Dustin LindenSmith

I just wrote up a detailed overview of a book I recently read which rang some loud bells for me throughout. I tried to provide enough info in the overview that you don't actually have to read the book! But it's still totally worth reading if you're interested in the topic, because it's really well-written and contains a lot of fascinating stories in it.

http://lindensmith.com/2012/the-power-of-habit

Legit clinical psychs like vision_serpent probably wouldn't get much from this book, because it's really written for the layperson. But I thought it was very good.

I observed these terms discussed in a post and related comments by grammardog. These passages don't resonate with me personally, so much as they remind me of a close friend of ours (not grammardog) who suffers from depression and from these factors. She has created a lot of suffering in her life due to excessively high expectations of herself and others around her, and she exacerbates this suffering through her apparent lack of insight into it. I believe it's a bona fide mental illness, this. But I doubt it would help to share these passages with her.

I'm interested to know more about this Rational Emotive Behavioural Therapy, though. At first blush, it sounds a bit quacky, but after a careful reading, it makes a fair bit of sense to me. The treatment tenet of learning to accept things as they are is profound, and in a nutshell, would really resolve most human suffering of a psychological nature in one blow, I think. And what about this statement: ideas and feelings about self-worth are largely definitional and are not empirically confirmable or falsifiable. Like, wow! Imagine if we all really believed that one!

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http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Learned_helplessness

Learned helplessness is a psychological condition in which a human being or an animal has learned to believe that it is helpless in a particular situation. It has come to believe that it has no control over its situation and that whatever it does is futile. As a result, the human being or the animal will stay passive in the face of an unpleasant, harmful or damaging situation, even when it does actually have the power to change its circumstances. Learned helplessness theory is the view that depression results from a perceived lack of control over the events in one's life, which may result from prior exposure to (actually or apparently) uncontrollable negative events.

Learned helplessness is a well-established principle in psychology. It can be observed in the effect of inescapable punishment (such as electrical shock) on animal (and human) behaviour. Learned helplessness may also occur outside the laboratory, in everyday situations or environments in which people perceive (rightly or wrongly) that they have no control over what happens to them. Such environments may include repeated failures, dysfunctional childrearing, repeated mental, emotional and/or physical abuse, prison, school, war, disability, famine, and drought. A similar example is that of those concentration camp prisoners during the Holocaust who refused to care or fend for themselves (so-called Muselmänner). Present-day examples can be found in schools, mental institutions, orphanages, or long-term care facilities where the patients have failed or been stripped of agency for long enough to cause their feelings of inadequacy to persist.

Not all people become depressed as a result of being in a situation where they appear not to have control. In what learned-helplessness pioneer Martin Seligman called "explanatory style ," people in a state of learned helplessness view problems as personal, pervasive, or permanent. That is,

* Personal - They may see themselves as the problem; that is, they have internalized the problem.
* Pervasive - They may see the problem as affecting all aspects of life.
* Permanent - They may see the problem as unchangeable.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Explanatory_style

Explanatory style is a psychological attribute that indicates how people explain to themselves why they experience a particular event, either positive or negative. Psychologists have identified three components in explanatory style:

* Personal. People experiencing events may see themselves as the cause; that is, they have internalized the cause for the event. Example: "I always forget to make that turn" (internal) as opposed to "That turn can sure sneak up on you" (external).
* Permanent. People may see the situation as unchangeable, e.g., "I always lose my keys" or "I never forget a face".
* Pervasive. People may see the situation as affecting all aspects of life, e.g., "I can't do anything right" or "Everything I touch seems to turn to gold".

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cognitive_behavioural_therapy
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rational_Emotive_Behavior_Therapy

One of the main pillars of REBT is that irrational patterns of thinking, feeling and behaving are the cause of much, though hardly all, human disturbance. REBT teaches that when people turn flexible preferences, desires and wishes into grandiose absolutistic jehovian demands and commands, they disturb and upset themselves. Albert Ellis has suggested three core beliefs that humans disturb themselves through (Ellis, 2001):

* "I absolutely MUST, under practically all conditions and at all times, perform well (or outstandingly well) and win the approval (or complete love) of significant others. If I fail in these important—and sacred—respects, that is awful and I am a bad, incompetent, unworthy person, who will probably always fail and deserves to suffer." This belief usually contributes to feelings of anxiety, panic, depression, despair, and worthlessness.

* "Other people with whom I relate or associate, absolutely MUST, under practically all conditions and at all times, treat me nicely, considerately and fairly. Otherwise, it is terrible and they are rotten, bad, unworthy people who will always treat me badly and do not deserve a good life and should be severely punished for acting so abominably to me." This belief usually contributes to feelings of anger, rage, fury, and vindictiveness and lead to actions like fights, feuds, wars, genocide, and perhaps ultimately an atomic holocaust.

* "The conditions under which I live absolutely MUST, at practically all times, be favorable, safe, hassle-free, and quickly and easily enjoyable, and if they are not that way it's awful and horrible and I can't bear it. I can't ever enjoy myself at all. My life is impossible and hardly worth living." This beliefs usually contributes to frustration and discomfort, intolerance, self-pity, anger, depression, and to behaviors such as procrastination, avoidance, and inaction.

REBT teaches that:

* Unconditional self-acceptance, other-acceptance, life-acceptance are of prime importance in achieving mental wellness.
* People and the world are inherently fallible and people had better accept themselves, life's hassles, and unfairness and others "as is".
* People had better consider themselves valuable simply because they are alive and kicking, and are better off not measuring their entire self or their "being," or giving themselves any global rating, because all people are continually evolving and are therefore far too complex to rate, and all humans do both good and bad deeds and have both good and bad attributes and traits. REBT holds that ideas and feelings about self-worth are largely definitional and are not empirically confirmable or falsifiable (Ellis, 2003).