GREAT BOOK — dealing with Jerks and Difficult People

This one of the most practical books I’ve read in a long time. While written from a Christian perspective, most of the practical issues can be applied by people of any religious persuasion.

Here are some snippets from Chapter 1.

“In its simplest form, being a jerk means “being selfish.”

"The root cause of jerkiness is a sense of selfish “entitlement” that is both inborn and learned.”Entitlement” simply says, I deserve to act, be or have what I want."

"Roughly speaking, we see the general population breaking down this way:
• 40 percent First-Degree Jerks
• 40 percent Second-Degree Jerks
• 10 percent Nth-Degree Jerks.
…you will see that that adds up to only 90 percent…Somewhere out there are people who have conquered all their jerky tendencies. We call these people Mature Adults."

"Contrary to popular opinion, men (as a group) are not more jerky than women…according to records kept on the MMPI [Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory] the millions of males and millions of females who have taken the test have scored equally."

"In our clinics, we have observed the enormous grief and human suffering that have occurred due to the tragic emotional fallout of the Me Generation."

"In the following chapters I want to show you:
• How to recover from jerk abuse
• How to strongly prevent or at least curtail abuse from jerks
• How to deal with your masochistic tendencies and their roots such as false guilt, and a sense of pervading shame that you probably aren’t even aware of, but it all sets you up for jerk abuse, just the same."

Below are extracts from the tables listing the characteristics of the 3 different degrees of jerks followed by an extract from the Maturity test. Note that these are only part of each table.

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