As a doctor of the human psyche, author R. Duncan Wallace believes in not only offering good medicine and science, but also offering solutions and solace to those who are experiencing psychological pain, emotional distress, and difficulty making their way. In The Book of Psychological Truths, Wallace provides a useful guide on how to live a happier, more satisfying life. Over the course of his forty-eight-year career, Wallace has compiled a set of truths that will help you grow your capability, outgrow problems, and overcome obstacles. The Book of Psychological Truths shows you how to • remove mental pressure and pain and strengthen self-power; • use psychological truths to remove barriers and increase your abilities; • enhance your relationships and communicate in the best possible ways; • develop the stances and attitudes that produce success; • handle situational anxieties and understand their value; • solve and remove severe psychological pains and complexes; • have and enjoy excellent, ongoing quality of life. The Book of Psychological Truths shows that when you use the power and value of these truths by choice and with awareness, you can greatly increase your personal evolution and influence society's evolution in wise ways.
THE BOOK OF PSYCHOLOGICAL TRUTHS
A Psychiatrist's Guide to Really Good Thinking for Really Great LivingBy R. Duncan WallaceiUniverse, Inc.
Copyright © 2012 R. Duncan Wallace, MD
All right reserved.ISBN: 978-1-4620-1561-0 Contents
Introduction...............................................................................................viiChapter 1—How to Eliminate Mental Pressure and Personal Stress.......................................3Chapter 2—How to Deal with Painful Emotions and Make New Discoveries.................................23Chapter 3—Increase Your Self-Power and Know Its Hidden Values........................................58Chapter 4—Our Mastery Mechanism: The Accomplisher....................................................87Chapter 5—The Flow of Certainty and Uncertainty in Our Minds.........................................101Chapter 6—Mind Functions and How Best to Use Them....................................................123Chapter 7—Our Greatest Forces: Actual Reality and Truth..............................................131Chapter 8—The Remarkable Force of Increase: The Growth and Wisdom it Gives...........................136Chapter 9—The Clear and Beautiful Truths about Motivation............................................148Chapter 10—Search Out the New to Increase Your Understanding and Capability..........................181Chapter 11—Belonging and Your Basic Loyalties........................................................198Chapter 12—How to Grace and Honor Your Relationships.................................................219Chapter 13—Clear Communication.......................................................................229Chapter 14—Psychological Stances and Monitoring Positions............................................241Chapter 15—Mattering, Influence, and Self-Esteem.....................................................251Chapter 16—Methods of Handling Situational Anxieties.................................................273Chapter 17—Guilt, Remorse, and Psychological Depression..............................................295Chapter 18—Overcoming Early Devastation..............................................................307Chapter 19—Regaining Meaningful Purpose..............................................................317Chapter 20—How to Understand and Face Despair........................................................324Chapter 21—Accepting and Integrating Undesirable Past Actions into the Present.......................332Chapter 22—The Arrival of Trusted Life-Handling Capability...........................................345Chapter 23—How to Create an Enduring Psychological and Emotional Quality of Life.....................351Epilogue Looking Back and Looking Forward.................................................................367Endnotes...................................................................................................371Index......................................................................................................373
Chapter One
How to Eliminate Mental Pressure and Personal Stress
You have the ability to release mental pressure and stress. When you learn to release mental pressure, your health and quality of life will improve dramatically.
Would you like to function without feeling mental pressure or stress? You can! You can remove all of your mental pressure and most of your personal stress immediately and, eventually, permanently. You know how bad it is to feel the pain of stress and mental pressure. At times, you have probably said, "I'm all stressed out. I hate this pressure and can't stand it anymore!" The good news is that you don't have to stand it anymore. When you know what to do, you can fix it.
This chapter shows you how to remove mental pressure quickly and decisively. When you do, you will be well on your way to possessing amazing ability and a free feeling that you never dreamed possible. Immediately your health, general well-being, and quality of life will be enhanced, and your energy will increase. You will feel lighter, laugh more, and love life more. You will be far more efficient and able to accomplish much more. It's true that you can enjoy a constant state of active tranquility.
Mental pressure is universal, causing most of our personal stress. Mental pressure develops in us naturally as we grow up. It is the most common psychological pain in our busy, frantic, modern-day life. Yet it doesn't need to be.
In this first chapter you will learn the cause of mental pressure, how to recognize it, and how to quickly remove it through your own releaser thought. Then you will see how to continuously bypass creating it through correcting the error that causes it, by using a subtle but powerful psychological truth.
When you remove your mental pressure, you will have much greater well-being and a continuous feeling of active tranquility in your mind. You will accomplish more with less effort; your efficiency and effectiveness will increase in everything you do.
The opening workplace example that follows will familiarize you with how a pressured and stressed employee thinks, feels, and functions, versus how one who is not mentally pressured or stressed goes about his work.
A Tale of Two Employees
It was already 2:30 p.m. Jim was feeling worried and harassed by all of the things he had planned on doing by 6:00, so that he could attend an important company function at 7:00, a dinner to honor employees with ten or more years of service. Jim was new to the company and wanted to make a good impression with management by attending, but he had so much to do; he had even skipped lunch. He fretted, How will I ever get it all done by tonight? He knew his boss wanted a report presented at the committee meeting tomorrow, and he estimated that he would barely make the deadline if he could get everything together. He silently talked to himself as he worked, pressuring himself to hurry.
Then the boss stopped by his desk and asked him to include one more analysis in his report. Jim smiled, said okay, and kept himself from blowing up. For the next ten minutes, he experienced fear that he wouldn't get it done, but he pressured himself with, I have to. I've got to hurry. I've only got three hours left! He did get it done but went to the dinner suffering from a headache. That night he fell asleep, exhausted.
George, who worked in the same department, had been with the company for three years. He, too, had reports to prepare for tomorrow's committee meeting—not one, but two reports. Yet George went to lunch that day with colleagues and attended the company dinner that night. Not only that, but George was friendly and open, had a smile for people, and generally appeared unruffled and calm. He had invited Jim to join the group for lunch that day, but Jim had declined due to his workload and his concerns about it.
At the end of the corporate dinner, they chatted briefly. Jim revealed how bad it had been for him that day—the pressure he'd felt, the worry he'd had, and how mentally taxing his job was. He asked George why he'd appeared so relaxed and unruffled during the day, and how he could take time off for lunch with reports due. "Don't you feel the stress too?" he asked.
"No, no I don't," said George. "But I used to until I learned not to. I rarely, if ever, feel pressure or stress anymore; I don't create it. My mind actually feels like I'm on a vacation most of the time. I can enjoy whatever I'm doing, wherever I am, and I accomplish far more than I used to."
Jim was stunned. How is George able to do this? he wondered.
Experiencing Mental Pressure
We feel mental pressure when we have deadlines to complete things. We feel it when we have a lot to do in a short period of time. We especially feel it when preparing for an important test, if the successful completion will have consequences on our future. Pressure often arises when we are trying to prevent an unwanted result. Mental pressure is simply a feeling of pressure in our mind. Though initially we may try to motivate ourselves using mental pressure, it soon becomes painful and unpleasant. We might say to ourselves, "I've got to get this done," or "I'd better hurry and get it done by four o'clock because I have to get to my meeting." How many times have you heard yourself say, "I have to—or else," or maybe even "This is a do-or-die situation"? How many of us worry throughout the day that we won't get everything done?
To complicate matters, we harbor all sorts of feared outcomes if we don't succeed, like, "What will happen to me? What will the boss think?" Or, "If I don't pass the test, I won't get into graduate school and my career hopes will be ruined." We even fret about our favorite sports teams: "If we don't win, we'll never amount to anything. We've got to win!"
Mental pressure exacts a toll. Many experience physical symptoms, such as headaches, elevated blood pressure, and tight muscles. Others become short-tempered, impatient, and hard to work with. When mentally pressured, we can become tense, critical, and even explosive. We go around and convey a "Don't bother me—I'm busy" message. Sound familiar? If left unattended, mental pressure can cause headaches, raise blood pressure, and produce anxiety and depression.
Mental pressure is described in different ways. We say, "I'm stressed" or "I'm all stressed out." We often describe our jobs as "high stress." The word "stress" and terms linked to it have become so widely used that, to a large extent, they have lost their precise value, though we often know what people mean when they use them. Mental pressure is a form of distress.
Some Background about Mental Pressure and Stress
Originally, the medical community used the terms stress and distress to describe the effect of external factors on our bodies and minds. Stress and distress had a central role in psychosomatic medicine and theory; they have been implicated in heart attacks, mental breakdowns, and various other illnesses.
The extent of the role that stress plays in various physical illnesses remains a subject of study and debate, but many experts suspect that stress and some illnesses are related. Attempts to define personality types (Type A and Type B) tried to show causation of cardiac illnesses in the Type A individuals who created a great deal of self-pressure with a "competitive and driven to accomplish" behavior pattern. The original studies appeared more certain about this than more recent inquiries, but in the 1960s the general medical belief was that it had some validity. Thomas Holmes, MD, produced some very important work, rating by severity the number of life stress events (divorce, loss of a job, death of a spouse, etc.) that people experienced and then correlating the number and severity with the onset of physical illness. The higher the point score, the more severe the illness he could predict. Until new evidence is presented, the debate about the correlation between physical illness, mental illness, and mental stress will invariably continue. Nonetheless, because of the likely ill effects of prolonged stress on health, medical practitioners believe it is good to reduce stress.
Concern about stress and its possible role in illness, and certainly its toll on quality of life, led to the rise of stress seminars, the popularization of transcendental meditation, and Dr. Herbert Benson's book The Relaxation Response. Today, a thriving cottage industry has developed, offering a litany of ideas and programs designed to promote better health and well-being. Although some approaches have found success offering assistance in helping reduce stress, few if any have offered a realistic look into the exact central cause of mental pressure, or have offered workable solutions for increasing our internal capability to handle it or eliminate it altogether.
The Cause and the Cure, in General
Until recently, the syndrome of mental pressure, subsequently called mental pressuring, has been wrongly considered to have outside or external causes—things such as a hectic schedule, the pressure or forces of a fast-paced society, and the individual's need to find professional success and financial well-being. Though no one denies that modern circumstances play a part in this equation, the truth about mental pressure and stress is that it is self-created by a specific thought pattern.
Not surprisingly, when I challenged four hundred participants at a University of Utah Fall Conference in 1978 to tell me where their mental pressure originated, from outside forces or from inside forces, 390 believed it came from the outside; only ten said it originated from the inside. Two hours later, at the end of the conference, the figures were almost exactly reversed. Only seven people still believed mental pressure came from outside forces. During that two-hour period, I introduced a unique concept that eliminates mental pressure, and I offered simple tools that release mental pressure immediately, resulting in a clear mind and freedom from the ill effects of mental pressure. The audience cleared their minds of pressure and took away a valuable tool for future use. Each of us possesses the capability to achieve this transformation. With the proper tools and releasing techniques and practices, we can develop a form of psychological strength that defeats pressure and keeps us in charge.
Each of us exhibits some mental self-pressuring; some experience it occasionally, whereas others feel it constantly. There are some fortunate people who seldom experience mental self-pressuring, and they are easy to spot because almost always they are calm or appear at peace. We often call on them during emergencies. In my experience, they represent less than 1 percent of people.
A Case Example
When people are crucial about the need for a certain outcome, their faulty thinking creates mental pressure. Jennie, a thirty-six-year-old woman who makes financial programs for organizations, offers an excellent illustration of this causative shift in thinking. When she and I were discussing how people create mental pressure, she observed that many of her work colleagues quickly become upset and frustrated during problem-solving meetings. "They limit themselves," Jennie observed, "by getting very crucial and making absolute statements such as, 'We'll never figure this out in time!' or 'It's impossible!' or 'We've got to have a solution or we'll lose our jobs!' At the same time, they stubbornly hold their positions rather than being fluid and arriving at a solution, a synthesis based on all the data gathered at the meeting. They are not even aware they are doing it."
The Real Cause of Mental Pressure
I have often wondered why we get so crucial, or "all driven up," as a tough, streetwise patient called mental pressure during therapy. When we create mental pressure, we're usually reacting to an important situation by changing from realistic probability thinking to absolute-necessity thinking. Realistic probability thinking says, "Let's see how I can do this," or "I'll do this, trying these steps," or "I'll do it if I'm able." When we shift to absolute-necessity thinking, it's "I must do this," or "I have to," or "It's do it or die." We depart from logic and probability, acting as if there is no other possibility than the one we must have. We fear losing or not obtaining our tightly held goals. We fear not succeeding, so we essentially ignore or squeeze out all other solutions. We believe that crucial, absolute-necessity thinking helps us reach our goals and overcome any doubt or reluctance we have. We believe, erroneously, that we must pressure ourselves to accomplish the goal.
The Subtle Shift in Thinking
When we set goals and go about accomplishing them, we begin to talk to ourselves differently. We depart from reality and change to the crucial, absolute-necessity thinking. We focus only on the accomplishment and mentally try to force the result we want. This shift in thinking is so subtle that most people are not aware of it or the fact that it creates mental self-pressuring. Even for someone who is aware of the problem, like Jennie in the example above, this departure from reality happens occasionally. Luckily, when we release or correct our thinking, the problem disappears.
Mental Pressure in High Achievers
More typical and common than Jennie are the high-achieving people who characteristically live day-to-day in the throes of mental self-pressure. Diane, a college graduate student, came to me about issues concerning her emerging adult professional and personal life. As she described the pros and cons and pondered the choices and decisions she faced, I noticed she took everything very seriously. Everything was "crucial," and if she made a decision, she felt it closed off all others—so it had better be right. She was convinced that if she made the wrong decisions, all was lost. How could she ever know what to do? She had to make the right decisions because everything depended on it.
With guidance, Diane gradually worked though the choices and decisions and moved on. She learned that by making everything so crucial, so terribly important and so life shattering, if she made the wrong decision, she severely limited her choices and hurt herself. She lived in a state of perpetual mental pressure, which she created. After first becoming aware of her thinking patterns, she was then able to remove the pressure by employing a releasing technique. As a result, she was refreshed, clear, and tranquil. With minimal assistance, Diane devised her own releasing technique to help eliminate the pressure. By the end of her therapy, every time she caught herself making things absolutely crucial, she used her releasing thought to return to clarity and freedom.
Compounding Mental Pressure
Marilyn fit the profile of the harried school teacher, mother, and single head of household who has too much to do. She was always busy and goal-oriented, and she listed all her tasks at the beginning of each day and started her self-talk about them. "I have to stop by the post office, mail the letters, process the mail, make my phone calls, and then stop at the store and pick up a few items for school projects. I have to hurry so that there's time to start the students' projects in the morning. Then I have to go to the faculty meeting, attend Missy's performance this afternoon, fix dinner, and still find time to exercise. I must get started now, or I'll never get it all done."
As you can probably guess, Marilyn was exhausted at the end of each day. Granted, she accomplished a great deal, but she wasted precious energy by constantly making things crucial and pressuring herself. In part, she had developed this style as a girl growing up on a ranch. "The animals died or crops failed if we didn't handle things immediately," she told me. In that kind of environment, immediate problem solving was crucial to success in many situations. However, that was not so in her current daily life.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from THE BOOK OF PSYCHOLOGICAL TRUTHSby R. Duncan Wallace Copyright © 2012 by R. Duncan Wallace, MD. Excerpted by permission of iUniverse, Inc.. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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