Scott came home that evening expecting his normally calm, upscale suburban neighborhood to be normal and calm. The sight of police, fire department, and helicopters hovering above his house did not seem normal and calm. The crashed car on the lawn near the front entrance of his house foretold the chaos within. A detective warned him that the scene inside would be traumatic. The sight of his wife sitting in a pool of blood on the living room floor was a bit more than traumatic. The sight of blood on the walls, on the ceiling, everywhere, was a bit more than traumatic. But the sight of a man's savagely butchered body on the kitchen floor took traumatic to an entirely new level. What happened that fateful evening? Who killed the guy in the kitchen? And by what miracle did his wife survive? What led to that fateful evening was years in the making. From the very beginning, things between husband and wife were not at all what they seemed. Someone in the household was not who they claimed to be. But then, neither was the other someone in the household. As old secrets came to light, it became clear the marriage could not survive. But this is not a story of betrayal, of infidelity. This story goes much deeper than that. This story is about paths that crossed before either of them was born. What began as a boy meets girl, boy falls in love, boy marries girl story, quickly morphed into the terrifying inner workings of an altered mind, foreign intrigue, and courting with assassins story. An organization intentionally brought together two people who never should have even known each other. The fallout resulted in someone’s desperate attempt to cover for a botched covert operation that occurred years earlier. No one had any idea what a colossal mistake that was until it was much too late to reverse course. As things unfolded, a realization emerged that divorce, though not yet on the table, could not be an option. There were too many secrets, too much emotional pain, and too many people working behind the scenes to ensure an unthinkable outcome. One of the two, husband or wife, simply could not to survive.

***A BEST BOOK OF 2018 SELECTION*** NPR * The Washington Post * Book Riot * Autostraddle * Psychology Today ***A BEST FEMINIST BOOK SELECTION*** Refinery 29, Book Riot, Autostraddle, BITCH Rage Becomes Her is an “utterly eye opening” (Bustle) book that gives voice to the causes, expressions, and possibilities of female rage. As women, we’ve been urged for so long to bottle up our anger, letting it corrode our bodies and minds in ways we don’t even realize. Yet there are so, so many legitimate reasons for us to feel angry, ranging from blatant, horrifying acts of misogyny to the subtle drip, drip drip of daily sexism that reinforces the absurdly damaging gender norms of our society. In Rage Becomes Her, Soraya Chemaly argues that our anger is not only justified, it is also an active part of the solution. We are so often encouraged to resist our rage or punished for justifiably expressing it, yet how many remarkable achievements would never have gotten off the ground without the kernel of anger that fueled them? Approached with conscious intention, anger is a vital instrument, a radar for injustice and a catalyst for change. On the flip side, the societal and cultural belittlement of our anger is a cunning way of limiting and controlling our power—one we can no longer abide. “A work of great spirit and verve” (Time), Rage Becomes Her is a validating, energizing read that will change the way you interact with the world around you.

"Anger has a bad reputation. Many people think that it is counterproductive, distracting, and destructive. It is a negative emotion, many believe, because it can lead so quickly to violence or an overwhelming fury. And coming from people of color, it takes on connotations that are even more sinister, stirring up stereotypes, making white people fear what an angry other might be capable of doing, when angry, and leading them to turn to hatred or violence in turn, to squelch an anger that might upset the racial status quo"--

As long as feelings are second-class citizens, people will be second class citizens. Experience is an endangered species. An important function of psychotherapy is to make time for experiencing. Psychic taste buds really exist and rarely rest. They feed us each other, gauge states of being, states of spirit. We taste each other's feelings and intentions. An important aim of this book is to build psychic taste buds, not put them down or pretend they don't exist. A positive feeling runs through this book, a love of life, an affirmation. Yet we discover many feel they do not have an impact. A sense of helplessness and impotence in face of awesome forces seems to be increasing. Health is a broad term with many dark threads. A creeping annihilating sense varies from pockets we try not to notice to soul murder that must be addressed. Yet individuals do try, in their private struggles and in the larger social sphere.

This is THE book on anger, the first book to explain exactly why we get mad, what anger really is - and how to cope with and use it. Often confused with hostility and violence, anger is fundamentally different from these aggressive behaviours and in fact can be a healthy and powerful force in our lives. What is anger? Who is allowed to be angry? How can we manage our anger? How can we use it? It might seem like a day doesn't go by without some troubling explosion of anger, whether we're shouting at the kids, or the TV, or the driver ahead who's slowing us down. In this book, the first of its kind, Dr. Ryan Martin draws on 20 years plus of research, as well as his own childhood experience of an angry parent, to take an all-round view on this often-challenging emotion. It explains exactly what anger is, why we get angry, how our anger hurts us as well as those around us, and how we can manage our anger and even channel it into positive change. It also explores how race and gender shape society's perceptions of who is allowed to get angry. Dr. Martin offers questionnaires, emotion logs, control techniques and many other tools to help readers understand better what pushes their buttons and what to do with angry feelings when they arise. It shows how to differentiate good anger from bad anger, and reframe anger from being a necessarily problematic experience in our lives to being a fuel that energizes us to solve problems, release our creativity and confront injustice.

How can the church move forward in unity amid such political strife and cultural contention? As Christians, we’ve felt pushed to the outskirts of national public life, yet even within our congregations we are divided about how to respond. Some want to strengthen the evangelical voting bloc. Others focus on social justice causes, and still others would abandon the public square altogether. What do we do when brothers and sisters in Christ sit next to each other in the pews but feel divided and angry? Is there a way forward? In How the Nations Rage, political theology scholar and pastor Jonathan Leeman challenges Christians from across the spectrum to hit the restart button by shifting our focus from redeeming the nation to living as a nation already redeemed rejecting the false allure of building heaven on earth while living faithfully as citizens of a heavenly kingdom letting Jesus’ teaching shape our public engagement as we love our neighbors and seek justice When we identify with Christ more than a political party or social grouping, we can return to the church’s unchanging political task: to become the salt and light Jesus calls us to be and offer the hope of his kingdom to the nations.

Introduces the method developed by John Cassian, a fourth-century monk, for concentrating the mind and controlling extraneous thought during meditation