I got a beautiful day, thanks to a friend who’s also a psychologist, the book?The art of not bittering about life? From Rafael Santandreu, he lent it to me and said, “Read this book, you will learn a lot, I improved my therapies thanks to him and I also grew up as a person.
I started reading it with enthusiasm and many expectations, and I certainly wasn’t disappointed. In fact, I was impressed. I quickly realized that I supported the rational-emotional therapy of the famous psychotherapist Albert Ellis, a therapy I’ve felt identified with since I discovered authors like Ellis or Auger himself, but even more radical and profound. It was the face cake I needed at the time and made me open my eyes to many aspects of my life.
- ? The art of not bitterness is not the typical self-help book that introduces you to what you want or need to read to feel good at that particular time.
It is a book whose main objective is to strengthen us emotionally, it is to clean the dirt of your glasses, lenses that are so dirty that they distort authentic reality, creating a subjective reality based on the irrational beliefs of the person himself and causing a great emotional discomfort. .
When we talk about irrational beliefs, psychologists refer to the subjective affirmations, assessments, truths, and assessments we have built since childhood, about ourselves, others, and the world.
Thus we interpret what is happening to us, if the glasses are clean we will have rational beliefs, based on reason and reality, that will be accompanied by healthy emotions.
If we leave them dirty, we will feed irrational, false beliefs that do not correspond to reality, that do not help us achieve our goals and that cause great suffering in the person, yet for those who have them, become absolute and indisputable truths, and that is when emotional problems arise.
The book teaches us, as Ep-cteto has already said, that it is not the situations that provoke our emotional suffering, but ourselves, with our irrational beliefs and our internal dialogue.
We tend to think that there is a direct relationship between situation and emotion, but if that were the case, everyone would react in the same way to the same situations, and we can show that this is not true, so the equation is more complex than what we think.
There is an intermediate ingredient that is beliefs and thoughts. That’s good news! If I believe in my thoughts with my thoughts, I also have the power to feel good about myself!It’s up to me!
In the book, we can discover that some of these beliefs are requests for ourselves, for others, and for the world, needs that no one really needs, and concerns about things that have never happened and may not happen.
When we think we need what we don’t need to survive, like the approval of others, success, a couple who love us, the work of our dreams, we will create a lot of anxiety, if we never manage to have these things, we will feel losing them, but if we have them we will always be afflicted by the possibility of losing them, so we do not take advantage of them either.
We don’t realize that all we really need is food and drink, and that if this is resolved we can already enjoy life a lot, the rest of the needs are a trap, things that we think we need, but that are a lie.
When are we sick Terribilitis? We tend to call everything that happens to us as terrible, unbearable, catastrophic, as dramatic as can happen. Is it automatically classified as?Terrible? Without meditating on a process of reasoning, we will naturally provoke emotions according to this way of coping with reality: anxiety and depression.
By using reason, we can realize that some of our thoughts and beliefs are false and unreal, and that we are hurting ourselves by “believing with conviction” in something that is not true. If we use logic well, we can see how our emotions calm down.
The first step will be to identify what’s going through your head Why do you think you feel so bad?Who needs your mother’s approval?If you don’t have a partner anymore, life won’t make sense?
Once your irrational beliefs have been identified, you must combat them, combat them through questioning and confrontation. To do this, you’ll need to prove that these ideas are unreal. Some of the questions in the book are:
Are there other happy people in the same situation? (Or worse)
? Even with this adversity, could you achieve goals that are interesting to me and others?
? In an infinite universe of planets and stars that are born and die all the time, is there something really dramatic?Is it really terrible?
The more arguments we find, the easier it is to establish a rational belief and delve into it until it becomes our own.
Gradually they will even become your new saving philosophy, remember that negative emotions do not disappear completely, since this is neither possible nor recommended, since all emotions have an important role in survival.
What will disappear will be inappropriate, exaggerated and meaningless emotions. You can get out of the prison from the unrest. You already have the key, freedom and happiness are guaranteed.