11-13. But threaded throughout the book. Cassidy J, Jones JD, Shaver PR. Contributions of attachment theory and research: a framework for future research, translation, and policy. Dev Psychopathol. 2013;25(4 Pt 2):1415–1434. doi:10.1017/S0954579413000692

I was so conflicted about this book. At times it seemed overly simplistic, and the reader for the audio version seemed so condescending and patronizing. And yet... You’ve probably heard all of these anger management techniques and more from friends, family, and experts, but somehow they miss the mark when it comes to coping with the complex emotion of anger. Parsing psychological processes into elegant and applicable concepts, Never Get Angry Again is a book that can be read and re-read."—PsychCentral Use italics (lyric) and bold (lyric) to distinguish between different vocalists in the same song part The upward turn. You begin to adjust to your new life, and the intensity of the pain you feel from the loss starts to reduce. At this point in the grieving process, you may notice that you feel calmer.

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While the question may seem to contradict human nature and maybe even seem like an unrealistic proposition, what makes the difference, David J. Lieberman says, is perspective. Metaphorically speaking, typical anger-management tools are akin to weed killer: You have to keep spraying all of the time, every time, to keep weeds from sprouting up—and no matter how vigilant you are, you’ll still miss plenty, and you are left exhausted. Never Get Angry Again explains how to pull up weeds by their roots by looking at reality—ourselves, our lives, and our relationships—with optimum perspective and emotional clarity.

When, through our choices and life decisions, we don’t like who we have become, we often seek to escape our feelings through excessive behaviors, endless entertainment, and even abusive behaviors. Eventually, as Lieberman writes, “our willingness to endure short-term pain for long-term gain wanes.” It’s important for us to take full and complete responsibility for our actions. We must not shift the blame or make excuses—this will only exacerbate the situation. We shouldn’t say, “I got so upset because we did…,” or, “I didn’t think it was a big deal to…” We must not blame the person for anything—his actions or ours—and we mustn’t minimize our role. Never Get Angry Again: The Foolproof Way to Stay Calm and in Control in Any Conversation or Situation Not limited to anger issues, this book offers good insight into controlling your reactions and approaching the world in a positive manner. There's not just philosophical expositions, but a decent amount of practical advice, such as some basic meditation exercises. There is an acute awareness of our humanness in this stage of grieving; when we realize that there is nothing we can do to influence change or create a better end result.

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Yearning and searching: As we process loss in this phase of grief, we may begin to look for comfort to fill the void our lovedone has left. We might do this by reliving memories through pictures and looking for signs from the person to feel connected to them. In this phase, we become very preoccupied with the person we have lost. We gain self-esteem only when we make responsible choices and do what is right—this is a soul-oriented (moral or conscience) choice. Indeed, this is how self-esteem and self-control are intertwined. Emotional freedom doesn’t mean doing whatever we feel like doing; rather, it is doing what we truly want to do, despite our desires at the moment. Imagine being on a diet and suddenly feeling the urge to eat a piece of chocolate. We fight the temptation but eventually give in. Is this freedom or slavery? We felt like eating a piece of chocolate, and we did it. Did we like how we felt afterward? When we choose responsibly, we exercise self-control and increase our self-esteem.

When we suffer from low self-esteem, we’re often afraid that something bad will happen to us after something good occurs in our lives. When fortune unexpectedly smiles on us, we feel anxious because of our sense of unworthiness. To alleviate our emotional tension, we might even sabotage our success so that we can fulfill our personal prophecy: The world is as we predicted. We feel secure because our beliefs—no matter how damaging and distorted—have been reaffirmed. We will be right, even if it kills us. Thus, we must focus on not the ‘ego’ but the ‘soul’ of our personality. The more one lives in accord with the ‘soul’, the less he or she needs the drug of anger to make him or her feel alive. Lieberman is adamant, and I agree with him, that the moment one has perspective and empathy to see the context of another person’s reality, one can eliminate anger from one’s behavioral mechanism. It is sometimes important for us to realize that we don’t have a ‘soul’, but instead, we are a ‘soul’ and have a body. Therefore, we must feed the soul with positivity and not the ego. Never Get Angry Again is New York Times bestselling author David J. Lieberman’s comprehensive, holistic look at the underlying emotional, physical, and spiritual causes of anger, and what the reader can do to gain perspective, allowing them to never get angry again. Self-acceptance can also transform our perspectives on the past, learn to forgive, live authentically and chose to respond calmly irrespective of our own or other's emotional states.

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The book analyzes the stages of grief: denial, anger, depression, and acceptance. The first three stages are ‘ego’ based, and only when we loosen the ego’s grip can we move towards acceptance, the last stage in this group. Lieberman takes time to explain the problem with the ‘Ego’ side to our personalities that makes us into the angry and frustrated people we become. We must not skip reading it because it’s not the situations that make us angry, but the meaning that we attach to it, and that meaning is always based on one thing: how we feel about ourselves. Precise control is actuated when we rise above our nature and exercise self-control by seeing things from another perspective. Various techniques will help us succeed in controlling our anger, but they can’t create awareness. Only the complete recognition of the apparatus—and the foolishness and futility—of anger will organically motivate us to keep our calm. For this reason, the first several sections of this book are descriptive; they explain the psychological dynamics of anger and of human nature. The latter sections are prescriptive, offering a range of psychological tools and techniques to win the ground war. But do not underestimate the power of understanding the enemy, anger. In any anger-provoking situation, we would love to ask ourselves, Why am I really getting angry? But of course, we can’t ask the question because we aren’t thinking; we are only feeling. At that moment, nobody’s home, and this is the fatal flaw in the tradition of anger management. However, when we wholly embrace the answer to this question with every fiber of our being before the situation arises, even when we lose perspective, the truth is baked into our very nature, and a calm and controlled response becomes second nature. The tie-in edition of the nine-part CBS All Access series starring Whoopi Goldberg, Alexander Skarsgard, and James Marsden.