Monday 11 January 2010

Integrating Freud, Ellis and Berne's Therapies

Hi,
I have now updated the Happiness Blog with a new piece on my process of integrating the mind models of Sigmund Freud, Albert Ellis and Eric Berne. Here's how that blog begins:

Reviewing REBT, Positive Psychology and Sigmund Freud

The great strength of Rational Emotive Behaviour Therapy (REBT) is that it teaches a philosophy of life. In a nutshell, this is it:

"If you will just give up ‘awfulizing', ‘demandingness', ‘low frustration tolerance', and ‘condemning and damning yourself, others and the world', then your life will become calmer and happier".

Let us now look at what is involved in implementing such a philosophy in your own life.

To give up awfulizing you have to develop a way of accurately rating the degree of badness of those noxious events and situations by which you are beset. The best system for this kind of accurate rating, that I have seen, is that developed by Dr Tom Miller. In Self Discipline and Emotional Control (which is available online as an audio or video programme), he developed something called The Johnny Carson Scale which helps us to put a realistic, numerical degree of badness on any adversity with which we are faced. By becoming more realistic, be also become less disturbed.

To give up demandingness is a more complex problem. In moderate forms of REBT, giving up demandingness means giving up extreme forms of demands, such as: "I must be loved and approved by all significant others, all of the time, and if I'm not, then this is awful, and I am no good". This is clearly illogical, and for this reason we say it is irrational. In extreme forms of REBT, on the other hand, all forms of usage of the words "should", "must", "have to", "ought to", "got to", "need to" are outlawed, proscribed and prohibited to ourselves - except for their use to describe "reality". For example, I would be able to say: "My life should be the way it is, because it is!" Unfortunately, this means we cannot make any moral prescriptions, or realistic demands upon ourselves, others and the world. (Although Tom Miller is very good on teaching how to get rid of awfulizing, he is an extremist when it comes to eliminating demandingness!) My own view is this: We should give up all unrealistic and unreasonable demands on ourselves, others and the world; but keep our moral prescriptions and our reasonable demands about our own behaviour, the behaviour of others, and the nature of the social world. (To learn my form of giving up demandingness, see in particular my pamphlet: Overcoming Fear and Anxiety).

Continued here: http://www.abc-counselling.com/id143.html

Hope you enjoy this post.
Best wishes,,

Jim
Dr Jim Byrne
Email Address
Happiness Blog
ABC Coaching and Counselling Services

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