Status Updates From Anger: How to Live with and...

Paradoxical intention... if you want a man to do something for you and you make yourself angry because he refuses to cooperate with you, exaggerate your wish for power and control over him...

As Lazarus and Fay note, "assertion involves taking a stand, resisting unreasonable demands, or asking what you want. Aggression involves putting another person down. Assertion is positive, aggression negative."

Rational Emotive Therapy hypothesizes that the frustration you originally experience has itself relatively little to do with your holding and retaining these hostile feelings for prolonged period of time. Your ongoing, or sustained, view of that original frustration- rather than the frustrating conditions themselves- keep you perenially angry...

... we do, in fact, have choices and control over our responses to every situation and our feelings and individual responses often remain much more within our control plan than we realize at the time. The more awareness we have of the existing alternatives, the more likely our ability to consider the situation in its proper perspective before we take action.