Hello Darkness, My Old Friend: Embracing Anger to Heal Your Life. This item is unavailable.Hello Darkness, My Old Friend: Embracing Anger to Heal Your Life

This innovative, self-help book proposes that anger is an omnipresent, albeit unpleasant, part of every person's life, every single day. Our happiness and our success, professional, personal, and physical, is directly dependent on our ability to handle it. Using clinical vignettes as well as familiar examples from the front page and the silver screen, all aspects of anger, from sibling rivalry to mob violence, are analyzed and understood. Constructive pragmatic approaches are suggested for every conceivable frustration or confrontation. The book soothes as it illuminates. With hundreds of footnotes it is an encyclopedic overview of a vital subject.

Herschkopf, a psychiatrist at NYU and Bellevue Hospital, names Elie Wiesel, Courtney Love, Gwyneth Paltrow and Dr. Ruth Westheimer in this book's acknowledgements and dismisses self-help books as "nothing but a catchy title with a single provocative thought." He says those other books are no better than horoscope columns where invariably "you find something familiar under your sign, but if you read further, you recognize yourself under all the signs." However, his own self-help book is based on the same foundations that he criticizes in others, both in his basic thoughts about anger ("The more we understand it, the more we can begin to control it. The less we understand of it, the more to continues to control us") and his all-purpose, one-size-fits-all, five-step EXTAR (Explain, Express, Threaten, Act, Reinforce) program for effectively expressing anger. Fortunately for Herschkopf and his potential readers, the book does provide some good, basic insights into the roots of anger in such areas as family abuse and repression, and his examples of applying the approach in marriage, child-rearing and work-related situations are straightforward and helpful. He also provides numerous examples of the use or misuse of anger in books, films and various specific families, all of which provide the reader with a range of possible familiar situations that can help in understanding anger management. But a bit of judicious editing would have made this a more helpful and approachable book for the average reader interested in understanding and managing anger.
Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information, Inc.