Online Anger Training | Web Based Anger Training Course by James A. Jim Baker | Free Anger Management Training Courses | Anger Therapist Online Course

Anger Management Workbook

Anger Busting Workbook

Page 176

blow-up last month. She was pretty sure that asking Keith to move $1,200 into her account to cover that bill would just about do the trick.

Living with a crazy person can make you crazy. Rageaholics do and say all sorts of wild,
crazy, scary and destructive things. If you have survived all these years of living with one, you have been forced to make all sorts of adjustments and choices, and most of them seem pretty crazy to people who haven't walked in your shoes. Who in their right mind would go and pick a fight with a confirmed anger addict, rageaholic wild man? Probably nobody except his wife, who is trading a little pain now for a little peace later. It seems nuts to most people. It makes perfect sense to anyone who has been there.

But just because you have been there doesn't mean you have to stay there. The whole point of this book is to help couples relocate their marriages and their lives to a safer, saner address. In the last chapter, you worked very hard on a plan to get your husband's attention in order to motivate him to work on his problem. In this chapter, we hope to motivate you to work just that hard on you.

Learning Your ABCs

The first three chapters of this book were designed to teach men how to control their anger by learning a new set of ABCs: Abstain, Believe and Communicate. By stopping certain behaviors, trusting in certain new truths and communicating in ways that are safer and more helpful, anger addicts really can break the power of their anger addiction.

But what about the woman who has been living with him all those years? His anger has had a devastating effect on her. She has been forced to learn a set of survival skills that may have helped to keep her a little safer in the short term. However, over time, the compromises she had to make and the feelings she had to ignore or deny begin to wear away at her ability to act and feel normal. More to the point, her definition of normal gets so distorted that, well she forgets how to be her old, normal self. Her home and her marriage aren't normal. What else can you expect?

In this chapter, we will help you learn a new set of ABCs for yourself, following the same pattern used with the men: Abstain, Believe and Communicate. We want to encourage you to stop doing and thinking certain things, start trusting in some new, important truths, and learn to communicate in ways that are safer and more helpful.

Abstain From These Behaviors and Phrases With Your Partners

Women involved with rageaholics resort to all sorts of tactics in an attempt to control the rage attacks. Unfortunately, most of these tactics are verbal, which gives the rager just one more excuse to get worked up in an argument. The result, then, of most of these tactics is to increase or intensify arguments. They don't resolve anything and can generally make things worse.

The wording of the phrases can vary widely, but the core strategies generally fall into just
a handful of categories:

Reasoning You just want to talk to him and encourage him to process his feeling more
rationally and calmly.

Confronting No more Mrs. Nice Lady. Let's see how he likes it when I get tough.