How To Stop Destroying Your Relationships: A Guide to Enjoyable Dating, Mating & Relating - Softcover

Ellis, Albert

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0806538074 ISBN 13: 9780806538075

Publisher: Citadel Press Inc.,U.S., 2016

Synopsis

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.

About this title

About the Author

Albert Ellis, Ph.D. founded Rational Emotive Behavior Therapy (REBT), the pioneering form of the modern Cognitive Behavior therapies. In a 1982 professional survey, Dr. Ellis was ranked as the second most influential psychotherapist in history. His name is a staple among psychologists, students, and historians around the world. He published over seven hundred articles and more than sixty books on psychotherapy, marital and family therapy, and sex therapy. Until his death in 2007, Dr. Ellis served as President Emeritus of the Albert Ellis Institute in New York, which provides professional training programs and psychotherapy to individuals, families and groups. To learn more, visit www.albertellis.org.

Robert A. Harper, Ph.D. was a psychology and sociology professor, a psychiatric social worker in the U.S. Army, and prominent marriage and family counselor. He wrote several books with Albert Ellis, including Creative Marriage, A Guide to Successful Marriage, and A Guide to Rational Living, among others. His Psychoanalysis and Psychotherapy: 36 Systems was one of his most influential books. He lived and practiced in Washington, D.C., until his passing in 2004.

Ann Vernon, Ph.D., Sc.D., PPC, is President of the Albert Ellis Board of Trustees, one of the first Diplomates of the Albert Ellis Institute, a member of the International Training Standards and Review Committee of the AEI, and a member of the Board of Consulting Advisors for the Journal of Rational-Emotive Cognitive-Behavior Therapy. Dr. Vernon is recognized as the leading international expert in applications of RE&CBT with children and adolescents and has written numerous books, chapters, and articles about counseling this population, including Thinking, Feeling, Behaving: An Emotional Education Curriculum, What Works When With Children and Adolescents: A Handbook of Individual Counseling Techniques, The Passport Program, and More What Works When With Children and Adolescents. Dr. Vernon is Professor Emerita, University of Northern Iowa. She currently conducts RE&CBT training programs around the world, as well as in the United States. She lives in Tucson, Arizona, and Wisconsin.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

How to Stop Destroying Your Relationships

A Guide to Enjoyable Dating, Mating, and Relating

By Albert Ellis, Robert A. Harper

KENSINGTON PUBLISHING CORP.

Copyright © 2003 Albert Ellis Institute
All rights reserved.

ISBN: 978-0-8065-3807-5

Contents

ALSO BY DR. ALBERT ELLIS, 
Title Page, 
Copyright Page, 
Dedication, 
Foreword, 
Preface, 
1 - Getting Relationships Together by Getting Yourself Together, 
2 - Getting Relationships Together as a Couple: Using the ABCs of REBT in Your Relationship, 
3 - Starting Out With Realistic Views of Couplehood, 
4 - Trying It Out Before Commitment, 
5 - Communicating and Problem-Solving as a Couple, 
6 - Better Sex for Better Couplehood, 
7 - Saving Time and Money and Enjoying Life More, 
8 - Getting Along Together and With Others, 
9 - How to Be Happy in Spite of Your Blasted In-Laws, 
10 - To Have or Not to Have Children — That Is the Question, 
11 - Happy Couplehood: Building a Deep and Lasting Relationship, 
12 - Summary: How You Can Use REBT to Build a Healthy Relationship, 
Suggested Reading, 
About the Authors, 

CHAPTER 1

Getting Relationships Together by Getting Yourself Together

Newborn infants often panic when a newspaper or a paper bag is rustled near their ears. To them, with their near-zero experience with the non-uterine world, any sudden change in the messages impinging on their senses may represent a great threat. As experiences increase, so may real or imagined dangers. Some dangers lessen or disappear, but others increase. As the eight-year-old shows when he or she hides in the closet at a thunderclap, experience does not necessarily teach one how to deal with fear.

How can you learn to live a relatively unpanicked life? How can you tolerate the frustrations of coupling? Not easily! Most of us learn to face crackling paper and even thunder without fear, but we tend to pick up other disturbances that interrupt our individual happiness and render us undelightful to another person who wants to keep closely relating.

Before you contemplate and get involved in couplehood, you had better keep two things in the back of your mind. First, you must make substantial headway in accepting and coping with your own life. Second, be sure to look for long-term satisfactions — not just immediate gratifications.

We emphasize coupling when we deal with happiness-seeking not because we believe that true and lasting enjoyment cannot be achieved by solitary individuals — both history and current observation prove that it can be — but because humans try, and often try repeatedly, to be in happily intimate relationships. Also, our long experience as scientists, educators, and clinicians indicates that most of us can use all the help we can get in learning how to couple happily.

We developed the Rational Emotive Behavior Therapy (REBT) theory of human behavior in the mid-1950s. This theory holds that people are born with strong tendencies to act both well (self-helpfully) and badly (self-defeatingly), but that they have considerable choice in the way they react. You, as a human, are born with two conflicting tendencies: a tendency to needlessly (and, hence, neurotically) disturb yourself, and a tendency to seek enjoyable, non-disturbed thoughts, feelings, and behaviors. REBT tries to help you to enhance the positive second tendency and to reduce the strength and persistence of the first, which is often reinforced by yourself and by others.

Before we get to the major principles of REBT and how to apply them to your life, let us present some basic facts about humans and human behavior.

First off, all human behavior (thinking, perceiving, feeling, and acting) derives from individuals. No proof has ever been uncovered of a collective unconscious, let alone a collective conscious. Also, there is no such thing as a mystical couple merged into one being. Therefore, you have to make efforts at changing a relationship first within yourself. Then you have to agree with your partner that you will do or not do certain things to improve your relationship, and vice versa. But whatever middle ground you come to as a couple, your actions or inactions (and the attitudes behind them) still belong to you (Individual A) and to your partner (Individual B) separately.

Keeping that in mind, know that you can only directly change yourself. Even if you are a therapist, all you can do is try to make change seem attractive and interesting and possible for someone else — it's up to the individual whether or not s/he makes the change. If you think you can change Individual B or that s/he automatically should change (because, after all, look how wonderfully changed you are), trouble will likely ensue!

Individuals function more effectively and enjoyably when they learn to reduce their tendency — either instilled early on or possibly innate — to rate themselves. Contrary to many other psychotherapists and educators, we have long contended that self-esteem is something to shun rather than to embrace and enhance. By all means take satisfaction in your behavior — your thoughts, feelings, perceptions, and actions — and rate or have your behavior rated by others as "good" or "bad." But rating your personhood, your totality, your self is bound to be incomplete and inaccurate. Is a "good person" always "good" and therefore a "good" hockey player, orator, or electronic troubleshooter all at once? Self-ratings can have distracting and disturbing effects. If you are focused on "How am I as a person?" or "Am I what others rate me to be?" you are probably reducing the effectiveness of what you are doing to that degree. Self-rating leads to self-cremating.

The next principle is a tough one to understand and difficult to act on in your daily life, as most of us have been immersed in the process of rating the total person (ourselves and others) since infancy. "She's a good baby." "I'm a bad person." Many of the efforts of REBT are directed toward helping people overcome their tendencies to rate themselves and others as persons, and instead only to evaluate actions. By rating people's actions, separate from their personhood, we can learn to live more happily.

Let's step back for a moment to examine the ABCs of REBT. A stands for the activating events or adversities in your life — the phone is ringing, your jury duty notice has arrived, or your life raft has developed a leak. B is your beliefs or belief system, or how you filter the A's. C is for consequences (emotional and behavioral) and is a result of how you used B to deal with A. Like most people, you probably thought that A (adversities) produces C (consequences) directly and naturally. But that isn't necessarily the case. REBT teaches you to understand that your Bs largely effect your Cs. Let us illustrate.

Charlene, an intelligent and energetic fifteen-year-old, sought therapy because, in her words: "I have just squarely faced the fact that I am a lesbian, and naturally it blows my mind. What a shit I am for letting myself be attracted to women. I've known about my lesbianism for a long time, but I kept telling myself that it would blow over — it was a phase I was going through. Now I'm looking at it — I'm a total goddamned dyke. And it's terrible, and I hate it! I am miserable. I don't want to live, but my mother, who doesn't know what's eating me but knows something is, made me come to see you. I know it won't do a damned bit of good. I want to fucking well die." Dr. Harper had several REBT sessions with Charlene. Here is an excerpt from one of their sessions.

R.A.H.: Charlene, of course, you have the right to die, but dying is an irrevocable decision. Since you have gone to the trouble of coming here, let's look at some of the assumptions you are making. While it's possible that you may not be lesbian, let's assume for the time being that you are. Why do you think being a lesbian makes you a shit?

Charlene: Well, doesn't it? Anybody who wants to be normal and get married and have kids and be respected in the community and ends up a lesbian ends up a shit. Ask anybody — except maybe another lesbian.

R.A.H.: Your exception tells me that you don't necessarily believe that a lesbian must be and must feel herself to be a shit. So you grant the possibility that a lesbian does not have to rate herself negatively and go around feeling miserable.

Charlene: Yeah, but this is all theoretical crud. The fact is that I'm a lesbian and I don't want to be and I think I'm a shit and I'd rather die than go on this way.

R.A.H.: Please understand that I fully accept you as a person who has an undeniable right to feel however you choose to feel. That's the concept: choice. And by this I mean a practical choice, not just some way-out theoretical choice.

Charlene: You mean I can choose whether to be a lesbian or not?

R.A.H.: What you can choose is whether or not to act on it. But for now let's assume that you are a lesbian, and we are challenging your assumption that this makes you a shit. Because you understandably want results and not a philosophical discussion at this point, close your eyes, please. Now think, "I am a lesbian," and tell me what you are feeling.

Charlene: What I've already told you: shitty, terrible, miserable, like dying.

R.A.H.: Okay. Keeping your eyes closed, think, "I am a lesbian," but see if you can feel any differently about it.

Charlene: Oh, come on. You're treating me like a stupid child.

R.A.H.: It probably seems that way to you, but I think I am accepting you as a full person who has developed some heavy self-downing ways and could use a little help in easing up on it. So what have you got to lose? Please close your eyes again and think, "I am a lesbian." Now see if you can feel less miserable about it.

Charlene (after several silent minutes and with eyes still closed): Well, maybe now I feel like yeah, I'm a lesbian, but maybe it's not the end of the world. I suppose I don't have to die, but I still see a pretty shitty life for myself compared with what I'd thought I would be: a beautiful and brilliant young physician who is also a perfect wife and mother to a perfect husband and three perfect children. To say the least, I feel disappointed. (She opens her eyes and gives a rather sickly smile.)

R.A.H.: Splendid! You have quickly moved from despair to feeling disappointment. There is a world of difference: In despair, as you know, all hope is gone; in disappointment, no matter how crushed and discouraged you feel, hope creeps back in. Tell me, how did you change your feelings?

Charlene: I'm not sure, but I think the way you reacted to me showed me that it was at least worth trying to feel differently about being a lesbian. As I tried I thought about how you weren't treating me like a shit — so maybe I wasn't entirely a shit. But I also thought about a number of people who are lesbians and who don't despair about it. They're not blowing their brains out or jumping in front of a train.

R.A.H.: Very good again! You realize that your self-acceptance was encouraged by my unconditional acceptance of you as a person, but that was not the whole reason your self-feelings started to change. You began to think of some other people and their behavior, which cast some doubt on your earlier conviction that lesbianism and shithood are synonymous. Are you also starting to see how what you think and what you feel are so mixed up in each other that it becomes hard to distinguish one from the other?

Charlene: Yeah, I suppose if I think I'm a shit for being a lesbian, I'm going to feel like a shit. Which, by the way, I still do. I just don't feel all's necessarily lost.

R.A.H.: That is progress. None of us completely transforms his/her behavior in one easy lesson. To change even the simplest thoughts, feelings, and actions often takes long, hard, and persistent work. But that's life — and it's not awful.

Through her comments about thinking and feeling, Charlene indicated she was already beginning to understand the fundamentals of the ABCs of REBT: namely, that her beliefs about lesbianism and not the activating event of her "discovery" of her sexual disposition led to her feelings (consequences). Dr. Harper indicated to her, however, this fine beginning did not mean that Charlene would not have a long and difficult learning process ahead. While she saw this, she also saw that it might work, so we continued working on the ABCs of her feelings and on her understanding and challenging her self-rating process.

By gradually learning to make better judgments about her thoughts, feelings, actions, and perceptions — her behavior — instead of making judgments about her total self or personhood, Charlene chose this solution to the problem of self-downing. No person can be shown to be, as a person, good or bad. Either way is an unprovable assumption. However, you will feel miserable if you assume that you are bad (at the core no damned good), and you'll feel much better if you assume that you're okay — that is, a satisfactory human being. Why not make the assumption that makes you feel better?

"But," Charlene said at first (like many of our clients do), "it is no assumption that I am a shitty person. I really am." Over and over again we had to help her see that she was accepting an arbitrary and unprovable judgment as indisputable and unchangeable, and that was a choice she was making. She could, as I kept pointing out, learn to dispute such a nonsensical and destructive judgment of herself and gradually (with diligent persistence) substitute a more positive self-rating.

As REBT therapists we are never wholly satisfied with what we call the inelegant, but workable, solution chosen by Charlene. Why? Because we are quite aware that positive self-evaluations are readily reversible. If you become convinced you are a good person for any reason except "because I exist," that reason can be snatched away, and you can be left again with the old conviction that you are somehow inadequate, unacceptable, undesirable, inferior, or "bad" because you were not able to achieve whatever you had decided you had to achieve to be "good."

We believe, however, that if you work hard at challenging your self-downing judgments, substituting positive judgments, and deciding, "I am good only because I am alive and not because of the worthy things I do," you are likely to end up close to what we call the elegant therapeutic solution. That solution (like all things human, imperfectly stated and imperfectly executed by anyone) is to not rate your self or essence or personhood at all. Instead, you must learn to rate only what you think, feel, and do. You, of course, are responsible for your actions. But ideally you should rate only your actions and not your youness or self.

Learning not to rate yourself as a person means learning not to rate the personhood of others. Because this concept probably goes against the way most of you have been brought up, and it is possibly contrary to your biological nature, none of you is likely to become perfect at not judging others as persons any more than you are going to overcome the tendencies to rate your total selves. But if you become more conscious of how you are rating yourself and others, you can make a lot of progress — progress that will definitely help you in couplehood.

Is this all you have to know about REBT and how to get it all together for a happy and functional union? Not really! But it is not a bad beginning. What we've covered so far is not easy. It will take a lot of hard work on your part to successfully apply this chapter.

But this hard work will definitely pay off whether you are in or out of couplehood. Whether or not you take our advice is your choice, but if you take it, you may learn how to live more effectively and enjoyably. At the end of this chapter, you'll find a few exercises that will start you off on the hard — but very rewarding — work of achieving unconditional self-acceptance (USA) and other thoughts, feelings, and behaviors that will help you in your dating, relating, and mating goals.

EXERCISES TO KEEP YOU EMOTIONALLY FIT

It is easy to read about — and even to think about — what you're doing badly. We wrote this book to give you insight into how you and your mate are defeating yourselves and what you can do about changing. Insight, however, is not enough. Some of the most brilliant insights you have, and often keep having, can sound great. Utterly real. Quite convincing. But, as I, Dr. Ellis, discovered when I was a card-carrying psychoanalyst, some of these insights can be pretty useless.

One of my clients, a twenty-five-year-old teacher named Carol, who I saw in the 1950s, insisted that she had "good, healthy relations" with her mother, father, and younger brother and couldn't understand why she was so hostile toward her boyfriend, Don. I soon found out that she was intensely jealous of her mother, terribly hurt by her father's favoring her brother, and exceptionally angry at her boyfriend for ignoring her demands for more affection. Carol was thrilled with these important insights and was sure that they explained her hostility. She thought that these revelations would cure her. Well, they didn't. For the next few months, Carol's rage against Don escalated and he threatened to break up with her. Carol was distraught about this — and about the dismal failure of her insights into her hidden feelings to help her.

Fortunately, I was becoming skeptical myself at that time about the virtues of psychoanalytic revelations. So I went back to the details of Carol's two-year relationship with Don, and soon helped her gain a different kind of insight. Carol had with Don — as she had had all her life with other relatives and friends — an overwhelming Irrational Belief. "I absolutely need significant people's approval. Without it, I am a thoroughly unlovable, worthless person!" While that shook Carol up, it still didn't quite change her.

(Continues...)

Excerpted from How to Stop Destroying Your Relationships by Albert Ellis, Robert A. Harper. Copyright © 2003 Albert Ellis Institute. Excerpted by permission of KENSINGTON PUBLISHING CORP..
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.

Edition details

• Publisher: Citadel Press Inc.,U.S.
• Publication date: 2016
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0806538074
• ISBN 13: 9780806538075
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 240