According to cognitive or rational therapy, we suffer from emotional disorders mainly due to the irrational assessments we make of ourselves, others and the world. These assessments are absolutist demands, obligations, right? and I “should. “
When we push ourselves, we tend to think: Should I get it right? You must be a perfect mother, a perfect husband, an exemplary employee! You must be thin! When we demand people, we think: this should not happen! The world should be different! It’s unfair that this happens to me! And when we ask others, our thoughts are like: everyone should treat me well, like I do them! My husband should have found out what is wrong with me! My friends should communicate better with them! me!
- By demanding ourselves in an unrealistic or absolutistic way.
- We generate feelings of anxiety.
- Depression or guilt.
- Because we are very anxious to meet the expectations that we define as obligation.
- Which will eventually stress and block us.
So when you don’t meet these expectations, you feel losing, useless and failed, which doesn’t help solve the problem and ends up blocking the person even more.
Perfectionism is largely responsible for this type of absolutism, perfectionists demand themselves at a difficult level to achieve and generally postpone what they have to do for fear of not doing a certain task perfectly, because they will never get to the perfect path, because nothing can be perfect, in the end they stop doing it, “do they confirm?that’s why his ideas of ‘I’m not useful’, ‘I’m a failure’.
On the other hand, when we demand that the world move in the direction we want, feelings of victimism and depression arise, when things do not go as we would like, we suffer what is called a low tolerance to frustration, which is the tendency to exaggerate the unbearable of a situation, calling it terrible and catastrophic.
People who are not tolerant of frustration think that if their living conditions are not what they want, they can never be happy and doomed to a horrible, sad and unbearable life.
Finally, if we do not accept that others have the right to act freely in any way they wish, even if their actions make us suffer or we do not like them, and demand that they be as we wish, we will develop feelings of anger and passive or violent aggression, which will only aggravate our relations with others and have the opposite effect.
If we are aggressive to others because they do not act the way we want, in the end, all we can do is bitter ourselves without being able to exert any control over how others act, or even aggravate our relationship with them.
Stop demanding. And you have to ask yourself: isn’t that compliance ?, no, it’s normal that we have desires, that we want to achieve goals, that we fight because things don’t go well, that we prefer that others always treat us well, etc. .
But it’s one thing to prefer or want and another to demand. Neurosis is in demand, no long as we demand, things will never be the way we’d like them to be. The world doesn’t work that way.
Therefore, accept this reality and stop demanding yourself, the world, and others. He thinks, “I prefer to be thinner, but I’m not, but I have many other qualities and things to offer others,” “I as my husband to remember our birthday, but he’s human and he also fails. Besides, do you have many other qualities?, “I would like to find a job in my field of study, but if I can’t, I can also be happy in another type of work.
You’ll never have full control. By accepting this, you will be freed from the emotional disorders that duties, obligations, and pressures could cause you. Paradoxically, your life will work much better.