An Angry Man's Guide to Personal Loss and Acceptance: Overcoming the Rage & Bitterness of Divorce, Loss of Children, Family & Friends A New Guide to Transcend Misfortune & Restore Your Frayed Relationships

By Troy Alfeo

Don't be angry all the time! Sage advice for an Angry Man.

Has uncontrollable rage driven away your children, led to your divorce, and left you alone, filled with remorse? Do you wonder if you will ever cope with your explosive rage, get through your pain, lead a physically healthy, emotionally positive, spiritual life?

Like many middle-aged men who experienced alienation from their children or bitter divorce, Troy Alfeo shows that his personal tragedies could have been avoided if he had seen the patterns of his explosive rage and uncontrollable anger beforehand. He shows how years of such behavior eventually left him totally isolated, alone, and cut off from the ones he loved. He speaks frankly about the violence that he visited upon his loved ones and friends. This a book about anger so destructive that those he loved were forced to stay away from him out of fear. It is also a story about redemption and the attempts to repair these broken relationships. The author provides a road map back to normalcy, some cognitive behavioral therapy, as well as a number of positive steps you can incorporate in your life right now that will help you come to terms with your own inner Angry Man.

The author recognizes the damage one's angry behavior causes to relationships and that it may not be repairable. The author maintains there are tools for dealing with this specific challenge, too, especially estrangement from one's own children. He provides practical, concise guidance on how to deal with this particular problem and notes that if you have suffered from it, the most difficult part of your journey back to normalcy may be that you might not ever see or hear from your children ever again. The author posits, "What are you going to do when that happens?" Troy Alfeo provides a solution that works for him. The author freely admits that although he is still a very Angry Man by temperament, it is now a beast under his control, not controlling him. He has successfully started on the road to anger management and has slowly begun to rekindle lost relationships with his estranged children. Succinct and to the point, Troy Alfeo discusses the following topics:

Life has no "do-overs." If you have screwed up your family relationships, you are stuck with it. Own it and embrace it. Your life will be better for it.

Angry emotions make you stupid. Don't believe it? Read what happened to Troy Alfeo when he interacted with his children under a dark cloud of rage.

Your anger will alienate you from everyone. Put simply, people will not want to be around you, and they may even eventually come around to hate you. You might even get fired from your job. That happened to Troy Alfeo too.

Did you even love your wife? No? Is that why you were angry?

When did the emotional distance between you and your spouse begin? Do you know?

Do your children hate you now? How do you fix and change that?

Why divorce is the worst thing that could ever happen to your children. So avoid it!

Coping strategies, to include developing a life of meaning and finding love again.

Solutions for today that you wished you had known about yesterday.

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• Language: English
• Publisher: Page Publishing, Inc.
• Release date: Sep 7, 2023
• ISBN: 9798887936567

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An Angry Manand#39;s Guide to Personal Loss and Acceptance

Overcoming the Rage & Bitterness of Divorce, Loss of Children, Family & Friends A New Guide to Transcend Misfortune & Restore Your Frayed Relationships

Troy Alfeo

Copyright © 2023 Troy Alfeo

All rights reserved

First Edition

PAGE PUBLISHING

Conneaut Lake, PA

First originally published by Page Publishing 2023

Cover Design By

Rob Williams fiverr.com/cal5086

© TROY ALFEO PRODUCTIONS

ISBN 979-8-88793-630-7 (pbk)

ISBN 979-8-89157-129-7 (hc)

ISBN 979-8-88793-656-7 (digital)

Printed in the United States of America

Table of Contents

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Legal Disclaimer

While all attempts have been made to verify the information provided in this publication, neither the author nor the publisher assumes any responsibility for errors, omissions, or contrary interpretations of the subject matter herein.

Adherence to all applicable laws and regulations, including international, federal, state and local governing professional licensing, business practices, advertising, and all other aspects of doing business in the United States, Canada, or any other jurisdiction is the sole responsibility of the purchaser and/or reader.

Neither the author nor the publisher assumes any responsibility or liability whatsoever on behalf of the purchaser and/or reader of these materials. Any perceived slight of any individual or organization is purely unintentional.

The views expressed are those of the author alone and should not be taken as expert instruction or commands. The information provided in this book is for informational, discussion, and entertainment purposes only.

The author is not responsible for either yours or the readers’ actions. The reader is always personally responsible for his or her own actions.

A New Preface

You write to communicate to the hearts and minds of others what’s burning inside you, and we edit to let the fire show through the smoke.

—Arthur Plotnick

When I first self-published this book last November in 2019, albeit for only a very short twenty-four-hour period, I almost immediately received this unhinged voice mail response from my youngest son, Santino, who had a completely enraged meltdown: I just called to tell you that your book is bullshit! You’re a fucking lying pussy. You know that? You’re a self-loathing, selfish, lying pussy. You victimizing little bitch!

So I guess Santino didn’t like it.

I shouldn’t have been surprised at his reaction, though. His angry response was the result of my initial approach to the book itself: I had used the writing process like therapy. I had sort of let it all hang out there, warts and all—big mistake.

I had drafted the original version of this self-help book as a defense against any of my potential critics. Or to put in a slightly different way, my first draft of this book was more of an apologia, my attempt to explain my actions vis-à-vis my family as our domestic life disintegrated all around us, and I had lost contact with my beloved children, perhaps permanently. As an apologia, however, this tome ceased to be a self-help book per se and had become something else almost entirely: a weapon with words that again hurt those whom I presumably loved, or at least say that I do. Hence, Santino’s justifiably defensive reaction to its initial publication.

With hindsight, I should have listened to my editor, Mike, who did the yeoman’s work of reviewing the early drafts of this manuscript. A former military colleague and a dear friend of many years, a man who nowadays spends his professional time as a subject matter expert in suicide prevention and grief counseling, he suggested I make immediate changes to this self-help book so that I could relaunch it properly.

Mike instinctively knew that by airing so much dirty laundry about my family, it was both grossly unfair and painful for them. The book as written would have made anyone angry, and it violated my family’s privacy too. As he put it, "Troy, it’s a self-help book, not a pile of justifications piled on top of even more justifications for what you think they did to you."

He continued, "Even though everything you wrote in your draft is true as far your memory can recall, you can’t put that personal stuff in there, especially not if you truly want to help other middle-aged men out there going through the same things that you are going through. And you definitely don’t want to discuss any of your own hurts and pains in such a defensive way, hurts and pains I might remind you that you yourself contributed to at the expense of everyone else. It makes you look selfish. Indeed, it’s not at all helpful. The whole book just comes across as one giant bitch session."

Mike was right, of course.

So here is that book, newly launched and reedited, hopefully less the apologia it was when I first launched it last November. It is a self-help book designed for the Angry Man so he can navigate the turmoil roiling his soul to help him realize that he made mistakes, lots and lots of them, but that those same mistakes don’t have to define his future—that he can’t let himself simply roll over, despair, and just die.

No matter how much our past may hurt us in the present, the Angry Man has to learn from those past mistakes and move on with his life, even if it means a sometimes-painful goodbye to what once was. I want to help other middle-aged Angry Men let go, get their footing back, find their bearings, and focus on their future lives. I want them to stop being angry, and I want them to be successful in their new lives.

So let’s get started.

And who knows? Maybe one day, Santino just might like this version a little bit better than the last one.

Introduction: Are You an Angry Man?

Are You an Angry Man?

A smart man makes a mistake, learns from it, and never makes that mistake again. But a wise man finds a smart man and learns from him how to avoid the mistake altogether.

—Roy H. Williams

You are an angry middle-aged man. You cannot help it. You are angry all the time, not a little but a lot. You get angry at everything. And it has cost you dearly. If you are anything like me, the thing your anger has most likely destroyed are your relationships. Your anger has alienated you from your children. Your anger has led to your divorce. Your marriage and family are both gone, but your anger is still there feeding the furious toil in the dark recesses of your soul. You are an Angry Man.

The cycle continues. Like a maelstrom, the breezes of rage are gentle at first, but they harbor ill-omened winds that can blast through your life and tear everything you love apart. You fight it, but the storm still comes and then it happens again. When it does, you brace against it but fail. You are all instinct. One more time, your rage has conquered you for the—you have stopped counting how many times that this has happened to you. Your anger has won again.

After a while, you give up. You think nothing but dark thoughts. You despair. What is the point of it all? And then the anger returns to haunt you some more. You want to be rid of your anger, have peace of mind. You want to deal with your loss and move on. But how? Every time you try, it seems impossible to deal with either your anger, which led to your loss, or both. Believe me. I understand and feel your pain.

I have lost everything because of my anger. Besides losing my family and children who are now estranged from me, I have lost friendships, other relationships, and even my job. Since I was the loadstar, the constant variable in these destructive relationships, and because I was the one who drove these people away with my wicked temper, each time I experienced personal loss caused by my more ferocious, uncontrollable rage, I began to ask the same questions repeatedly. How could I change? How could I learn to control my own anger? How should I, and at what point could I, channel my anger into a positive direction? If I achieved that goal, how could I pivot from it, embrace it, learn from it, and help other Angry Men cope with their own personal losses? Should I teach these same coping skills to other Angry Men so they could also manage their own inner furies?

And if so, how could I help all the Angry Men out there who found themselves in a similar situation recognize the patterns of their uncontrollable rage—help them heed the warning signs beforehand and arrest the disasters that uncontrollable anger brings on?

I knew I wanted to help other Angry Men manage their tempers so they could save their own families, loved ones, relationships, and even careers before the losses caused by their uncontrollable rage overwhelmed them, subsumed them, and wrecked their lives. I wanted to do this long before it was too late, before they found themselves living alone in a studio apartment somewhere, crying desperately in the darkness as they forlornly watched their phones in the vain hope that one of their adult children might call on them just to say, I love you, Daddy.

If that description fits you, there is hope. I have some basic and pragmatic solutions to these entrenched problems that seem to afflict middle-aged men now more than ever.

My book, An Angry Man’s Guide to Personal Loss and Acceptance: Overcoming the Rage and Bitterness of Divorce, Loss of Children, Family, and Friends, A New Guide to Transcend Misfortune and Restore Your Frayed Relationships, is the result.

I have spent many years wondering what happened to my relationships. Why did I become so estranged from my own children? What were the signs? Damn it, why was I so angry all the time?

This book is an attempt to answer these questions and develop the solutions those answers inspire. Its goal is to help you see the signs of your own anger and to deal with the fallout in your relationships because of it. It provides a road map for embracing your loss, not with despair but with a renewed sense of purpose so that with the few years you have left on this earth, you do not have to experience that same terrible loss again. Or if you are on the cusp of a divorce or an irretrievable loss, you may be able to recognize the signs and pull back from the brink beforehand so that what happened to me does not happen to you.

Be advised, however, that this book is in part a confessional. My nome de plume is a pseudonym that protects both my privacy and the privacy of my estranged children, ex-wife, and friends. In fact, the tales within this book may horrify you. What I write, though, is absolutely true, ugly though it may be.

Nevertheless, I have had to process a lot that has gone wrong in my adult life and work on my own personal transformation, not as some sort of flaming narcissist nor as some would suppose as a person who never gets angry anymore. That’s just not possible! But rather, as an Angry Man who redirects all that negative energy into positive channels, who helps other Angry Men let go of their inner furies so that they, too, can try to live a normal, balanced life surrounded by people who in turn love and care about them.

I believe my techniques for conquering the Angry Man we all carry around inside ourselves works. If you embrace what I teach in this book, take it to heart, and practice its lessons every day, you will have a fighting chance to control your out-of-control anger, not have your out-of-control anger control you.

Do not wait, though. The longer you take to channel your inner anger, the more relationships you will lose over your lifetime. One relationship destroyed is one too many, and multiple destroyed relationships over a lifetime are even worse. So do not let anger be the way everyone you ever knew remembers you. Conquer your Angry Man at last.

Let me show you the way.

Chapter 1

You Don’t Get a Giant Do-Over

Do not look at the world through the eyes of an insolent and unhappy man, or judge things as he would; but see life as it truly is.

—Marcus Aurelius

If you are still reading this book, you know who you are. You are always pissed off. You are quick to anger. You seethe and still cannot let it go. You are an Angry Man. And like a lot of Angry Men today, you are also probably well into your early to midfifties. You are divorced, your kids hate you, and they never even talk to you unless they need money! And like a fool, you give it to them, hoping to buy their love. But they will not call you again until, well, they need more money. Rinse. Repeat. Congratulations. You have prostituted yourself.

You have downsized your life too. You rent or own a small single-family home, a condo, or a crappy little apartment, and the decor is a reminder of your past. You have photos of your children from happier times. Their frozen images beam innocent smiles from when they were toddlers, before they came to know you as an Angry Man.

Even food and drink do not taste as sweet anymore. At the end of another long day, when you look into the mirror before you drop off into your restless sleep alone in the night, you see that grizzled face stare back at you. You think to yourself, I wish I could get a giant ‘do-over.’

Well, here’s a news flash: There will not be a do-over! Not now, not tomorrow—never! And the brutal part is that you have to accept it, even if your mind wanders back to those distant shoulda-woulda-coulda scenarios that you keep replaying repeatedly in your head. You might ask yourself for the millionth time, What the hell happened to me?