Overcoming Passive Aggression: How to Stop Hidden Anger from Spoiling Your Relationships, Career, and Happiness by Congressman Tim Murphy, PhD and Loriann Oberlin, MS, LCPC.
We all have them: the supposed friend or co-worker who attacks rather than remedies, the bully on the playground or behind the Twitter account, or people who can’t be direct if their life depended upon it.
Add family gatherings that culminate in hostile humor, negative undertones or complete cutoff. Sadly, resentment, chronic negativity or sheer drama gets dished up at many holidays leaving people to feel guilted and uncomfortable.
No more! Learn how you can stop avoiding difficult people and situations in your life and how to effectively take an assertive stand for yourself—how to say things you’ve always wanted to say, but perhaps never knew quite how. There is a handy guide to your rescue by a local therapist, who will meet and greet readers in Easton in November.
Passive aggression and hidden anger manifest in most everyone’s life—at home, in friendships, at school, in the workplace, and even in relationships where professionals try to assist but encounter the help-rejecting complainer, the never-to-be-pleased client, or the non-compliant patient. Such toxic unhappiness puts a strain on everyone and negatively impacts people’s physical health, putting them at risk for increased anxiety and depression.
Overcoming Passive Aggression: How to Stop Hidden Anger from Spoiling Your Relationships, Career, and Happiness shows us how to identify the roots of hidden anger. Often acquired in childhood, passive-aggression and other forms of covert anger can haunt us 24/7 with or without social media.
Loriann Oberlin, M.S., L.C.P.C., who is an Easton-based individual and family therapist along with her co-author Congressman Tim Murphy, Ph.D., a psychologist and champion of mental health concerns on Capitol Hill, step readers through the controlling, manipulative, immature, depressed and self-absorbed behaviors which may indicate problematic hidden anger. They offer modern examples of how this indirect style stalls academic or work-related progress, undermines intimacy, leads to anxiety, compromises one’s health and derails life satisfaction.
While some books target one gender, Overcoming Passive Aggression covers everyone since anger truly does not discriminate. Men, women, young, older, manager, employee, wealthy and struggling all succumb to frustrations. When this book first appeared in 2005, it was heralded for including research and both genders, in particular.
In this completely overhauled and revised edition, Tim Murphy and Loriann Oberlin use charts, text, and plenty of real-life examples to show readers how to overcome behavior traps, how to manage oneself when someone else’s anger gets unleashed, and how to communicate effectively—not avoiding conflict but working through it.
In the 2016 edition, these authors:
• Outline ten angry traits to recognize in yourself and others
• Explain four family types that every clan can fall into
• Explore the true costs of hidden anger on business’s bottom line
• Offer individual exercises and verbal strategies to use in your next conversations
• Cite copious research, expert opinions, and other resources
• Caution when and how to seek further professional help
• Provide handy phrasing to use when frustration has you tongue twisted
• Show hope ahead for active, productive and satisfying work and personal lives
Whether dealing with divorce, a difficult child or family member, conflict in the office, or verbiage bantered about in everyday life, we can all benefit from understanding healthy and unhealthy forms of anger, hostility, and the anxiety that it brings as well.
Overcoming Passive Aggression helps us to remove toxic behavior and hidden anger from our lives, and move forward in a mentally positive, healthy, and appropriately assertive way. This new edition also features must-read insights for educators, healthcare personnel, lawyers, judges and more. The book is available as an eBook, trade paperback, and will become an audio edition as well. Locally, signed copies will be available at the News Center in Easton, but the revised 2016 edition of Overcoming Passive Aggression is sold in bookstores and online.
Loriann Oberlin, MS, LCPC, is a therapist with offices in Easton and North Potomac, Maryland. She’s the author of twelve books on health, relationships, and psychological issues, including Surviving Separation & Divorce (a guide for women) and The Angry Child (co-written with Murphy). Oberlin also writes relationship themes into women’s fiction under the pen name of Lauren Monroe. She will be a speaker at the 2017 Bay to Ocean Writer’s Conference, which is now accepting registrations.
You can learn more at www.loriannoberlin.com and become a follower of relevant articles and news at
www.facebook.com/OvercomingPassiveAggression.
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