Vinegar into Honey: Seven Steps to Understanding and Transforming Anger, Aggression, and Violence [Paperback]

Our desires and our fears are woven into a tangled web of conflicts. We want both to eat dessert and to be thin. We want money but don’t want to work. Anything that threatens our sense of self and its striving for happiness is perceived as a threat to our very lives—the response to which is defensiveness, anger, aggression, and violence.Vinegar into Honey proposes a new paradigm for understanding the relationship between stress, anxiety, anger, and depression. Leifer provides detailed instructions for working with anger and other painful emotions. The process of transforming suffering into equanimity and compassion is central in Buddhist psychology and practice. Each of the steps in Vinegar into Honey reflects views and methods drawn from Buddhist tradition. Leifer’s work holds promise for psychotherapists and their patients individuals seeking to understand and work with their anger and people interested in the interface of Buddhism and psychotherapy. Easily one of the best books on understanding and transforming anger, aggression, and violence that I have ever read. —Albert Ellis, founder of Rational Emotive Behavior Therapy and author of A Guide to Rational Living

Vinegar into Honey is well grounded in wisdom Dharma and fertilized by western psychology, clearly showing in seven steps how to understand and work with our feelings of anger. —Lama Surya Das, author of Awakening the Buddha Within

Dr. Leifer's thoughtful fusion of Western and Buddhist insights provides us with a lucid analysis of the psychodynamics of anger and a practical workbook for dealing with aggression in our daily lives. —Stephen Batchelor, author of Buddhism Without Beliefs

[Leifer] describes the process of transforming suffering into equanimity and compassl©