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CLASSIC SELF-HELP FROM A RESPECTED PIONEER OF PSYCHOTHERAPY Lost enough loves for three lifetimes? Want to break bad habits and replace them with good ones that last? Whether you are male or female, single or married, gay or straight, Rational-Emotive Behavior Therapy (REBT), created by world renowned therapist Dr. Albert Ellis, can help anyone--at any age--learn to maintain healthy and lasting love. Simple and effective, the proven REBT techniques in this landmark book show you how to relate lovingly and intimately, for the long-term. Using a nonjudgmental approach, here is more than just a guide to getting along better with a "significant other." You'll also find help for improving relationships with friends, children, and even in-laws. Discover practical information on: *Getting Your Relationships Together by Getting Yourself Together*Realistic Views of Couplehood*Communicating and Problem-Solving*Better Sex for Better Couplehood*Saving Time and Money and Enjoying Life More*Having or Not Having Children*Building a Deep and Lasting Relationship*Self-coping statements and exercises to keep you emotionally fit ...and much more to help you take matters into your own hands--and heart--and stop the cycle of relationship ruin. With healing doses of wisdom and humor, Dr. Ellis puts you firmly on the path toward a lifetime of love.… (plus d'informations)
Informations provenant du Partage des connaissances anglais.Modifiez pour passer à votre langue.
Psychotherapists—and philosophers before them—have struggled for years to find and cure the one central or core problem of disturbed people. Why? Partly because humans like to simplify complex things—and to figure out one crucial, and presumably final, answer to the difficult human condition. We probably never will find this core problem, because humans are complex—and so are their woes.
Of the many existent therapies, REBT is one of the simplest and tightest. It says that practically all people’s neuroses—not their severe personality disorders and their psychoses—involve or are largely sparked by their absolutistic shoulds, oughts, musts, and demands. And REBT has an excellent record of helping tens of thousands of clients, as well as millions of readers, to see their musturbatory thinking, feeling, and behaving, to change it to strong preferring, and—voila!—to significantly improve.
But REBT also includes many related, more complex theories. For example: (1) Musts and demands are not merely cognitive but also emotional and behavioral, (2) they are not merely learned or innately created but also imbibed, practiced, and manufactured, (3) they are not only experienced and followed in childhood and adolescence but also reconditioned and actively reconstructed in the present, (4) they are not simply changed to helpful preferences by people’s making a profound philosophical change but also modified by their using a large number of cognitive, emotive, and behavioral exercises and techniques, (5) people’s absolutistic and dogmatic thinking and experiences are quite individualistic and self-destructive but also stem from cultural and subcultural teachings and can be harmful, and (6) human goals, purposes, experiences, and personality are again personal and individual but are also amazingly social and cultural.
So REBT is simple—and has its complications. It is constructivist and postmodern—and also (hopefully) scientific, practical, and efficient. Read Ellis’s revised and updated edition of Reason and Emotion in Psychotherapy and see for yourself.
Back to self-help basics. REBT [Rational Emotional Behavioral Therapy] theorizes that you tend to have two major IBs [Irrational Beliefs] when you think, feel, and act self-defeatingly: (1) self-deprecation, self-downing, or self-damning—“l absolutely must perform well and be approved by significant others or else I am, my person is, incompetent and worthless!” and (2) frustration intolerance (FI) or discomfort, anxiety, rage, and depression—“Conditions and other people absolutely must be easy, comfortable, and enjoyable, and absolutely must not be very frustrating and depriving, or else people and/or the world are no damned good. I can’t stand it, and my life is awful!” These two IBs often interact, reinforce, and complicate each other and lead to mental and physical “horror” and pain. Moreover, when they help to create physical and emotional disturbance, we humans—including you—often have self-downing and low frustration tolerance about our disturbances. Result: more disturbance.
In this chapter we looked at Heather’s and George’s defensiveness, lack of authenticity, and perfectionism. But aren’t these disturbances all related to self-downing? Intimately! In some ways they are products of, or what in REBT we actually call derivatives of self-deprecation. For if Heather and George and the rest of the human race were not self-downers, how would they ever be defensive, inauthentic, or perfectionistic? Not very easily.
When you are defensive—that is, when you deny your failings to yourself and others and fail to be “yourself”—you are scared that they will witness your flaws and (of course) down you for having them. You are afraid of severe criticism. So defensiveness, when you could be honest and perhaps be severely penalized, in large part is highly conditional self-acceptance instead of unconditional self-acceptance.
Isn’t lack of authenticity pretty similar? Indeed so. When you are inauthentic you pose, pretend, posture, and put on an act. Again, you refuse to be “yourself,” because if you were, other people would presumably down your “real” self—would down you. More important, you would agree with them that you are no good.
Perfectionism is in the same class—piled higher and deeper. Following it, you believe that you have to do perfectly well at important tasks—and be perfectly approved by significant others. And if not, back to self-downing you go. Other people witness your imperfections and supposedly put you, the person, down. And again, you fully agree.
All of the above illustrates what we touched on in chapter one. Unless you decide to commit to and work hard at achieving unconditional self-acceptance, you will cultivate self-downing—and be a willing victim of your partner’s and other people’s assaults on your personhood. Moreover, when your partner inevitably exhibits flaws and unniceties, will you really resist denigrating him or her? Not very likely.
So, how can you powerfully, consistently, and persistently avoid the pitfalls of arrogant self-aggrandizement on the one hand, and self-beration on the other hand? Answer: Think your way through the philosophy of USA [Universal Self-Acceptance], especially in your intimate relationships. Be determined to always accept yourself as a “worthy” or “good” person whether or not you perform important tasks and relationships well—and whether or not significant other people accept you. Even more elegantly, use the unique REBT solution to the problem of self-evaluation by establishing important goals and purposes and only rating your thoughts, feelings, and actions in terms of these aims, and not globally rating yourself, your essence, your being, or your person at all.
I (Dr. Ellis) vaguely realized when I practiced psychoanalysis in the late 1940s and early 1950s that feelings of shame, embarrassment, and humiliation were the essence of much—no, not all—human disturbance. When you are really ashamed of something you have “foolishly” done or of some “good” thing you have thought of doing but “cowardly” refrained from executing, you are almost always criticizing your “bad” behavior. You may well be right. To dress “ridiculously” when with your partner or to “stupidly” fail to give support when he or she is in trouble will often bring on censure, penalties, and disruption to the relationship. So, noting this, you’d better feel moderately abashed and push yourself to act differently next time. As a social creature and a would-be partner, use caution and vigilance.
Deep-seated shame or humiliation, however, usually adds some Irrational Beliefs (IBs) to create disturbances that we described above. First, especially when your partner criticizes your “ridiculous” dress or your lack of support, you feel ashamed of it—your “wrong” and “dislikable” behavior. Good. But, simultaneously, you put yourself down for your “foolish” or “bad” acts and feel ashamed of yourself. Quite a jump! Actually, your partner may only be criticizing what you’ve done. But you take it as criticism of you and agree that you are “bad” for doing it. A very neurotic overgeneralization. Deadly.
Second, you often horrify yourself about the discomfort of the “shameful” situation. You hate the hassles of defending your actions, of arguing with your mate, of being scorned, of correcting your behavior, and so forth. You define these hassles as too hard, tell yourself you can’t stand them, insist that they are awful. So, in addition to making yourself feel ego-anxiety, you also create considerable discomfort-anxiety or frustration intolerance (FI).
The toughest block to functioning effectively in couplehood is almost everyone’s foolish tendency to rate self and others as total persons. REBT [Rational Emotional Behavioral Therapy] practitioners valiantly strive to help individuals and couples to focus on improving their behaviors rather than on rating their selves or other people. REBT teaches that long-term and not short-term satisfaction is the best guide to improvement; and it stresses the importance of beliefs in helping you change your ineffective functioning.
In addressing people today on “Living Together in Unfettered Love,” we often bring out the following points. For one, “love conquers all.” How many of you still believe that? Fewer, no doubt, than your parents’ generation, but it is not a completely dopey idea when you take some of the absolutism away. How about, “love can help a hell of a lot?” Caring deeply for another person (which is how we’re defining “love”) can help you overcome some of the difficulties of mating. We say “difficulties” because most of us have never learned, even in our original families, how to relate warmly and understandingly to others. Many of us grow up in conditions where family members pretend to be warm and understanding and then pretend that they are not pretending. This double pretend may constitute deep-seated denial, because the pretender is often unaware of his or her real feelings.
How do you know if family members are unaware of their real feelings? And if you find double-pretending is indeed going on, how does that relate to our topic of living together in unfettered love? We tend to emerge from our original families with love quite fettered—in a kind of double bind of double pretend. So to unfetter ourselves, we had better first accept our possible fettering.
To reveal our pretenses about loving those we blithely suppose that we do love, we need to be skeptical of our alleged feelings and probe to see how realistic they are. We can also look for the occasional flashes of awareness that break through our denial of our pretenses. In clinical work, the evidence for pretend and double pretend, especially in matters of love, is often vague. But we can often accept pretense as a helpful working hypothesis and try to change it to nonpretense whenever we discover it.
The question is, how do people emerge from a double-bind pretend and start living in loving couplehood with other persons who may be similarly unaware of their pretending? The answer is that usually they don’t. But because they have learned to pretend so well, they may stay together for quite a long time. Most of them used to get married and transmit the same patterns of pretense to their offspring, generation after generation. At least some of you in this generation are testing out living together before launching such major legal and social commitments as marriage and parenthood.
When we work with a couple trying to achieve a close personal relationship, each member of which has emerged from the frequent family background of phony caring, we often say, “You don’t have to love each other, but it would probably help a hell of a lot if you learned to do so.” And they say: “Yeah, sounds lovely. How do we do it?” What do we then reply?
We show people how to behave more lovingly with each other and how not to rate each other as total persons. We try to help each of them see how they can be more affectionate toward their partner and how not to focus on the “goodness” or “badness” of the other person. That is the essence of the REBT view of unconditionally accepting and therefore being able to better love each other.
We encourage people to behave more lovingly toward their partner rather than asking, “How can I be a great lover?” or “Why do I have such an asshole of a partner who fails to meet my every wish?” or “If my stupid parents had been more genuinely affectionate wouldn’t I now be a truly loving person?” If people can concentrate on seeing how they can improve their loving behavior, they will often make real progress.
In the all-too-usual family, the child lives with angry, depressed, or indifferent parents who say they are interested and loving. They instruct the child, “Be a nicer boy or girl. Only a bad child would eat up all the cookies. So you know what you are!” Many children learn to pretend that they do not have horrendous inner urges, such as the urge to gobble up all the goodies in sight. But in order to convince themselves they are not “bad children” they double-pretend—that is, pretend that they are not pretending. Otherwise, they may see themselves as “bad persons” for the rest of their lives.
When we say to an individual in couple therapy, “Try to behave more lovingly toward your partner,” we are not duplicating the pathology of this kind of family scene. This is why. First, each partner is asked to describe his or her thoughts, feelings, perceptions, and actions in a problematic couple situation. Next, both may be asked to close their eyes and focus on that “awful” situation and to silently let their reactions have full sway. After, they are encouraged, while their eyes are still closed, to see if each can imagine ways of behaving more lovingly toward the other in a similar future situation. Finally, both are asked to describe how they modified their imagined behavior change with as little reference as possible to how they think the other person might react to this change.
Is this imagined change still somewhat phony and superficial? Possibly, but it is still very different from what most people experienced in developing undesirable and unloving behaviors in earlier interactions. Part of its lingering artificiality is that both partners may make some imaginative changes to impress the other one. But using REBT for couples helps many couples to wipe out other stimuli and to focus intensively on ways of improving their own behavior. The effect of each partner’s saying in front of the other how he or she would behave more lovingly is often very positively reinforcing. They remember what they said; they remember that they thought it up themselves with no pressure from anyone else; and they are likely to try to do their damnedest to actually function that way.
REBT, however, goes even further. It also points out the harmful nature of perfectionism. It describes how couples have great difficulty in changing their habits. It helps people to give up their unrealistic expectations and to cherish even their small successes at becoming more loving.
Can these procedures that work with couples also be used to make behavioral changes not related to lovingness? Yes, they often can be. As REBT has noted since the 1950s, people not only learn to be unloving in their original families, but just about all people have strong innate or biological tendencies to disturb themselves, and thereby to disrupt their relationships.
What people need to look at and do something about is how well or badly their behavior fulfills the purpose of the relationship they want. What is that purpose? Just to have fun? It’s presumably more than that or they typically would not consider living together.
Falling in love with someone causes readjustments in your life, and therefore, you and your mate should think long and hard about what you are trying to accomplish in this living-together situation. This arrangement is not unfettered love! So look at your behavior to see how it fits in with your purposes. Then work at improving your communication and problem-solving skills.
Sound difficult? Not exactly, but an REBT way of life does take extra effort. It’s well worth it, though, when it increases satisfaction in living. It usually brings more love and more fun for individuals and couples alike. Totally unfettered? Hell, no—because it takes planning and problem-solving. This shatters the myth that fun should be something that just happens and that somehow the greatest joy is to have no responsibility laid on you to do anything at all. Even when you have interesting and enjoyable experiences as a result of your special efforts, you may still believe that “the ideal” is do-nothingness. One of the benefits that you can get from a close personal relationship is that both you and your partner reinforce each other in living a more rational, realistic, and satisfying life.
R.A.H. [Robert A. Harper]: Splendid! Ed, you have correctly discerned that you do not have to agree with Jan in order to come to clearly understand what is troubling her. But you have also come up with a very positive attitude of wanting to work with Jan so that she doesn’t feel seriously troubled. An important principle can be generalized here: Whenever one person in an intimate relationship experiences a problem then (regardless of the differing view of the partner) a problem does indeed exist and problem-solving is highly desirable. It is easy for any of us in a couple relationship to decide, “I’m right, and he or she is crazy.” This makes problem-solving more difficult!
But let’s not lose sight right now of this simple exercise. Your first step is to satisfy each other that you understand your partner’s problems.
In that case, Jan and Ed’s agreeing that they could solve their problems and that each of them could alter his/her thoughts, feelings, perceptions, and actions was a tremendous help. Although it may not seem the case to some readers, it is still a radical concept—even in psychotherapy circles—that people are able to regulate their own lives instead of letting themselves be driven by organic, unconscious, social, or cosmic forces. “You must take me as I am” and “That’s just the way I am” (and, hence, unchangeable) are strongly held beliefs of many partners. The two exercises just demonstrated showed that good results can occur when neither individual holds strongly to the common belief that misery is forced on him/her by outside people or events. These same two exercises can powerfully help partners overcome their underlying IBs [Irrational Beliefs] about themselves and each other.
Making sure that both understand each other’s perceptions of problems and focusing on changing each of their own problem behaviors, and not merely their partner’s problem behaviors, are helpful in solving mating difficulties. But, by doing this, couples hardly always and automatically end up with a heavenly relationship.
Sex differences in couples arise for a number of reasons. For example:
One partner—as in Jo’s case—may be relatively low-sexed and the other—as was true of Sid—relatively high-sexed. Jo really wanted sex a maximum of once a month and Sid wanted it a minimum of once a week. No great compatibility!
Possible solution: The low-sexed partner finds some sexually uninvolved, noncoital way of satisfying the high-sexed partner. Thus s/he can do so with his/her mouth, tongue, vibrator, or in some other manner, while remaining unsexy but loving and interested in the other’s satisfaction. One client I saw, who enjoyed intercourse about once a month, massaged her husband’s penis with her large breasts twice a week and gave him “stupendous” orgasms—which she immensely enjoyed his having.
CHANGING YOUR IRRATIONAL BELIEFS ABOUT OTHERS
Following are some important IBs [Irrational Beliefs] about others that you can explore and work at changing.
IB: “I must be totally approved as a person regardless of how I behave.”
MRB [More Rational Belief]: “I will strive to do what I consider enjoyable and desirable. That usually includes accepting some of the people who show that they like or accept me as a person. But since people in their reactions tend to jump from rating my particular behavior to rating me as a total person, they are overgeneralizing and will not accurately rate me globally. Even if I could somehow get people to react to the ‘real me’ (which is an inaccurate abstraction), what are my chances of having them react to this ‘real me’ as totally lovable? Very slim! I may learn something helpful from other views of me, but what I learn should be balanced by what I learn from other sources.”
IB: “To be worthwhile as a person I must prove to others that I am outstanding in whatever I do. To fail to do so shows that I am a failure or an inadequate person who doesn't deserve people’s approval.”
MRB: “It is nice if I perform well and am therefore approved by others—nice but not necessary. And my performance has nothing to do with my worth as a person.”
IB: “l should judge people by who they seem to be—as good or bad individuals. If I judge them to be wrong, bad, or evil, they deserve to be damned and punished.”
MRB: “Because all people are human and hence fallible, I and others will surely misbehave part of the time. None of us is good or bad, though we all do “good” and “bad” things. I can give people unconditional other-acceptance (UOA) and only rate their deeds and not their selves. I will try to help them act better but refuse to damn them when they don’t.”
IB: “Since REBT [Rational Emotional Behavioral Therapy] says I am not to worry about what other people think and what they tell me I ought to do, I’ll always do whatever I feel like doing whenever I feel like doing it. Today I feel like staying home from work and lying on the beach smoking pot all day. So whatever else other people may be expecting, I’ll avoid working. Fun’s fun, man.”
MRB: “Let me face it. Indulging in immediate gratification that later leads to grim results (such as getting lung cancer from smoking) is hardly fun. I can enjoy life more if I don’t cop out but promptly and unrebelliously do difficult and unpleasant tasks for which I have responsibility. I can vigilantly try to distinguish between short-term and long-term hedonism. I won’t always avoid immediate fun, but when it seriously distracts me from my commitments, I’d better be responsible to myself and to others and postpone the ‘fun’ till later. REBT never says I am not to be concerned at all about what other people think of me and my behavior, but only that I’d better not be over-concerned and worry too much about what they think.”
IB: “My partner must take me the way I am. I have been molded into the kind of person that I am. The past cannot be altered, and I must go on deeply reacting in the same way that I always have.”
MRB: “My past is not all-important. If I rethink my old assumptions and rework my past habits (and check from time to time with my partner on how much I am changing), I can minimize the undesirable influences from my childhood and adolescence. I can learn valuable lessons from studying my past, but I do not need to consider myself enslaved by it. Today is tomorrow’s past: see what I can do to make it better. I hope that my partner accepts me with my failings. But to help myself and to improve our relationship, I’d better work on some of those failings!”
IB: “Since the REBT goal is to enjoy myself as much as I can, I will make as few commitments as possible and only arrange for free time, where nothing is expected of me and no responsibilities are laid on me. That’s real happiness!”
MRB: “I have had my happiest times when I have been fully committed to and involved in action of some kind. I shall search and find and develop activities that challenge me and provide me with long-term expanding interest and development. I shall also try to help my partner, individually and as a couple, be committed and responsible, and thereby improve our relationship and our lives.”
Again, as ever, we teach one main thing in this book: that almost all your severe emotional problems are your own. You have the ability to disturb or not disturb yourself, therefore—whatever problems your inlaws and their relationship with your spouse may seem to create. Your attitude toward these troubles, rather than the difficulties in themselves, will determine whether you are quite miserable or satisfied with your marriage and your life.
To Have or Not to Have Children—That Is the Question
While, few people think they can, without much preparation and training, fly a jet plane, teach a course in nuclear physics or reprogram a bevy of complex computers, we keep running into hordes who not only think they themselves are naturally destined to be dandy parents, but also that others less magnificently endowed than themselves can easily and automatically undertake the glories of parenthood and turn out super-duper children. All you have to do to get an A-plus in parenting, they insist, is to be properly and legally married, for all husbands and wives—of course—are born with superlative child-raising skills and are able to bear incredibly marvelous offspring. If you sorely lack such skills, well, take a chance, anyway. What have you and your brats got to lose? As the Bible brilliantly proclaims, “Be fruitful and multiply.”
Are we being sarcastic? In a word, yes. For we would like to highlight some of the common irrationalities of our society about children and parenthood. There are loads of such IBs [Irrational Beliefs]. Even though large numbers of people hold that reproduction is to be encouraged and that child-rearing is a process for which no great knowledge or skill is needed, couples who want to adopt children usually have to meet fairly strict standards. These standards are often difficult to measure and/or fulfill. Couples must, for example, somehow demonstrate present and future happiness and emotional and financial stability. Couples who reveal themselves to be too old or too young, gay or lesbian, or different from arbitrarily predetermined “desirable” social or religious philosophies are often eliminated.
Our stance as a society on a couple’s acquiring children seems to be: if you do it by reproduction, “feel free (but please be married).” If by adoption, “Hey, wait a minute, we are very concerned about the kind of parents and the kind of environment this child will have.” We would expand considerably on prevalent attitudes about having children, but we hope we’ve said enough or at least cast doubt on the rationality and realism of what seems to be our society’s position.
It is not the purpose of this chapter to join society in trying to persuade “a nice young married couple” that they ought or ought not to have children. All couples have the right to choose—rationally or irrationally—not to become parents just as they have the right to decide not to work for the government or to live in large city or to buy an automobile. With the help of this chapter, work out the important factors in your particular situation in deciding whether or not to be parents. Let us pose some questions and some “rational” or “healthy” answers—for some of our readers some of the time!
Question: Is it essential to our happiness and welfare for us to have children?
Answer: It all depends. Are you sure that you can’t be happy without children or that you would be happy with children? Have all your relatives been really happy with their children? And what about their children—do they all seem top-hole? What about the background, skills, and attitudes you are both bringing into this deal? Aren’t those the sort of questions your partner and you should preferably be discussing at great length?
Question: What are some important things to consider in deciding whether to have or not have children? Shall we have them because we are happy with each other?
Answer: Probably not. Your being happy together is a good sign but hardly a demand for your having children. Would having them help or hinder your relationship? Hmm . . . Is your marriage the kind of process that a kid will fit into and enjoy (let alone your enjoying the kid)? Or is your relationship one of those great me-thee things that leave little room for anybody else?
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CLASSIC SELF-HELP FROM A RESPECTED PIONEER OF PSYCHOTHERAPY Lost enough loves for three lifetimes? Want to break bad habits and replace them with good ones that last? Whether you are male or female, single or married, gay or straight, Rational-Emotive Behavior Therapy (REBT), created by world renowned therapist Dr. Albert Ellis, can help anyone--at any age--learn to maintain healthy and lasting love. Simple and effective, the proven REBT techniques in this landmark book show you how to relate lovingly and intimately, for the long-term. Using a nonjudgmental approach, here is more than just a guide to getting along better with a "significant other." You'll also find help for improving relationships with friends, children, and even in-laws. Discover practical information on: *Getting Your Relationships Together by Getting Yourself Together*Realistic Views of Couplehood*Communicating and Problem-Solving*Better Sex for Better Couplehood*Saving Time and Money and Enjoying Life More*Having or Not Having Children*Building a Deep and Lasting Relationship*Self-coping statements and exercises to keep you emotionally fit ...and much more to help you take matters into your own hands--and heart--and stop the cycle of relationship ruin. With healing doses of wisdom and humor, Dr. Ellis puts you firmly on the path toward a lifetime of love.
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