Psychological Solutions

This site has three purposes! First,this site will help you work through our program to beat an addiction of any kind. The program can be found in our book, "Beat Your Addiction". Second, we will share our ideas on issues other than addiction. Third, we will answer questions you may have about psychological issues, and offer psychotherapy privately to those who desire it from us.

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We are both Clinical Psychologists, each with over 35 years of experience.

Saturday, December 10, 2005

ABCDE Example

Check out Rational-Emotive Behavior Therapy [REBT], below, see Chapter 8 in "Beat Your Addiction," or snoop around the Albert Ellis Institute website before reading this example.

This is an example of how to use REBT to help overcome dysfunctional anger.

Anger, by the way, can be addictive: not because it is pleasurable in itself, but because it can be substituted for even more subjectively painful emotions such as feelings of guilt, shame, hurt, or inferiority, among others. This kind of addiction is due to a process psychologists call negative reiforcement or removal of a punishment instead of provision of a reward.

Suppose, for this example, that the Activating Event, A, is your boss telling you that you're incompetent and need to straighten out your act. Then, your Belief about this event, B, might be something like this, at first: "I'm no good! What a worthless person I am. I should be better, but I can't. I'm hopeless." Now you don't like that series of ideas at all, so you quickly cover it up with a new B such as, "He has no right to say such horrible things to me, that ignorant bastard! I ought to bash in his worthless skull."

Now the Consequence, C, of thinking B about A is likely making you feel hurt and ashamed, or even depressed at first but quickly switch to feeling intense anger or rage which, relatively speaking, is likely to be a relief compared to the other feelings. After using your negative feelings as motivation to examine your thinking about A and recognizing your irrational thoughts and beliefs at B, the next step in applying REBT in order to feel better (that is, less negatively rather than good) is to question and challenge these thoughts and beliefs, forcefully and emotively! This step is called the Dispute, or D.

A sample Dispute of the irrational thinking could be something like, "Why doesn't he have a right to have and express his thoughts, no matter how wrong, exaggerated, or nuttily hostile they are? The fact that he is ignorant of how difficult this job is or how hard I work doesn't make him a bastard worthy of being bashed in the head, nor does it exempt him from his right to have and express wrong, stupid views. Neither does his saying those things make them true! I am not worthless or no good no matter what he says and no matter how many mistakes I make. I have a right to be imperfect, just as he does. And just because I may make some mistakes doesn't prove that I can't improve. I don't "need" to straighten out my act but it wouldn't hurt me if I did improve my performance. Even if I were incompetent at this job it still wouldn't be the end of the world because I'm not totally incompetent: there are other things I can do."

Then, when D is done extensively and vigorously enough for you at least to start accepting what you are telling yourself as your Dispute of the irrational Bs, you will experience a shift of feelings, called E, the Effect of the new thinking due to D. The greater your acceptance of the more realistic ideas you tell yourself during your Dispute of B, the more your feelings change. Your new feelings, in this case, might be sense of determination to improve your performance, and a sense of resigned acceptance if that doesn't work out for whatever reason. In addition, the intensity of your anger will probably have mellowed off to mere irritation over the poor managerial skills of your boss.

For those addicted to anger, revenge, and/or punishment, repeated challenging of the underlying irrational thought patterns, as in this example, will eventually result in more self acceptance and acceptance of others' poor behavior, as well as a reduction of reliance on defensive hostility as a means of coping.

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