Dealing with doubts and reservations
Many people feel that, by accepting themselves, they're simply letting themselves off the hook. But self-acceptance is about taking personal responsibility for your less good traits, actions and habits. Self-acceptance is about targeting areas that you both can and wish to change and then taking the appropriate steps towards change. Self-acceptance is not saying: ‘Hey, I'm human and fallible! Therefore, I just am the way I am and I don't need to think about changing anything.'
You are, at baseline, worthy and acceptable, but some of your behaviours and attitudes may be simultaneously unacceptable.
Another common fear is that by accepting yourself, you're actually condoning undesirable aspects of yourself: ‘Hey, I'm an acceptable human being and, therefore, all I think and do is acceptable.' Not so.
Work on accepting your overall self on the basis of your intrinsic human fallibility, and be prepared to judge specific aspects of yourself. You can both condone your personhood and also condemn, or reject, certain things that you do.
Selecting the Self-Help Journey to Self-Acceptance
A common reason for people persistently putting themselves down is that they hope to become better by calling attention to their mistakes, flaws and failings. Unfortunately, this process frequently includes feeling depressed or anxious, which may well already be underpinned by low self-esteem.
Trying to solve an emotional problem at the same time as calling yourself useless, worthless and pathetic is much like trying to learn a foreign language while hitting yourself over the head with a textbook - your actions are likely to make both jobs much harder. Self-esteem is such an important issue for so many people that we've written an entire book on the subject: Boosting Self-Esteem For Dummies (Wiley).
Accepting yourself has two interesting implications for overcoming emotional problems and personal development. First, you're equal in worth to other human beings just as you are, which helps to reduce emotional pain. Second, because you're not distracted by beating yourself up, you can focus better on coping with adversity, reducing disturbance, and self-improvement.
Imperfect self-acceptance
As you're a fallible human being, you won't be perfect at self-acceptance either. You'll very probably slip into putting yourself down from time to time, as everyone does - us included. The aim is to accept yourself more often and to accept yourself again more quickly, if you notice that you're putting yourself down. Such acceptance definitely gets easier and more consistent with practice.
Broadly speaking, you may be using one of two common strategies to manage low self-esteem: avoiding doing things, or doing things excessively. For example, a person who believes they're worthless unless they're liked by everybody may try extra hard to avoid rejection or to win people's approval; while a person who regards themselves as a ‘failure' may try to avoid situations in which they might fail. Have a look at Chapter 23 for more on avoiding potential self-esteem pitfalls.
Chapter 15: Cooling Down Your Anger
In This Chapter
Knowing when your anger's problematic
Developing healthy anger
Taking healthy anger to work
Communicating effectively to combat unhealthy anger
Anger's a pretty common emotion. However, anger is also increasingly recognised as an important emotional problem. Anger can be bad for your relationships, your health and your self-esteem.
In the bad old days of psychological treatment for anger, people were encouraged simply to ‘get it out', often by beating pillows to vent their fury. The result? Just like anything you practise, these people got better at being angry. The notion that expressing your rage can ‘get it out of your system' is something of a myth. More often, you wind yourself up further, generating even more anger. A better solution is to get to grips with managing your angry feelings responsibly, and to master skills that can help you to feel less angry, less often.
CBT offers clear and effective management of anger by tackling the thinking that underpins your anger and helping you express it in a healthy manner. This chapter focuses on CBT techniques that can help you deal directly with your feelings of anger.
Discerning the Difference between Healthy and Unhealthy Anger
Essentially, two different types of anger exist - healthy and unhealthy:
Healthy anger is helpful annoyance and irritation. This is the kind of anger that spurs you on to assert your rights when it is important that you do so.
Unhealthy anger is unhelpful rage, and hate. This type of anger leads you to behave aggressively or violently even in response to mild or unimportant provocation. Unhealthy anger can also mean you bottle things up and vent your anger indirectly (sometimes called ‘passive aggression') or take it out on innocent parties.
All emotions have themes - that is, sets of circumstances or triggers from which they arise (we explain this a bit more in Chapter 6). Themes for anger include someone breaking one of your personal rules, or threatening your self-esteem through word or deed. Another anger theme is frustration, when someone or something gets in the way of you reaching a goal.
The triggers for healthy and unhealthy anger are the same, but the behavioural responses they typically produce are very different. Both anger types are also associated with different ways of thinking and attention focus.
Key characteristics of unhealthy anger
Unhealthy anger is far more likely than healthy anger to cause fractures in your personal relationships, create trouble in your workplace or land you in prison. You're also likely to feel more physically and emotionally uncomfortable when you're unhealthily angry.
Several ways of thinking typically underpin unhealthy anger:
Making rigid demands and rules about the way other people must or must not behave
Insisting that other people do not insult or ridicule you
Demanding that life conditions and other people don't get in the way of you getting what you want
Overestimating the degree to which people deliberately act in undesirable ways towards you
Assuming automatically that you're right and the other person's wrong
Refusing to consider another person's point of view
Common behavioural characteristics associated with unhealthy anger include the following:
Attacking or wanting to attack another person physically or verbally
Attacking another person in an indirect - also known as passive-aggressive - way, for example trying to make someone else's job difficult
Taking out your anger on innocent parties, such as another person, an animal or an object
Plotting revenge
Holding a grudge
Attempting to turn others against the person you believe has behaved undesirably
Sulking
Looking for evidence that someone has acted with malicious intent
Searching for signs of an offence being repeated
Being over-vigilant for people breaking your personal rules or acting disrespectfully towards you
Common physical signs of unhealthy anger include the following:
Clenched fists
Muscular tension, especially in the neck and shoulder muscles
Clenched jaw
Trembling or shaking
Raised heart rate
Feeling hot
For many people, anger can come on hot and fast. Familiarising yourself with your own early warning signs of anger can help you to intervene earlier.
Hallmarks of healthy anger
In general, people experience healthy anger as intense but not overwhelming. You can feel intensely angry in a healthy way without experiencing a loss of control. Healthy anger does not lead you to behave in antisocial, violent or intimidating ways.
In addition, healthy anger is typically underpinned by the following ways of thinking:
Holding strong preferences rather than rigid demands about how people should act
Having flex
ibility in the rules you expect people to abide by
Strongly preferring that others don't insult or ridicule you
Desiring that other people and life conditions don't get in the way of you getting what you want
Thinking realistically about whether other people have deliberately acted undesirably towards you
Considering that both you and the other person may be right and wrong to a degree
Trying to see the other person's point of view
Behavioural characteristics typical of healthy anger include:
Asserting yourself with the other person
Staying in the situation with the intent of resolving any disagreement
Requesting the other person to modify her behaviour - and respecting her right to disagree with you
Looking for evidence that the other person may not have behaved with malicious intent
Being able to forgive and forget
Assembling Attitudes That Underpin Healthy Anger
If you're serious about overcoming your unhealthy anger, you have to take a long, hard look at some of the attitudes you hold. This involves honestly looking at the way you believe that other people and the world at large must treat you. You may hold some common toxic beliefs that frequently lead to unhealthy anger in people. Some of these toxic thoughts include:
‘No one must ever treat me poorly or disrespectfully.'
‘The world must not be unjust or unfair and especially not to me!'
‘I must get what I want when I want it and nothing should get in my way.'
‘I must never be led into feeling guilty, inadequate, embarrassed or ashamed by other people or life events.'
‘No one and nothing must ever expose my weaknesses or errors.'
Having looked long and hard at your attitudes, you need to make your toxic attitudes more helpful and realistic (see Chapter 3 for more on tackling toxic thoughts in general). Yes! Once again, positive emotional change comes from changing the way you think about yourself, other people and the world in general. If you want to be emotionally healthy and high-functioning, you need to start developing flexible, tolerant and accepting attitudes. High-functioning individuals experience fewer disturbing emotional responses, they are able to enjoy life, and they bounce back fairly readily from everyday hassles and annoyances. It's all in the way you look at life and the kind of attitude you take toward life's ups and downs (particularly with regard to anger).
We can explain the types of attitude that are likely to help you overcome unhealthy anger. However, you must decide to agree with these attitudes and ultimately act in accordance with them if you want to see a change in the amount of anger you experience.
The following sections describe the healthy attitudes that you need to take in order to overcome your unhealthy anger.
Putting up with other people
Other people exist in the same universe as you. Sometimes, this can be a rather pleasant state of affairs, but on occasions you may find that these other people are a damnable inconvenience. Whether you like it or not, other people can exist, do exist and will continue to exist in your universe for the foreseeable future. Accepting that these other people have as much right as you to inhabit the planet just makes sense. And while cohabitating, you may as well accept the reality that sometimes other people may get on your nerves. As you're not in charge of the universe, you'd better accept that other people are allowed to act according to their rules and values - not yours.
You've probably noticed that humans come in a variety of shapes, sizes and colours. No doubt you've seen that not all people share the same religion, culture, political opinions, moral codes or rules of social conduct. Now, without going into a long-winded speech about the value of diversity, accepting individual difference is terribly important. Acknowledging that other people have a right to their own ideas about how to live their lives - even when you flatly disagree with their ideas - can save you a lot of emotional upset. People will continue to exercise these rights, whatever your opinion.
Accepting others can save you a world of unhealthy anger. Consider this: every morning Jill and Tim travel to work together by bus. Every time she boards the bus, Jill says a pleasant ‘Good morning!' to the driver, who always ignores her completely. One day, Tim asks Jill why she persists in greeting the driver, even though he never acknowledges her. Jill says: ‘Because I choose to behave in line with my standard of politeness rather than to respond to his standard of rudeness.'
Jill's high tolerance to rudeness from the bus driver means that she can avoid making herself unhealthily angry. She does this by:
Accepting that the driver has the right to be rude. No law exists against responding (or not) to another person's greeting.
Not taking the driver's rudeness over-personally. The driver doesn't know Jill, so it's highly unlikely that he's actually ‘out to get her' specifically. He's probably foul-tempered to many people in addition to Jill.
Exercising her right to behave according to her own standard of politeness, even in the face of another person's rudeness. Although the bus driver is rude to Jill, she chooses not to respond in the same way. She can carry on being a generally polite person even in the face of another person's rudeness if she so chooses.
Forming flexible preferences
Wanting others to treat you well and with respect makes sense. Similarly, you probably want other people to do their jobs well and to help you to get what you want. You're likely to want life to roll your way and for world events to gel with your personal plans.
However, expecting and demanding these conditions to be met all the time doesn't make sense!
Keeping your attitudes flexible and based on preferences, rather than demands or expectations, can keep your anger in the healthy camp. Rigid and demanding attitudes can land you in unhealthy destructive anger, time and time again.
Consider the relationship of Ade and Franco: Ade holds rigid beliefs about other people showing him respect and courtesy. Franco holds the same principal attitudes, but flexibly. Ade and Franco go for lunch together and sit near a table of young men, who drink a bit too much and end up talking very loudly and rudely. Franco and Ade can't hear each other and their lunch is being ruined by the behaviour of these young men. Franco suggests that he and Ade move to another table, where they won't be disturbed by the men's antisocial behaviour. Ade, however, gets up and shouts at the men, ending up in a brawl outside the cafe. He's lucky not to be hurt more seriously than he is.
Ade's rigid attitudes about the situation are:
‘How dare these idiots treat me this way?'
‘I won't tolerate being disrespected like this.'
‘I've got to show these idiots who's boss.'
Franco's more flexible attitudes about the situation are:
‘These guys are behaving like idiots.'
‘These guys are really annoying me with their disrespectful behaviour.'
‘I don't want to put up with this, so I think I'll get away from these guys.'
Flexible preferences for things like respect allow for the possibility of you being treated disrespectfully. Rigid demands don't allow for the possibility of life and other people treating you in ways that you think they shouldn't. Inevitably, you can end up feeling outraged if you always demand that others behave in a specific way. People behave according to how they want to behave - not how you want them to behave.
Accepting other people as fallible human beings
Cognitive Behavioural Therapy For Dummies Page 26