Ross G. Menzies – författare

Featuring the wisdom and wit of: Confucius, The Bible, Yoda, Billy Connolly, George Bernard Shaw, Jerry Seinfeld, Dale Carnegie, Ricky Gervais, Larry David, and many more.

Back in 2013, this ground-breaking, best-selling book told us the inconvenient truth that anger is such a toxic human emotion that we should try to avoid it at all times - even when we think it might be helpful!

Today, this book''s message is as vital and relevant as ever.

Anger and division on matters such as health, sex, gender, politics, climate, race, religion, and culture are expressed so freely across social media that we can feel swept up in the emotion, compelled to take our own stand and join our angry voice with others. After all, how else do we create the change we want to see? It is our right, is it not, to state our claims with force, use anger to drive action and strongly oppose those who disagree? 

Well, actually, all anger does is hurt both your mental health and the health and wellbeing of those around you. It is rarely ever helpful to one''s own benefit, let alone any discussion, debate, argument or conversation. Its destructive effects are much more toxic than previously acknowledged. In fact, when we are angry, we hold an irrational mindset that blinds us to self-righteous judgements propelling our behaviour in the wrong ways.

But it isn''t always easy to avoid getting angry. We need to learn a lot more about anger, its uses, its origins, and how we might substitute empathy and understanding in its place. We need to learn why we get angry and how to try and remove our anger. And you can do that right now by simply reading this book. 

And that''s no hollow advertising pitch by the way. The Anger Fallacy was written by clinical psychologists Ross Menzies and Steven Laurent and has been successfully used in therapy.

Clients enter therapy grappling with a range of difficulties. They don’t speak in diagnostic terms, but instead focus on the everyday problems that confront them. Their struggles may include isolation, loneliness, anxiety, guilt and regret, and problems making decisions in a world that offers seemingly endless choice. In contrast, the cognitive-behavior therapist is trained in the language of conditioning and extinction, avoidance and safety behaviors, behavioral activation and attentional biases. This book explores the ideas of the existentialist philosophers as a bridge between the suffering client and technically trained clinician. The volume is not a rejection of cognitive behavior therapy (CBT), but seeks to place CBT in the broader context of the most popular philosophic tradition of the 19th and 20th centuries. 

Therapists versed in existentialism argue that the individual''s starting point is characterized by a sense of disorientation in the face of an apparently meaningless and absurd world. Each individual must become solely responsible for giving meaning to life and living it passionately and authentically. Each of us must confront the ‘Big 5’ existential issues of death, isolation, identity, freedom and meaning and find our solutions to these problems. 

The present volume explores each of these existential themes in turn. Each section opens with a theoretical chapter describing the relevant existential dilemma and its impact on human experience. The second chapter in each section explores its relationship to mental health disorders and psychopathology. The third chapter in each section explores the evidence for treating the existential issue from a CBT framework. This book will be of value to those interested in CBT, philosophy and mental health, and will appeal to psychotherapists, clinical psychologists and psychiatrists.