http://www.intropsych.com/ch13_therapies/ten_irrational_ideas.html
Irrational idea #5 is the idea that emotional misery comes from external pressures and that you have little ability to control or change your feelings.
Corollary to this is someone or something else can make you happy/sad/mad. The biggest challenge my counselor had was to get me to feel feelings in the first place. I was so completely dissociated from my emotions that I felt baffled about how to feel them at all. One person told me how lucky I was to be dissociated from my anger....I explained that you don't dissociate from one emotion...I lost all ability to feel all emotions except the vaguest feelings. I had to learn to feel them. Name them. Accept them....then he explained how I am 100% in control of my emotions. This blew me away. I was raised with ***smack*** "You made me mad for waking me up." So I believed emotions came outside of myself. It was so powerful for me to learn that emotions are an inside job. Before counseling I came across "Life's Uncertain, Eat Dessert First." I loved the book. It started changing me as I learned to control what I feel. No one can make me happy/sad/mad/useless/stupid/ugly/or any other feeling without my permission. This was a real mind bender for me. I like what Ellis wrote as the rational thought to counteract this one:
The rational alternative, recommended by Ellis, is control your destiny by taking responsibility for how you interpret and react to events.This is my power....controlling my reaction to the world. It is awesome to feel it and use it with kindness.
Irrational Idea #6 is that if something seems dangerous or fearsome, you must preoccupy yourself with it and make yourself anxious about it.
Ellis believes that when one evaluates a future event as catastrophic,
one becomes anxious. Ellis's solution is to re-evaluate the situation in
a more realistic manner.
This is the results of #3 and 4. The news encourages people to be totally absorbed by every second of anxiety rending experience. I was raised on fear mongering. Every horrible, rotten, scary thing that came along must be obsessed over to the exclusion to all else is a lousy way to be raised. I actually stopped taking the paper because every morning all the worse in the world was dropped on my doorstep with the inability to do anything about it. I am not clueless to World events, I just prefer to balance things up a bit. Watch the news one evening and count the number of stories you can actually do anything about. For me it was a very small number. In counseling I was so obsessive about healing that I neglected living. KavinCoach restricted me to one hour a day working on past crap. I am working on building new happier memories and less delving into a past I cannot change. Irrational Idea #7 is the notion that avoiding life's difficulties is more rewarding than undertaking new challenges.
Looking for the Easy Button. I watch people die before their dead trying to make life easy to the point where no challenge exists. I learned for myself that I am happiest when faced with a challenge. I believe the very purpose of coming to Earth is to take on a challenge. I enjoy Joel's Impossible page..... http://impossiblehq.com/ His motto.... Push Your Limits, Do Something Impossible.
Irrational Idea #8 is that your past remains
all-important and that because something once strongly influenced your
life, it has to keep determining your feelings and behavior today.
This is kind of a Yes....and......No. Yes my past influences what I do now, especially if I stomp on a trigger. Cowering on the floor of my ear doctor's office was directly linked to a nightmare from my past. However, my past does not define who I am today. I can accept my abusers definition of me or I can reject and define myself. I prefer to define myself. I am proud of the person I am today and I would not be that person without the experiences that I had. (Thanks Dave Pelzer.....I finally reached your challenge to love myself because of, not in spite of my past.)Irrational Idea #9 is that people and things should turn out better than they do and that you must view it as awful and horrible if you do not find good solutions to life's grim realities. "Let's face it," Ellis writes, "Reality often stinks. People don't act the way we would like them to act. This doesn't seem to be the best of all possible worlds.... But you still don't have to feel desperately unhappy."
Some people utterly embrace the notion: "Life's a Bitch and then you die." They see misery everywhere.....no happiness can mar their myopic twisted view of the world. I was in that dark hole once. Stunned me when KavinCoach informed me that I put myself there. The opposite of this is those that are happy in the worse conditions possible. Happiness is barred from no one. Viktor Frankl writes about his experience during imprisonment during the Holocaust.
Everything can be taken from a man but one thing: the last of human freedoms - to choose one's attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one's own way.Read more at http://www.brainyquote.com/quotes/authors/v/viktor_e_frankl.html#b5r8qjMAdzOsEllr.99
Finally there is Irrational Idea #10, which Ellis and Harper say "millions of civilized people believe in heartily." This is that you can achieve maximum human happiness by inertia and inaction or by passively and uncommittedly "enjoying yourself."
Living is an ACTION word, a glorious VERB. I like a break as much as the next person but I quickly look forward to rolling up my sleeves and get involved in living.
There are plenty of other irrational ideas shared and reshared on the internet. These are just 10 collected my Ellis and Harper. Part of my adventure now is to take my irrational thinking and turn it into rational, joyous living......I highly recommend what Joel suggests.....Go out and do something impossible.
Walt Disney quote that I kept in my office, "It is kind of fun to do the impossible."
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