Gary D. Chapman

I’d be a bad therapist. See, Aristotle says anger is like any other human trait: there’s an excess, a deficiency, and a mean. An excess explodes at everyone over everything all the time. A deficiency tolerates abuse it shouldn’t accept. The mean expresses anger in the right proportion at the right times and at the right people. By the time I’ve finished talking, found my copy of the Nicomachean Ethics, and turned back around, my office is empty and I’ve lost another client. Bad show more therapist.

This is why Gary Chapman’s book “Anger: Taming a Powerful Emotion” is a better bet than a session with Dr. Nathan. Whether you’re shoving anger down into a festering ball of rot or gracing the entire world with your “truth telling,” you need a lecture on Aristotelian ethics less than you need to learn how to take control of all that righteous indignation before it sinks your most important relationships.

These two concepts, righteous indignation and relationships, are good prisms for understanding Chapman’s angle on anger. Chapman writes both as a professional counselor and as an evangelical Christian. He starts, then, with the presumption that everything about human nature is created by a good God for a good reason — including anger.

Thus, indignation serves a righteous end. It’s a warning light on the dashboard, alerting us to a problem that needs a solution. Anger is good. It’s neither a vestigial “fight or flight” response from our time as apes on a savanna, nor a mistake we should try to deny or evade. The trick is to learn how to be angry for good reasons, in a good proportion, and in a good direction. (As Aristotle said…never mind.)

Whether or not you find a Christian worldview compelling, Chapman’s techniques for anger management are agnostic. What I mean is that his methods don’t really require the lordship of Jesus or a sinner’s prayer, although Chapman suggests a lot of prayer and provides enough scriptural support to reassure the reader he’s not working at cross purposes to the Bible.

Chapman assumes you wouldn’t have turned to him if you weren’t a Christian, so he isn’t out to convert you. Rather, he wants to empower you to stabilize and restore the relationships that unmanaged anger always damages. He emphasizes thinking together: writing your feelings down, expressing yourself in “we” language that requests help instead of “you” language that accuses, and other approaches that prioritize healthy relationships over proving your point or extracting confessions of guilt.

Along the way, Chapman handles a host of sensitive subjects with sensitivity and grace. What do you do when the other person refuses to see a problem and doesn’t want to reconcile? How do you help an immature child deal with maturing emotions? Is it okay to be angry with God? What about when you’re angry at yourself, and how do you confront an angry person without setting off a landmine?

I appreciate Chapman’s clear, calm, rational recommendations. Anger is hard, especially since so much of a person’s identity is wrapped up in feeling right. Though I may quibble with some of his prooftexts, it’s hard to fault his strategies. I personally have never regretted slowing down, thinking before I open my big mouth, and redirecting my energy toward building bridges with the people I love. show less

This excellent book covers all aspects of relating to adult children. For instance, it describes problems with children in their twenties who drift, never leaving home; or who don't want independence; or who treat their parents as doormats.

I don't have any of those problems, but still found it very interesting in understanding better how younger people think, and why the traditional model of the empty next is no longer so appropriate. There was advice in dealing with behaviour problems, show more with boyfriends/girlfriends, with in-laws, with money... and one about what we leave our children as legacies, not just financial but moral and spiritual too.

The book is very well written, with anecdotes and clear advice. My only quibble was that almost every page was advice about going to counselling to resolve problems - but for some that may, of course, be appropriate.

All in all, highly recommended to anyone with adult (or nearly adult) children, particularly if you are having any problems with them. Written from a Judaeo-Christian perspective, but relevant to anyone. show less

We were pretty disappointed in this book (my husband and I read it together).
Although he might have something worth while to say about the 5 love languages we couldn't really pay attention to those without cringing in pain at his awful gender stereotypes. Firstly, he does not include homosexual couples in this book at all. He presumes that everyone is heterosexual. Then repeatedly made it seem that women were more in need of emotional support than men, one-sidedly using stereotypes about show more how women cry etc without recognizing that men are emotional beings as well. However, what was the worst part for us however was in the 'act of service' section. The husband fully expected his wife to be a stay at home, work all day doing house chores, no career wife. Rather than addressing this as the problem (as Betty Friedman did in The Feminine Mystique 50 years ago), Chapman told the couple that the wife needed to make sure she did 4 things for the husband everyday and in turn he would *help her* with 4 things of his choice. Why doesn't he just do four things for her? There's still an expectation that she will be doing at least twice as much housework. There is no equality in that marriage. A woman's place is not in the home. Only a patriarchal oppressor would force a woman to stay home and do housework when she aspires to do greater things.
Overall, Chapman was greatly disappointing. He really needs to take a Sociology of Gender class before he writes another book because his views are very outdated... but considering he's an 80 year old man perhaps we can cut him some slack.
Sincerely,
Not impressed at all show less

After taking a love languages quiz as part of premarital counseling, my fiancee and I decided to acquire and read the book. Its advice and insight is terribly helpful, and all couples (whether married or only engaged) couldn't lose by reading it.

I found out that at least some reviews accuse author Dr. Gary Chapman of being a "Bible-thumper." I wish I could say merely "they have got to be kidding," but I know perfectly well the explanation: those reviewers are individuals who recoil in show more disgust from the slightest hint of a Christian worldview. At least those reviewers did seem to actually read the book. Well, then, *is* this book Bible-thumping in tone? Absolutely not. I'm fairly sure I don't recall Dr. Chapman mentioning the Bible once in the entire book. Actually, before the last chapter (where he finally explicitly states his belief that Jesus is the Christ), the tone is fairly secular; I could not tell whether Chapman was a Christian of any sort. He successfully left that unclear (again until the last chapter), by calling Jesus "Jesus of Nazareth" or only "Jesus" when mentioning Him at all. The people who tend to reveal their beliefs and habits are Dr. Chapman's counseling patients, not him. Several patients mention the mere fact of going to church. If either that, or Dr. Chapman's tone and implicit worldview, offend the reader, the reader frankly gets offended easily. They also don't know what a "Bible-thumper" actually is. show less