Each person is a product of his or her heredity and environment. Each of us is born with a certain potential, and our ability to reach that potential is then either supported or not by the experiences that we encounter while growing up. Some of those experiences are positive and encourage us to reach our potential, and some are negative and discourage us from doing so. 

Each of our experiences is remembered at some level, some consciously and some unconsciously. Memories of positive experiences have one or more positive emotional feeling attached to them, while memories of negative emotional experiences have one or more negative emotional feeling attached to them. These negative emotional feelings fall into three main categories: sadness, anxiety or fear, and anger. 

Your positive, life-affirming experiences and your negative, unsupportive ones affect your view of yourself, of others, of the world in general, and even your relationship with God. That is, your experiences are likely to be accompanied by some kind of decision-making process, since it is as a result of your experiences that you decide what you are like, what others are like, and so on. 

Negative experiences – those that generate memories which have a negative emotional charge attached to them – are likely to have been accompanied by decisions that limit you in some way. So then we come to the crux of the matter (where the rubber hits the road, so to speak): 

If you always think the way you’ve always thought, You’ll always feel the way you’ve always felt; And if you always feel the way you’ve always felt, You’ll always do what you’ve always done; And if you always do what you’ve always done, You’ll always get what you’ve always got. If nothing changes, nothing changes. 

And that is okay if you are completely satisfied with the way things are going for you. If not, then it is time to let go of any negative emotions that may have become attached to the experiences you had in your past, and any limiting decisions as well, so that you can realize your fullest potential.  

This is not to say that all negative emotions begin with negative thinking. Not at all. There are actually two routes to follow to become distressed. Both of these routes to distress begin with some event, which is then followed by either physiological arousal or negative thinking. The first is the “conditioned emotional arousal” route, which works as follows: 

Event –> physiological arousal –> “negative” thinking –> distress (i.e., anxiety, anger or sadness ) 

The second route to distress, and the one which is much more common, is the primarily cognitive route, which works as follows: 

Event –> “negative” thinking –> physiological arousal –> distress 

Please note that in each case, for distress to occur, both physiological arousal and negative thinking must be present. This suggests two particular approaches to treatment. The first, Systematic Desensitization, targets the physiological arousal; the second, Rational Emotive Therapy (RET), targets the negative thinking. Let me give you a bit of background on them: 

In 1958, a psychiatrist by the name of Joseph Wolpe published a book entitled Psychotherapy by Reciprocal Inhibition in which he described a learning-based deconditioning procedure known as Systematic Desensitization. In essence, it involves teaching the client to relax and then, while relaxed, to approach the trigger stimulus (event) at a rate which is slow enough for the client to be able to maintain the relaxation. Assuming that the event is not currently harmful, this results in the eventual pairing of relaxation and the event, which teaches the body/mind that its proper response to that particular kind of trigger stimulus is relaxation rather than arousal. That is, the client learns at a gut level that there is no need to get “all cranked up” about that particular kind of event. Hence, no more distress! 

Shortly afterwards, Albert Ellis and Robert Harper published a book entitled A Guide to Rational Living in which they described a cognitively-based approach to treatment in which the client is taught to challenge his or her negative thinking on the grounds that it is erroneous or non-rational – based on such erroneous beliefs, for example, as the belief that it is necessary (as opposed to desirable) to be unfailingly perfect or the belief that it is necessary to be universally loved – since erroneous beliefs put the client in conflict with the laws of the universe and invariably contribute to his or her becoming distressed (“shooting oneself in the foot,” as it were). 

Albert Ellis (A New Guide to Rational Living, 1975) identifies a number of different “negative” thoughts that, because they put the individual in conflict with the laws of the universe, contribute to his or her distress. These thoughts – beliefs really – always include value judgements or evaluations of the way things are: 

1. I don’t get the love that I want to get, and I should get the love that I want. 

2. I am not perfect, and I must be perfect (or at least close enough to it that people can’t criticize me).

3. Certain people are bad and should be punished.

4. The world is not the way I want it to be, and it should be.

5. External events cause most human misery and must be controlled in order to create happiness and avoid sorrow.

6. The unknown is potentially dangerous, so it should be feared.

7. Taking responsibility for what happens is scary and should be avoided.

8. You can’t always know what is the right thing to do, so you should turn your life over to someone or something stronger than yourself (Kaufmann calls this “Decidophobia,” the fear of making fateful decisions).

9. The past determines the present, so I should not be held responsible for what I do with my life.

10. Leisure is more precious than any other activity and should be sought out whenever possible.

Such irrational beliefs inevitably lead to frustration, disappointment and distress; whereas challenging these irrational beliefs and substituting more realistic beliefs for them leads to harmony and contentment. 

(To be continued)