Cognitive Behavioural Therapy For Dummies

by Branch, Rhena

  Consider therapy as a temporary experiment. Give your therapist's advice a shot and see what happens. You can always return to your old ways or try out a new strategy if you think your therapy isn't working.

  Part V

  The Part of Tens

  In this part . . .

  This Part of Tens is a source of vital CBT information. You'll find ten fundamental pointers toward living in an upbeat and enjoyable way, ten books to benefit your library, and ten self-esteem boosters that don't work and alternatives that do.

  Chapter 22: Ten Healthy Attitudes for Living

  In This Chapter

  Taking responsibility for your feelings

  Philosophising rationally

  Enhancing your psychological health

  Staying interested

  As we discuss many times in this book, the attitudes you hold about yourself, other people and the world greatly affect your ability to respond successfully to negative life events. Even in the absence of unusual or difficult circumstances, your core philosophies influence your overall experience of life. People who hold rational philosophies are generally less prone to emotional disturbances, such as anxiety and depression, and are more readily able to solve problems.

  This chapter offers ten rational philosophical standpoints that are good for your psychological health. Read them, re-read them, think them through and test out acting upon them to see for yourself.

  Assuming Emotional Responsibility: You Feel the Way You Think

  Bad or unfortunate things, such as splitting up from a partner, being made redundant or having a car accident, can happen to anyone. You may reasonably have negative feelings in response to such events. Experiencing extreme sadness or annoyance in the face of misfortune is wholly understandable.

  In some instances, bad things occur through no fault of your own. In other cases, you may have some personal responsibility. We don't suggest that you blame yourself for every bad thing that comes your way. However, try to assess a given situation and determine whether you have any legitimate responsibility for its development and look for a resolution.

  Even if you're not personally responsible for a negative event, you can still take responsibility for your emotional and behavioural responses to the event. People who deny their part in creating their own emotional problems in the face of negative events don't recognise how their thoughts and actions can make a bad situation worse. They hand over their personal power to make things better by waiting passively for someone or something to step into the breach.

  When you hold an attitude of personal responsibility for your feelings and actions, you're more able to find creative solutions, and your belief in your ability to cope with adversity is heightened. You empower yourself by focusing on your ability to influence the way you feel even if you can't control events.

  On a cheerier note, when good things happen, you can also assess the extent to which they're a result of your own efforts - and then give yourself credit where due. You can appreciate good fortune without sabotaging your positive feelings with worries that your luck may run out.

  Thinking Flexibly

  Making demands and commands - thinking in terms of ‘must', ‘should' and ‘have to' - about yourself, other people and the world around you has a fundamental problem: such thinking limits your flexibility to adapt to reality. The human capacity to adapt creatively to what's going on is one of the hallmarks of the species' success. However, humans are fallible, and the world continues to be an imperfect place. Insisting ‘It shouldn't be this way!' can leave you irate, depressed or anxious and much less able to focus on how to cope with and adapt to reality.

  Although circumstances may well be desirable, preferable and even better if the situation were different, they don't have to be a particular way. Accepting reality and striving to improve it where wise and achievable can help you save your energy for creative thought and action. See Chapter 2 for more on demands, and Chapter 14 for more on developing realistic attitudes towards yourself.

  Valuing Your Individuality

  You can express your individuality in many ways, such as in your dress sense, musical tastes, political opinions or choice of career. Yet perhaps you're hesitant to express your individuality openly because you fear the reaction of others. People who develop the ability to value their idiosyncrasies and to express them respectfully tend to be well-adjusted and content. Accepting that you're an individual and have the right to live your life, just as other people have the right to live theirs, is a pretty good recipe for happiness.

  As social animals, humans like to feel part of a group or social structure, and tend to be happier when interacting meaningfully with other humans. However, the ability to go against group mentality when it's at odds with your own personal views or values is a tremendous skill. You can be both socially integrated and true to your values by accepting yourself as an individual and by being a selective non-conformist. Check out Chapter 14 for more on accepting yourself.

  Accepting That Life Can Be Unfair

  Sometimes, life's just plain unfair. Sometimes, people treat you unjustly and nothing gets done to put the balance right. Bad things happen to the nicest of people, and people who don't seem to have done a deserving thing in their lives get a winning ticket. On top of being unfair, life's unpredictable and uncertain a great deal of the time. And really, that's just the way life is.

  What can you do? You can whine and moan and make yourself thoroughly miserable about the lamentable state of the world. Or you can accept things and get on with the business of living. No matter how much you insist that the world should be fair and you should be given certainty about how things are going to pan out, you ain't going to get it.

  Life's unfair to pretty much everyone from time to time - in which case, perhaps things aren't as desperately unfair as you thought. If you can accept the cold, hard reality of injustice and uncertainty, you're far more likely to be able to bounce back when life slaps you in the face with a wet fish. You're also likely to be less anxious about making decisions and taking risks. You can still strive to play fair yourself, but if you accept that unfairness exists you may be less outraged and less horrified if and when justice simply doesn't prevail.

  Understanding That Approval from Others Isn't Necessary

  Receiving approval from someone important to you is nice. Getting a bit of praise from a boss or a friend can feel good. But if you believe that you need the approval of significant others or, indeed, everyone you meet, then you probably spend a lot of time feeling unhappy and unsure of yourself. Many people get depressed because they believe they're only as good as the opinions others hold of them. These people can't feel good about themselves unless they get positive feedback or reassurance from others.

  Accept yourself, independent of overt approval from other people in your life. Having a preference for being liked, appreciated and approved of by others - but not believing that you need approval - means that your self-opinion can be stable and you can weather disapproval. You may still behave in ways that are more likely to generate approval than disapproval, but you can also assert yourself without fear. You can consider praise and compliments a bonus rather than something you must cling to and work over-hard to maintain.

  If you hold the belief that you need rather than desire approval, you may pay emotionally for it somewhere along the line. You're likely to feel anxious about whether approval's forthcoming - and when you get approval you may worry about losing it. If you fail to get obvious approval or - horror of all horrors - someone criticises you, you're likely to put yourself down and make yourself depressed. Refer to Chapter 9 for more on combating anxiety, and Chapter 12 for tackling depression.

  You cannot please all the people all the time - and if that's what you try to do, you're almost certainly going to be overly passive. If you can take the view that disapproval isn't the end of the world, intolerable and an indication that you're less than worthy, you can enjoy approval when you get it and st
ill accept yourself when you don't.

  Realising Love's Desirable, Not Essential

  Some people would rather be in any relationship - even an unsatisfying or abusive one - than in no relationship at all. This need may stem from a belief that they can't cope with feelings of loneliness or get through life in general if they're alone. Other people consider themselves worthy or lovable only when they're reassured by being in a relationship.

  Romantic relationships can enhance your enjoyment of life, but they're not essential for you to enjoy life. Holding this attitude can help you to feel good about yourself when you're not part of a couple and may lead you to make more discerning partner choices in future since you will choose, rather than be compelled, to be with someone. Believing that your basic lovability is relatively constant, regardless of whether a significant other actively loves you, can help you to feel secure within a relationship and secure within yourself outside of a relationship.

  People who strongly prefer having a partner and yet believe that they can survive a break up tend to experience little romantic jealousy. Jealousy can be a big obstacle to relationship satisfaction - jealous people tend to believe that they must keep their partner and end up focusing on signs (real or imagined) of infidelity or waning interest rather than on the pleasure of the relationship. Jealousy's turned many a relationship sour. A jealous partner can end up alienating the other person through constant reassurance-seeking or monitoring, leaving both members of the couple feeling that mutual trust doesn't exist between them.

  Preferring instead of demanding to have a relationship helps you to retain your independence and individuality. Then when you are in a relationship, you're less likely to fall into the trap of trying to be the perfect partner - which means you can continue to attend to your own interests while being able to negotiate compromises when appropriate. You'll also be able to call a halt to destructive relationships when evidence suggests that there's no way forward.

  Tolerating Short-Term Discomfort

  Healthy, robust and successful people are often able to tolerate temporary discomfort in the pursuit of longer-term goals. They practise self-denial and delay gratification when doing so is in their long-term interests. These people are the ones who are able to eat healthily, exercise regularly, save money, be romantically faithful, study effectively, and so on.

  You can experience intense pleasure in the present and the future, but often some degree of pain and effort today are necessary to win you greater pleasure tomorrow. This will be true for many of the achievements you've already made in life. Putting up with temporary discomfort is also going to be crucial in reducing painful feelings of anxiety and depression. See Chapters 9, 12 and 13 for more on overcoming these problems.

  Enacting Enlightened Self-Interest

  Enlightened self-interest is about putting yourself first most of the time and one, two or a small handful of selected others a very close second. Enlightened self-interest is about looking after your own needs and interests while also being mindful of the needs of your loved ones and other people living on the planet.

  So why put yourself first? When you reach a certain age, you need to look after yourself because nobody else is going to do so for you. If you can keep yourself healthy and content, you're better able to turn your attention to caring for the people in your life that you love.

  Many people make the mistake of always suppressing their own needs and end up tired, unhappy or ill. People may think they're doing the right thing by putting others first all the time, but in fact they're left with very little to give.

  Of course you will experience times when putting someone else's needs before your own and making personal sacrifices is a good choice. For example, parents frequently put the welfare of their children before their own. But you must still make space for your own pursuits too.

  If you're starting to get concerned that ‘self-interest' translates to ‘selfish beast', stop! To clarify: self-interest involves taking responsibility for looking after yourself because you understand that you're worth taking care of. Self-interest means being able to care for others very deeply. When you're self-interested, you're able to meet your own needs and take a keen interest in the welfare of other people in the world around you. You can also determine when you're going to put yourself second for a period of time because someone else's need is greater than your own - which is where the ‘enlightened' part comes into play.

  Selfishness is not - we stress, not! - the same animal as self-interest. Ultimately, selfish people put their own wants and needs first, to the exclusion and detriment of other people. Selfishness is much less about taking responsibility for looking after yourself and much more about demanding that you get what you want, when you want and to hell with everybody else. The two concepts are very different - so don't be scared. Head to Chapter 18 for more on building a lifestyle that promotes taking care of yourself.

  Pursuing Interests and Acting Consistently with Your Values

  Loads of evidence indicates that people are happier and healthier if they pursue interests and hobbies. Have you let your life become dominated by work or chores at home, and do you spend your evenings sitting in front of the television as a means of recharging? If your answer to this question is ‘Yes!', then you're in extremely good, but not optimally healthy, company.

  One of the arts of maximising your happiness is to pursue personally meaningful goals, such as furthering your education, participating in sport and exercise, developing skills, improving relationships, or acting in ways that contribute to the sort of world you'd like to live in, for example by doing some voluntary work. Try to structure your life to ensure that you have some time for personally meaningful pursuits. Check that the things you do in life reflect what you believe is important.

  As far as we can tell, life isn't a dress rehearsal. Will you really look back and regret missing a bit of TV because you dragged yourself out to spend time on a hobby, to exercise, to enjoy a night out with your friends or to participate in some charity work?

  Tolerating Uncertainty

  Healthy and productive people tend to be prepared to tolerate a degree of risk and uncertainty. Demanding certainty and guarantees in an uncertain world is a sure-fire recipe for worry and inactivity. Safety (or more accurately, the illusion of complete safety) comes at a cost - fewer rewards, less excitement, fewer new experiences.

  The fact that you don't know what the future holds is grounds for calculated risks and experiments, not avoidance, reassurance-seeking or safety precautions. You can make educated decisions and take calculated risks, but if you accept that 100 per cent certainty is exceptionally rare (and, in fact, unnecessary), you can reduce undue anxiety and worry. Risk is inherent to existence. You know that you're mortal and therefore destined to die one day but, in order to remain sane, you keep that knowledge on the outer track of your daily consciousness. You live in an uncertain world every single day of your life. Embrace it, enjoy it and relegate it to your peripheral vision.

  Chapter 23: Ten Self-Esteem Boosters That Don't Work

  In This Chapter

  Identifying techniques that are counterproductive to your self-esteem

  Substituting healthier self-esteem strategies

  You may be trying to manage your low self-esteem in ways that are counterproductive, particularly in the long term. This chapter highlights ten techniques that don't boost your self-esteem effectively.

  ‘Why focus on where I'm going wrong?' you may ask. Well, using the strategies we describe in this chapter to boost your self-esteem is like trying to dig your way out of a hole. Your first step is to realise you're only digging yourself deeper - so put down that shovel! Only when you stop digging, can you begin to look for other ways to get out of the hole. Fortunately, we include several self-esteem ladders within this book to help you find your way out.

  The following ten points describe counterproductive strategies for boosting your self-esteem. We explain why they don't work and su
ggest more constructive ways of increasing your sense of self-worth.

  Putting Others Down

  If you measure your self-esteem by comparing yourself with other people and tend to regard yourself as inferior, you may try to boost your worth by putting down other people, whether in your mind, by moaning about them to others or by criticising them directly.

  By increasing your sense of other people's inferiority, you may manage to persuade yourself temporarily that you're less inferior. But, you won't change the underlying problem - your attitude towards yourself. Putting down others is tiring, not only for you but also for other people - and doing so does not elicit warm responses from others.

  Instead, try respecting your own uniqueness - and that of others. The human race is a species, not a competition. Focus on following your own values and pursuing your own goals. Pay more attention to your own strengths rather than others' weaknesses.