Optimism is also a powerful antidote to anger. Many participants in our anger management classes report their anger lessening as they learn to replace negative thinking with positive thinking.

Here’s some good news for negative thinkers: You can learn how to replace pessimism with optimism.

The starting point is to access your vulnerability to pessimistic thinking by taking self-evaluation test you can find at www.authentichappiness.org

Your responses will be compared to thousands of other people in various categories, down to your Zip Code.

If you scored lower than you’d like, you can become more optimistic. As Dr. Seligman writes in Authentic Happiness, his latest book: ‘the trait of optimism is changeable and learnable.’

There is now a well-documented method for building optimism. It’s based on first, recognizing, and then disputing, pessimistic thoughts.

People often do not pay attention to their thoughts and thus do not recognize how destructive they can be in leading to negative emotions. The key is to recognize your pessimistic thoughts and then treat them as if they were uttered by someone else – an external person, a rival, whose mission in life is to make you miserable!

Basically, you can become an optimist by learning to disagree with yourself – challenging your pessimistic thinking patterns and replacing them with more positive patterns.

Note: This view of optimistic thinking is not process of ‘positive thinking’ in sense of repeating silly affirmations that you don’t really believe.

Rather, it is process of correcting distorted or faulty thinking patterns that create health, career and relationship problems for you.

By teaching yourself to think about things differently (but just as realistically), you can morph yourself from a pessimist to an optimist – and tame Anger Bee in process.

Option 2: Interact differently. Many couples like Kevin and his partner develop patterns of behavior that create miscommunication and conflict. Do you interact in one or more of these ways?

-Inattention; simply ignoring your partner when you shouldn’t. This is also called stonewalling or being emotionally unavailable when your partner needs you, or not speaking to your partner for long periods because you are upset with them.

-Intimidation; engaging in behavior intended to make your partner do things out of fear. This includes yelling, screaming, threatening and posturing in a threatening way.

-Manipulation; doing or saying things to influence your partner for your benefit instead of theirs.

-Hostility; using sarcasm, put-downs and antagonistic remarks. Extreme or prolonged hostility leads to contempt – a major predictor of divorce.

-Vengeance; need to ‘get even’ with your partner for a grievance you have against them. Many dysfunctional couples ‘keep score’ and are constantly trying to ‘pay back’ each other for offenses.

Option 3: Positive interactions. Start by actually listening not only to what your partner says, but what he or she means. Partners in conflict are not listening to understand; rather, they listen with their answer running because they are defensive. Unfortunately, defensiveness is another predictor of divorce.

-Stick to issues at hand. Seems obvious but is very hard to do in heat of battle. Focus and stay in present.

-Learn to forgive. Research by Peter Larson, Ph.D., at Smalley Research Center, suggests a huge relationship between marriage satisfaction and forgiveness. As much as one-third of marriage satisfaction is related to forgiveness!

-Communicate your feelings. Tell your partner how you feel about what they do, instead of accusing them of deliberately offensive behavior. Use ‘I’ statements rather than accusatory, or ‘you’ statements.