Your Perfect Right: Assertiveness and Equality in Your Life and Relationships

All-new edition of the most widely recommended assertiveness training book helps readers develop more effective self-expression with detailed procedures, examples, and exercises. The ninth edition has been completely revised to include new material on assertive expression in email and social networks, what to do when assertiveness doesn't work, anger expression, persistence, treatments for social anxiety, giving and receiving criticism, facial expression research, social intelligence, personal boundaries, components of assertive behavior, and recent brain research. Not a “me-first” book—It's all about equal-relationship assertiveness.

Robert E. Alberti, PhD, has received international recognition for his writing and editing often praised as the “gold standard” for psychological self-help.

Recently retired from a long career as a psychologist, marriage & family therapist, book author, editor and publisher, Dr. Alberti's now inactive professional affiliations include licensure as a psychologist and marriage and family therapist in California, Life Membership and Fellowship of the American Psychological Association, Clinical Membership in the American Association for Marriage and Family Therapy, and fifty years of professional membership in the American Counseling Association. Alberti's publishing achievements include eight books, newsletters for a number of organizations, dozens of articles, and the editing of more than one-hundred popular and professional psychology books by other authors.

His “formal” publications career began in 1970, with the first edition of Your Perfect Right, co-authored with Dr. Michael Emmons. Now in its ninth revised edition, Your Perfect Right: Assertiveness and Equality in Your Life and Relationships has over 1.3 million copies in print in the US, and has been published in translation in more than twenty languages around the world. Alberti also collaborated with the late divorce therapist Dr. Bruce Fisher on the third edition of Rebuilding: When Your Relationship Ends, a bestselling guide to surviving divorce, which has over a million copies in print and editions in ten languages.

Michael Emmons, PhD, is a psychologist in private practice, who has been a consultant to educational, government and business organizations, a trainer of marriage and family counseling interns at California Polytechnic State University, and author/co-author of seven books.

Emmons and assertiveness training became synonymous when he co-authored Your Perfect Right with Robert Alberti. Since 1970, he has devoted much of his life's work to furthering and understanding assertiveness. Although his focus on assertive living has taken center stage, he has been an innovator in terms of dealing with the whole person, mentally, physically and spiritually.

A lifelong meditator, Emmons has practiced daily, often in the garden by a koi pond. This practice helped him form his approach to psychology and led him to develop the system he calls meditative therapy. The Inner Source: A Guide to Meditative Therapy first detailed this holistic, eyes-closed method that facilitates an inner source to generate therapeutic and creative experiences. Meditative Therapy expands on this method as a therapeutic modality with wide ranging mental, physical, emotional and spiritual effects.