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Brainwave entrainment has been around for as long as mankind has. In a way, it is the way our brains respond to our environment. Our brains respond to sensory stimuli with what’s called a cortical evoked response. The cortical evoked response looks something like this:

Brainwave entrainment occurs as a response to any rhythmic stimulus, such as flickering light or pulsating sound. It is very likely that this is the reason why a flickering fire has such a calming, hypnotic effect or why the beating of drums evokes such a powerful emotional response.

The ability to measure and study brainwave patterns has given us an intellectual understanding of what we already knew intuitively: external stimuli have a effect on us. When you rock a baby to sleep, you are intuitively evoking a sleep pattern cortical response in an infant. When you go to a disco, the flashing lights and thumping rhythms evoke another kind of response.

Brainwave entrainment occurs through a process called the frequency following response. Given a specific frequency, the brain will follow it and become entrained to the frequency. When a targeted frequency is played, the brain will entrain to or match it. The result will be an altered state of consciousness. If you entrain to a fast frequency, your brain activity will speed up. If you entrain to a slow frequency, your brain activity will slow down. This can happen very quickly, as is illustrated below.

As you can see, it can begin to happen very quickly. The reason why brainwave entrainment sessions usually last between a half an hour to an hour is because it takes time to descend to the very slow frequencies. In our normal waking state, our brains are operating at a fairly high frequency. In order to bring the brain down to a very slow frequency, such as that associated with dreams and lucid dreams, it takes a little time.

The cortical evoked response is natural and universal, as is the frequency following response. This is why brainwave entrainment can work on anybody. If it doesn’t, it may be necessary to experiment with different brainwave entrainment “vehicles.” While binaural beats are the best known, they are not the most effective for everybody. Isochronic beats produce a far more powerful response in the brain and are therefore often more effective.

The book identifies several types of passive-aggressive people and their deep inner motivations for expressing their anger passively. The authors point out that there are deep inner needs that drive the other person’s behavior and they often stem from childhood. Understanding what those needs might be help to explain why they are using these sneaky expressions of behavior instead of expressing it directly.

It also separates the differences you encounter when the passive-aggressive person is your partner, your child, your parent, your boss, your coworker, or your best friend.

The authors give detailed descriptions and great case stories to illustrate how the different types of passive-aggressive behavior show up.

They have numerous checklists to take in case, you, the reader, are the angry person expressing it passively. And they identify the costs of anger in terms of health challenges, ruined marriages, lost job promotions, estranged family relationships and others.

If you are dealing with someone’s hidden anger at home, at work or in some other situation, you are likely to recognize it as you read this book. Most likely, you know that already, but one of the possible problems they mentioned is that people enable and protect the angry person, denying, ignoring or minimizing the other person’s behavior.

For me, the most helpful part of the book is the part where they describe enabling and issue the call to stop it. They make several suggestions about the changes you need to make if you are encountering someone’s hidden anger…

(1) Immediately stop enabling it. Address it directly and clearly and set firm boundaries about what is or is not acceptable.

(2) But do so calmly, watching carefully the way you express your own anger, lessening your own reactiveness when something happens. Be as positive as you can during each interaction. Make the interaction about resolution and state clearly what you would like to see happen to resolve the problem.

(3) Don’t accept excuses if you are clear that what happened is an example of hidden anger expressed in a passive-aggressive way. And be direct about the consequences of continuing the behavior.

(4) Don’t be drawn into an argument about which one of you is right and which one is wrong.

(5) Be careful not to attack the person but to focus instead on what happened and what you believe needs to happen now and in the future. Behavior not character.