The Rational Basis® of Happiness Podcast

The Selfish path to romance. Download chapter one for free at DrKenner.com, and@amazon.com

Leanna, you're dealing with your own anger. Is that true?

Oh, yeah, absolutely. Well, I've got a history of some crazy things. My dad and my brother are bipolar. Okay? He was an alcoholic.

Who is the he your brother, your father was an alcoholic, yeah,

both of them were bipolar and my dad was an alcoholic, yeah? Well, growing up with my dad being very critical, it gave me a very low self-worth. I had a very skewed self-image. Wound up with like, avoidative personality disorder,

okay, avoid meaning that you pretty much wanted to go in a corner and not deal with the world.

Yeah, pretty much. I just took everything that was a problem to me and just stuffed it down deep inside. The problem with that is that it redirected all my anger and all the things towards myself and gave me a very, very skewed self-image. From there, okay, and since then, about a year ago, I've found myself and worked on a lot of issues and been able to get away from a lot of things, but I'm having particular trouble with my anger. I get very, now, some of it might have to do… I might have some bipolar, because my dad obviously had it. My brother got it. I get irritable easily and things like that. Here's my main issue: I don't know where to put all of that anger, all of that emotion that I've got inside. I recognize when it happens, and I recognize what's making me angry, but I don't know what to do after that. I don't know where to put all of that emotion. I don't know where to put all of that intensity without hurting everybody around me. Okay, you know, condescending, and

there's no reason why to the rescue you. What you want to give yourself are a body of skills called assertiveness skills, and what they… you have a choice in life. You can either go through life passive, where you stuff everything, you know, Mom swears at you, Dad puts you down, your brother beats on you or something, and you stuff down everything that you're feeling. It's not fair. It's not fair. I didn’t do anything wrong. You stuff it, you stuff it, you stuff it, but you feel like you're exploding inside. And you have all of these different negative feelings, and you don't know how to get them out. So being passive is one way that people manage their anger. It is not a healthy way to manage your anger, as you can see, because you just feel like you're all bottled up. Another way is to just let the anger out. I'm a direct person. I'm not going to sweet talk you. I'm not going to tiptoe around and say, Oh, I'm okay when I'm not okay. I'm gonna tell you how I feel. I think you're an idiot. I think you're a jerk. I think you hurt me. You did this. What is the first word I'm using in every one of those sentences? Listen again: You, you, you, you, you. If you could see me now, my face is leaning forward. If you were in front of me, I'd be in your face with my finger pointing at you. Sometimes it’s called finger-pointing language. It is aggressive language because when you start saying you did this, you didn’t do this, you should have done this, you idiot, you get in with the name-calling. What that does is it shifts the other person's focus. They don't hear what your complaint is. If I said to you, Oh, I hate doing this too. But can you bear with one role play, Leanna? Leanna, you're such a jerk. You put the car in the wrong place again.

What are you focused on right now?

Well, yeah, the fact that you called me a

jerk, and did you even hear that you put the car in the wrong place? Well, I did. You can hear it, but your focus shunts over. It shifts over to don't call me a jerk. Don't call me an idiot. I didn't do anything wrong. I'll park where I damn please. And you get into this rebellious, this don’t-tell-me-what-to-do, don’t-put-me-down. When you start a sentence with a “you” and then throw in your evaluation—You did this. You did that.—you're actually attacking the person, the person's personality, and you were at the receiving end of that. If you… if you're saying that your brother and your father were very critical… and I don’t know if your brother was but your father was very critical of you, you were on the receiving end of that and didn’t know assertiveness skills as a kid. Are you with me so far? Yes. So what you need to do to be able to express your anger, you need to be able to, hey,

I got to interrupt this because we've got to pay some bills. 30 seconds, that's it. A very quick ad, and then Alan will be back.

Romance. Oh, I wish guys knew more about what we want from a relationship. Boy, I wish I knew more about what I want. Where's that ad I saw here? It is the selfish path to… Romance, a serious romance guidebook. Download chapter one for free at selfishromance.com and buy it@amazon.com. Hmm, the selfish path to romance. That is interesting. So…

what you need to do to be able to express your anger, you need to be able to switch the “yous” to “I’s.” I'm feeling really frustrated. I remembered I told you that that's an emergency entrance, that we need to leave that open. And this is the fifth time I've seen your car parked there. If I cut, what are you now thinking?

Well, that I parked my car in a place that there's an emergency room.

Yeah, I didn’t attack your character. But could you hear the frustration in my voice? I could still vent my anger. Yeah, it's fascinating. I can say one of the examples—I love this parenting book, How to Talk So Kids Will Listen and Listen So Kids Will Talk. There’s an example of the mom saying, “There's a wet towel on my bed and I'm seeing red.” She just gets real angry. You can express anger, but she didn’t attack the person's character. She talked about how she was feeling. Is that… So I'm only giving you just a little window into assertiveness skills. There are multiple, multiple assertiveness skills rather than just I-and-you, knowing the difference between I-language and you-language, or assertive and aggressive language. But if you get a book on assertiveness skills… there's a book Asserting Yourself. There's a book Messages by McKay and some other authors. There are multiple good books on the market that can teach you how to express yourself. Even that parenting book I mentioned, not all of them are on my website. The parenting book is on my website, DrKenner.com, that teaches assertiveness skills for pint-sized kids, or there’s one for teenagers too. But if you've got a lot of pent-up anger, you want those skills. Then you can even go back to the people that hurt you in your past, and you can, if you want—may not be worth it—and say, I feel really angry. I felt attacked a lot as a child, and I'm hurting now for it. I'm repairing myself. I want to let you know that I'm hurting a lot, that it did a lot of damage. You know, you can express it now. I'm… I’m abbreviating a much more well-thought-out note to… to Dad or to your brother or to whoever it would involve. But if you're angry with yourself too, because you've kept stuff in that you've betrayed yourself, then instead of getting angry with yourself, learn the skills and grow. Use that anger to motivate you to love your life. So thank you so much for your call, Leanna.

And here's a little more from Dr. Kenner,

I just moved in with my son, and

it ain't working. There's a lot of tension between us. I guess I didn't see he had a whole new life plan for himself, and I kind of got in the way.

And what happens if you have your parent move in with you? You know, you've got caretaker responsibilities, and what is it like for you? It’s… it's hard to come and go and not pay attention to your parent, and yet you still want some of the freedom you used to have, and yet you love your parent. And from the parent's point of view, you know, they may think, Oh, great, I'm moving in with my son or my daughter. They may think, Oh, my God, I have to live with them. And I thought, Finally, once I launched them, they were out of the house. I no longer had to live with them. But there are all of these family dynamics—the dynamics that you've had over your whole lifetime—that come back when Dad or Mom comes back in to live with you. And the dynamics are ripe for you and ripe for Mom or Dad. And if you guys don't talk about it, it makes life more difficult. But if you can find tactful ways to bring up some of the concerns you have, you can come up with maybe a solution that works for everyone.

For more Dr. Kenner podcasts, go to DrKenner.com.

Here's an excerpt from The Selfish Path to Romance, the serious romance guidebook by clinical psychologist Dr. Ellen Kenner and co-author Dr. Edwin Locke.

To become a better romantic partner, understand where emotions come from. Every emotion is caused by a specific type of subconscious evaluation or appraisal. Here are some examples: Happiness is the emotion stemming from the appraisal that you've achieved or are making progress toward your most important goals and values. For example, romantic love satisfaction is a narrower, less intense form of happiness, usually stemming from gaining or holding a particular value. Love results from a highly positive evaluation of another person based on their desirable qualities. Hope stems from the appraisal that a desired value will be achieved.

You can download chapter one for free by going to DrKenner.com, and you can buy The Selfish Path to Romance at amazon.com.