Paul A. Hauck

Hauck is a crisp, clean and effective popular writer in the tradition of Albert Ellis and friends, the schools of cognitive psychology. It’s true he doesn’t talk about fear and love and all those things most profound like religion, or what I might call ‘end game’, what you’d ideally like to be, but more about first steps and things upon which people are more likely to agree. I also feel like he made a few allusions perhaps to social psychology perhaps, but I couldn’t get a clear non-obvious insight to talk about here. I am certainly very familiar with the basic idea that circumstances do not tyrannize over us unless we let them, and I agree. Or as Anne Frank said, Honestly, things are only as bad as you make them. We treat every suburban frustration as though life and limb were in danger, but even people in real danger have managed to get by without crippling anger and other dysfunctional thoughts, so.

It is largely about getting by though, not end game, and I’m very religious so for me this can only be a good beginning. I would therefore like to say something sufficiently non-devotional to be an appropriate response to a psychology book, but still ambitious. Basically, be sad. If you can be sad instead of angry—humor is a kind of halfway point I think, preferable certainly to anger but not entirely at ease—then with your sadness you have defeated anger. It’s like with music; the trashy break up songs are that way because they feed off of the energy of anger, and if they can’t have the positive energy they’ll settle for the negative variety. But if you just calm down the energy and get at ease, you might still be sad that people are foolish and vain—you’ll probably not be happy, still less pleased—but you won’t be wishing you could hurt them anymore, not even as a joke.… (meer)