Laura Fleming and Anger Management

My therapist suggested I read this long boring book about anger management, which I’m more than happy to do, but it also requires doing exercises frequently. This means I actually have to sit down with a pen and piece of paper, so I can’t just read the damn book whenever I want to, I have to set aside specific reading time to deal with it. I haven’t actually done this yet, and decided instead to read the next book in the Toni L.P. Kelner Laura Fleming mystery series, which has turned out to be surprisingly relevant to what I’m supposed to be learning from the other book.

For those of you unfamiliar, the Laura Fleming mystery series of the mid-90’s begins with Down Home Murder, and its about a young woman from the South who moved to Boston and became a computer programmer. Laura is married to a Shakespeare professor named Richard. They often visit her extensive family in North Carolina, and always become embroiled in the family drama and inevitably a murder mystery. Kelner is a wonderful author, and these books are sadly out of print, so I’ve been having to hunt them down in used book stores and find them on paperbackswap.com. I just got the third book in the series, Trouble Looking for a Place to Happen, from paperbackswap.com.

The first thing I noticed about Laura is that she can observe negative behaviors and personalities in others without condemning them. Her cousin Vasti is very pushy and self-involved. This is something Laura can observe and accept without judgement. She still interacts with Vasti and helps her in her pursuits, she also knows she has personality flaws. She accepts her the way she is.

Laura is also good about thinking before reacting. She doesn’t just go around reacting to everything, she thinks about things first. When she is made angry, she counts to ten. Sometimes she counts to ten, then counts to ten in binary. She doesn’t just explode with reaction.

Later in the book, Laura is very upset with the chief of police in the neighboring town. She feels he is completely unreasonable and too ‘by the book.’ She gets some information about him though that tells her why the police chief is like this, what he’s dealt with in his past, and gave her some perspective on his character. This helped her understand him, and she was no longer angry with him. She understood him, and understood how making uninformed judgements about people fueled her anger.

Laura Fleming keeps a cool head, and is very thoughtful about people and situations. She considers all the aspects. This not only makes her a good mystery-solver, but makes her a better and smarter person. She had several conversations with her husband about whether or not she had done the right thing. She also routinely learns more about people and their situations, like she did with the police chief, that gives her better understanding of them and their situation. She could have just written her cousin Ilene off as another annoying awful teenager, but Ilene had some real issues related to her parents that she was struggling with that were making her lash out against people and Laura got to the bottom of this.

I think Laura Fleming is an excellent role model for anger management and I look forward to reading more about her adventures.