How To Stubbornly Refuse To Make Yourself Miserable About Anything-yes, Anything! Read online

  A partial list of books and monographs by Albert Ellis

  Anger: How to Live With and Without It

  How to Live With a “Neurotic”

  Sex Without Guilt

  The Art and Science of Love

  A Guide to Rational Living (with Robert A. Harper)

  Creative Marriage (paperback edition title: A Guide to Successful Marriage) (with Robert A. Harper)

  Reason and Emotion in Psychotherapy

  How to Stubbornly Refuse to Make Yourself Miserable About Anything—Yes, Anything!

  Executive Leadership: A Rational Approach

  Humanistic Psychotherapy: The Rational Emotive Approach

  Overcoming Procrastination (with William Knaus)

  A Garland of Rational Songs

  A Guide to Personal Happiness (with Irving Becker)

  Overcoming Resistance

  How to Keep People From Pushing Your Buttons (with Arthur Lange)

  The Practice of Rational Emotive Behavior Therapy (with Windy Dryden)

  How to Control Your Anxiety Before It Controls You

  How to Control Your Anger Before It Controls You (with Raymond Chip Tafrate)

  When AA Doesn’t Work for You: Rational Steps for Quitting Alcohol (with Emmett Velten)

  Making Intimate Connections (with Ted Crawford)

  How to Make Yourself Happy and Remarkably Less Disturbable

  Feeling Better, Getting Better, and Staying Better

  Overcoming Destructive Beliefs, Feelings, and Behaviors

  How to Stop Destroying Your Relationships (with Robert Harper)

  Counseling and Psychotherapy With Religious Persons (with Stevan Nielsen and W. Brad Johnson)

  Case Studies in Rational Emotive Behavior Therapy With Children (with Jerry Wilde)

  How to Stubbornly Refuse to Make Yourself Miserable About Anything—Yes, Anything!

  Revised Edition

  Albert Ellis, Ph.D.

  CITADEL PRESS

  Kensington Publishing Corp.

  www.kensingtonbooks.com

  All copyrighted material within is Attributor Protected.

  CITADEL PRESS BOOKS are published by

  Kensington Publishing Corp.

  850 Third Avenue

  New York, NY 10022

  Copyright © 1988, 2006 Albert Ellis

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any means without the prior written consent of the publisher, excepting brief quotes used in reviews.

  CITADEL PRESS and the Citadel logo are Reg. U.S. Pat. & TM Off.

  Library of Congress Control Number: 2005934161

  ISBN: 978-0-8065-3653-8

  To Debbie Joffe, who helped tremendously with this revision.

  Table of Contents

  A partial list of books and monographs by Albert Ellis

  Title Page

  Copyright Page

  Dedication

  Introduction: Bringing Rational Emotive Behavior Therapy Up to Date in the Twenty-First Century

  Acknowledgments

  1 - Why Is This Book Different from Other Self-Help Books?

  2 - Can You Really Refuse to Make Yourself Miserable About Anything?

  3 - Can Scientific Thinking Remove Your Emotional Misery?

  4 - How to Think Scientifically About Yourself, Other People, and Your Life Conditions

  5 - Why the Usual Kinds of Insight Won’t Help You Overcome Your Emotional Problems

  6 - REBT Insight No. 1: Making Yourself Fully Aware of Your Healthy and Unhealthy Feelings

  7 - REBT Insight No. 2: You Control Your Emotional Destiny

  8 - REBT Insight No. 3: The Tyranny of the Shoulds

  9 - REBT Insight No. 4: Forget Your “ Godawful” Past!

  10 - REBT Insight No. 5: Actively Dispute Your Irrational Beliefs

  11 - REBT Insight No. 6: You Can Refuse to Upset Yourself About Upsetting Yourself

  12 - REBT Insight No. 7: Solving Practical Problems as Well as Emotional Problems

  13 - REBT Insight No. 8: Changing Thoughts and Feelings by Acting Against Them

  14 - REBT Insight No. 9: Using Work and Practice

  15 - REBT Insight No. 10: Forcefully Changing Your Beliefs, Feelings, and Behaviors

  16 - REBT Insight No. 11: Achieving Emotional Change Is Not Enough—Maintaining It Is Harder!

  17 - REBT Insight No. 12: If You Backslide, Try, Try Again!

  18 - REBT Insight No. 13: You Can Extend Your Refusal to Make Yourself Miserable

  19 - REBT Insight No. 14: Yes, You Can Stubbornly Refuse to Make Yourself Severely Anxious or Depressed About Anything

  Appendix: The Biological Basis of Human Irrationality

  Selected References

  About the Author

  Anger: How to Live With It and Without It

  Introduction: Bringing Rational Emotive Behavior Therapy Up to Date in the Twenty-First Century

  I wrote the first edition of this book in 1987, when Rational Emotive Behavior Therapy (REBT) was a thriving forty-two-year-old psychotherapy. Almost everyone thought that my title was much too long—fourteen words—and that that would interfere with the book’s sales. Well, they were wrong; Stubbornly Refuse to Make Yourself Miserable has been the most popular of all my books, along with A Guide to Rational Living.

  Much has developed in the past eighteen years, however, and REBT has changed quite a bit since 1987. For one thing, since 1993 it is now called REBT instead of RET. Second, it is now, more than ever if possible, truly multimodal. It stresses not only many thinking, feeling, and behaving methods of therapy, but also (as I note in this revised edition) their integration and interrelation. So it is more cognitive-emotive-behavioral than ever.

  Moreover, it is more philosophical—or more emphasizing philosophy than previously. Unlike most other Cognitive Behavioral Therapies (CBTs) it highlights three basic philosophies, which I have strongly espoused in several of my recent books, especially Feeling Better, Getting Better, Staying Better, Overcoming Destructive Beliefs, Feelings, and Behaviors; Rational Emotive Behavioral Therapy—It Works for Me, It Can Work for You; and The Road to Tolerance: The Philosophy of Rational Emotive Behavior Therapy. These philosophies follow from being aware of your dysfunctional and Irrational Beliefs, cognitively-emotionally-behaviorally Disputing them, and arriving at Effective New Philosophies or Rational Coping Philosophies.

  The three basic Rational Coping Philosophies that REBT stresses are these:

  Unconditional Self-Acceptance (USA) instead of Conditional Self-Esteem (CSE). You rate and evaluate your thoughts, feelings, and actions in relation to your main Goals of remaining alive and reasonably happy to see whether they aid these Goals. When they aid them, you rate that as “good” or “effective,” and when they sabotage your Goals you rate that as “bad” or “ineffective.” But you always—yes, always—accept and respect yourself, your personhood, your being, whether or not you perform well and whether or not other people approve of you and your behaviors.

  Unconditional Other-Acceptance (UOA). You rate what other people think, feel, and do—in accordance with your own and general social standards—as “good” or “bad.” But you never rate them, their personhood, their being. You accept and respect them—but not some of their traits and doings—just because, like you, they are alive and human. You have helpful compassion for all humans—and perhaps for all sentient creatures.

  Unconditional Life-Acceptance (ULA). You rate the conditions of your life and your community as “goo
d” or “bad”—in accordance with your and your community’s moral Goals. But you never rate life itself or conditions themselves as “good” or “bad”; and, as Reinhold Niebuhr said, you try to change the dislikable conditions you can change, have the serenity to accept those you cannot change, and have the wisdom to know the difference.

  REBT does not say that these three major philosophic acceptances will make you incredibly happy. They won’t. You’ll still have your and your social group’s limitations. You’ll still have the ability—the talent!—to needlessly upset yourself by making your healthy desires into unhealthy demands. You’ll still have physical problems to afflict you—such as floods, hurricanes, and disease. But your emotional-thinking-behaving problems will most probably be reduced—and so will your disturbed feelings about your thoughts, emotions, and actions.

  What to do to cope with your own, other people’s, and the world’s problems? Make yourself fully aware of your own needless tendencies to upset yourself with absolutistic shoulds, oughts, and musts in addition to your desires and preferences. See your own (and others’) irrationalities as clearly as you can. Dispute them realistically, logically, and pragmatically. Dispute them thinkingly and emotionally and behaviorally—as shown in this book. Arrive at basic Rational Coping Philosophies, as noted above. Continue, continue, continue!

  Acknowledgments

  I would like to acknowledge the collaboration of the many clients and workshop participants whose cases I anonymously mention in this book.

  I also greatly appreciate the constructive criticism of Emmett Velten, Shawn Blau, and Kevin Everett FitzMaurice, who read and commented on the manuscript of this book but who are not responsible for any of its contents. Many thanks!

  Finally, I would like to acknowledge Tim Runion, who did a fine word processing job.

  1

  Why Is This Book Different from Other Self-Help Books?

  Hundreds of self-help books are published every year, and many of them are truly helpful to millions of readers. Why bother to write another? Why should I try to surpass my own and Robert A. Harper’s A New Guide to Rational Living, which has already sold over two million copies, and try to supplement derivative books, such as Your Erroneous Zones, which have also had millions of readers? Why bother?

  For several important reasons. Although Rational Emotive Behavior Therapy (REBT), which I originated in 1955, is now a major part of the psychological scene today, and although most modern therapists (yes, even psychoanalysts) include big chunks of it in their treatment plans, they often use it in a watered-down, wishy-washy way.

  Aside from my professional writing, no book as yet gives a hardheaded, straight-from-the-horse’s-mouth version of REBT; those few books that have attempted to do so are not written in simple, popular, self-help form. The present volume aims to make up for this omission.

  More specifically, this book has the following goals—which I do not think you will find presented, all together, in any other book about acquiring mental health and happiness.

  • It encourages you to have and to express strong feelings when something goes wrong with your life. But it clearly distinguishes between your feeling healthily and helpfully concerned, sorry, sad, frustrated, or annoyed and your feeling unhealthy and destructively panicked, depressed, enraged, and self-pitying.

  • It shows you how to cope with difficult life situations and how to feel better when you are faced with them. But, more important—much more important—it demonstrates how you can get better as well as feel better when you needlessly “neuroticize” and plague yourself.

  • It not only teaches you how you can control your emotional destiny and can stubbornly refuse to make yourself miserable over anything (yes, anything!), but it also specifically explains what you can do to use your potential for self-control.

  • It rigorously stays with and promotes scientific thinking, reason, and reality, and it strictly avoids what many self-help books carelessly counsel today—huge amounts of mysticism and utopianism.

  • It will help you achieve a profound philosophic change and a radically new outlook on life instead of a Pollyannaism “positive thinking” attitude that will only help you cope temporarily with difficulties and will often defeat you in the long run.

  • It gives you many techniques for changing your personality, which are not backed merely by anecdotal or case-history “evidence,” but which have now been proven to be effective by scores of objective, scientific experiments that were conducted with control groups.

  • It efficiently shows you how you are now still creating your present emotional and behavioral problems, and it doesn’t encourage you to waste endless time and energy foolishly trying to understand and explain your past history. It demonstrates how you still needlessly upset yourself and what you can do today to refuse to keep doing so.

  • It encourages you to take full responsibility for your “upsetness” and for reducing it rather than copping out by blaming your parents or social conditions for your going along with their silly teachings.

  • This book presents the ABCs of REBT (and of other forms of cognitive and cognitive behavioral therapy) in a simple, understandable way, and it shows how stimuli or Activating Events (A) in your life do not mainly or directly cause your emotional consequences (C). Instead, your Belief System (B) largely upsets you, and you therefore have the ability to Dispute (D) your dysfunctional and irrational Beliefs (iBs) and to change them. It especially shows you many thinking, many emotive, and many behavioral methods of disputing and surrendering your irrational Beliefs (iBs) and thereby arriving at an Effective New Philosophy (E) of life.

  • It shows you not only how to keep your present desires, wishes, preferences, goals, and values; but how to give up your grandiose, godlike demands and commands—those absolutistic and dogmatic shoulds, oughts, and musts that you add to desires and preferences and by which you needlessly disturb yourself.

  • It informs you how to be independent and inner-directed and how to think for yourself rather than be gullible and suggestible, going along with what others think you should think.

  • It gives you many practical, action-oriented exercises, which you can use to work at and practice REBT ways of rethinking and redoing your way of living.

  • It shows you how to be rational in a highly irrational world—how to be as happy as you can be under some of the most difficult and “impossible” conditions. It insists that you can stubbornly refuse to make yourself miserable about some truly gruesome happenings—poverty, terrorism, sickness, war—and that you can, if you choose to do so, work more effectively to change some of the worst situations that confront you, and perhaps even the entire world.

  • It will help you understand some of the main roots of mental disturbance—such as bigotry, intolerance, dogmatism, tyranny, and despotism—and to see how you can combat these roots of neurosis in yourself and in others.

  • It presents a large variety of REBT methods for dealing with severe feelings of anxiety, depression, hostility, self-denigration, and self-pity. More than any other major school of therapy (except Arnold Lazarus’s Multimodal Therapy), REBT is truly eclectic and multimodal. At the same time, it is selective and does its best to eliminate harmful and inefficient methods of psychotherapy.

  • REBT is highly active-directive. It gets to the heart of human disturbance quickly and effectively, and presents self-help procedures that can be unusually effective in a short time.

  • This book shows you how to be an honest hedonist and individualist—to be true to thine own self first—but at the same time live happily, successfully, and relatedly in a social group. It lets you keep and even sharpen your own special values, goals, and ideals while being a responsible citizen of your chosen community.

  • It is simple and, I hope, exceptionally clear, but far from simplistic. Its wisdom, gleaned from many philosophers and psychologists, is practical and earthy—but nonetheless profound.

  • It present
s rules and methods derived from today’s fastest-growing type of therapies—REBT (Rational Emotive Behavior Therapy) and CBT (Cognitive Behavioral Therapy)—which have grown enormously in recent years through their efficacy in helping millions of clients as well as thousands of therapists. It takes the best of the self-help techniques from which these therapies are formed and adapts them to the ability of the average reader to use them. That means Y-O-U.

  Does this book, finally, uniquely tell you how to stubbornly refuse to make yourself miserable about anything—yes, anything? Really? Honestly? No nonsense about it? Yes, it actually does—if you will sincerely listen (L-I-S-T-E-N) and work (W-O-R-K) at receiving and using its message.

  Will you listen? Will you work? Will you T-H-I-N-K, F-E-E-L, and A-C-T?

  You definitely can. I hope you will!

  2

  Can You Really Refuse to Make Yourself Miserable About Anything?

  This book has a strange message, that practically all human misery and serious emotional turmoil are quite unnecessary—not to mention unethical. You, unethical? When you make yourself severely anxious or depressed, you clearly are acting against you and are being unfair and unjust to yourself.

  Your disturbance also badly affects your social group. It helps to upset your relatives and friends and, to some extent, your whole community. The expense of making yourself panicked, enraged, and self-pitying is enormous. In time and money lost. In needless effort spent. In uncalled-for mental anguish. In sabotaging others’ happiness. In foolishly frittering away potential joy during the one life—yes, the one life—you’ll probably ever have.