Before you start

You can read this book in two evenings. I kept it short because a person who loses their temper doesn't need four hundred pages of reasons to feel bad about it.

Most of the book is about why the outburst happens and what it seems to give you. The practical part comes in chapter 10. I put it late because you already know the usual advice. You've been told to count to ten and take deep breaths, and you may have tried it with your jaw clenched while the other person kept talking. The advice isn't wrong, and slow breathing turns up again in chapter 10. My view is that it fails because it asks you to give up something you still believe you need. So we'll go through those beliefs one at a time and see which of them hold up.

You won't be asked to stop being angry. I don't think that's possible, and I don't think it would be good for you. The book is about a narrower thing, which is what you do in the first few minutes after the anger arrives.

You don't need to wait for chapter 10 to change anything. If you feel a row starting tonight and you'd like to walk away from it, walk away. Nothing in the later chapters depends on you having one more bad evening first.

A few chapters ask you to look at your own recent history and check a claim against it. Please do those. You have years of evidence about your own temper, and it's better evidence than anything I can offer.