Letting Go of REBT’s Irrational Beliefs (iB’s) with The Work

REBT’s: See previous post

Should-ing beliefs
• I should be better.
• I should be different.
• I should be a better person.
Must-erbatory beliefs
• I must do things differently.
• I must be a better person.
• I must do a better job.
Awful-izing beliefs
• This is awful and I can’t stand it and it will get probably get worse.
Helpless core beliefs
• I am helpless.
• I am powerless.
• I am out of control.
• I am weak.
• I am vulnerable.
• I am needy.
• I am trapped.
• I am inadequate.
• I am ineffective.
• I am incompetent.
• I am a failure.
• I am disrespected.
• I am defective (i.e., I do not measure up to others).
• I am not good enough (in terms of achievement).
Unlovable core beliefs
• I am unlovable.
• I am unlikable.
• I am undesirable.
• I am unattractive.
• I am unwanted.
• I am uncared for.
• L am bad.
• I am unworthy.
• I am different.
• I am defective (i.e., so others will not love me).
• I am not good enough (to be loved by others).
• I am bound to be rejected.
• I am bound to be abandoned.
• I am bound to be alone. 

Use the following four questions and sub-questions (sub-questions only when appropriate) with the concept that you are investigating. When answering the questions, close your eyes, be still, and go deep as you contemplate.



1. Is it true?
• The answer is a “yes” or a “no” only.
• If your answer is “no,” continue to question #3.

2. Can you absolutely know that it’s true?

3. How do you react, what happens, when you believe that thought?
• What emotions happen when you believe that thought? (Depression, anxiety, etc.)
• Does that thought bring peace or stress into your life?
• What images do you see, past and future, when you believe that thought?
• What addictions/obsessions begin to manifest when you believe that thought? (Alcohol, credit
cards, food, the TV remote?)
• Describe the physical sensations that happen when you believe that thought.
• How do you treat that person and others when you believe that thought?
• How do you treat yourself when you believe that thought?

4. Who would you be without the thought?
Close your eyes and observe, contemplate. Who or what are you without that thought?

Finally: Turn the thought around.
Statements can be turned around to:
the self( I don’t ___ to me.),
to the other( I don’t ___ to them.),
and to the opposite. ( ___ does ___ to me.)

When dealing with an object, you can replace the object with “my thinking” or “my thoughts.”

Find a minimum of three genuine, specific examples of how each turnaround is as true as or truer than your original statement.

"I discovered that when I believed my thoughts, I suffered, but that when I didn't believe them, I didn't suffer, and that this is true for every human being. Freedom is as simple as that. I found that suffering is optional. I found a joy within me that has never disappeared, not for a single moment. That joy is in everyone, always."
— Byron Katie
http://www.thework.com/index.php

Still more Illusions

When all is well!

If you have been healed, whether of physical afflictions or mental disturbance or domestic in harmony or business perplexities, or worry, doubt, fear or anything, all is well.
One person gets his healing from a Christian Scientist.
Another gets his healing from a Psychologist and
someone else gets his healing from another mental practitioner,
but if you are healed,
there can be nothing but truth in that particular mental science which you have taken hold of
--for you!

REBT

Rational Emotive Behavioral Therapy, or REBT. Dr. Albert Ellis was originally trained as a psychoanalyst. However, in the 1950s, he began to develop a new type of therapy that he considered to be more "efficient" than psychoanalysis.
Using his REBT therapy, Ellis helped his clients to actively change self-critical thought patterns and self-defeating behaviors. He is often considered the "grandfather" of cognitive therapy, due to his pioneering work.
One of the most important approaches in REBT is the "A - B - C" model. According to this model, an Adversity (A) does not directly lead to emotional Consequences (C). Instead, there is an important middle-piece: our Beliefs (B). Either Rational (RB) or Irrational (IB).

Beliefs
1. Should-ing – I should be better, I should be different, I should be a better person .
2. Must-erbatory – I must do things differently, I must be a better person, I must do a better job.
3. Awful-izing – This is awful and I can’t stand it and it will get probably get worse.
 
Here are irrational beliefs that Albert Ellis described:
1. It is a dire necessity for adult humans to be loved or approved by virtually every significant other person in their community.
2. One absolutely must be competent, adequate and achieving in all important respects or else one is an inadequate, worthless person.
3. People absolutely must act considerately and fairly and they are damnable villains if they do not. They are their bad acts.
4. It is awful and terrible when things are not the way one would very much like them to be.
5. Emotional disturbance is mainly externally caused and people have little or no ability to increase or decrease their dysfunctional feelings and behaviors.
6. If something is or may be dangerous or fearsome, then one should be constantly and excessively concerned about it and should keep dwelling on the possibility of it occurring.
7. One cannot and must not face life's responsibilities and difficulties and it is easier to avoid them.
8. One must be quite dependent on others and need them and you cannot mainly run one's own life.
9. One's past history is an all-important determiner of one's present behavior and because something once strongly affected one's life, it should indefinitely have a similar effect.
10. Other people's disturbances are horrible and one must feel upset about them.
11. There is invariably a right, precise and perfect solution to human problems and it is awful if this perfect solution is not found.
The Goal, of course, is to replace the irrational, self defeating, beliefs with empowering , self accepting beliefs.

New Age has numerous Irrational Beliefs.
“I AM”/ Ascension / “Ascended Master Teachings” co-founded by Guy Ballard in the 1930’s. is one example.
He’d met an Ascended Master, St. Germaine, at Mount Shasta and became an emissary so to speak. Of course when Guy died and his body remained the Ascension was revised to levels or degrees, the highest level being Ascended Master status.
Borrowing heavily from Theosophy there are similarities and differences.
Theosophy had the “Masters of the Ancient Wisdom”. Who apparently wrote letters to C.W.Leadbetter.
Blavatsky claimed to have travelled the world ( Egypt, France, Canada (Quebec), England, South America, Germany, Mexico, India, Greece) and especially Tibet, where she studied for some years with the ascetics, to whom she referred as Brothers. Blavatsky was initiated for theosophical work while in Tibet.
Baird Thomas Spalding wrote “Life and Teaching of the Masters of the Far East” in 1924 about travels to India and Tibet contact with "the Great Masters of the Himalayas", immortal beings with whom they lived and studied. No proof was offered,
The source of the idea that there is a hidden sanctuary of ascended Lemurian masters under Mount Shasta came from “A Dweller on Two Planets or The Dividing of the Way” is a book written by Frederick S. Oliver printed in 1905. Other people believe or propagate the idea still.
Sister Thedra travelled to Lake Titicaca in Peru and was initiated into the “Abbey of the Seven Rays”. Actually, once there, she established the “Abbey of the Seven Rays” with other people. http://pvrguymale.blogspot.com/2011/07/dorothy-martin-sister-thedra.html
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guy_Ballard
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ascended_Master_Teachings
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baird_T._Spalding
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Dweller_on_Two_Planets
Numerology/Astrology/Horoscopes/Energy Vampires/Chakras/ Past Lives/2012?

ACT

Acceptance and commitment therapy is an empirically-based psychological intervention that uses acceptance and mindfulness strategies mixed in different ways with commitment and behavior-change strategies, to increase psychological flexibility.
ACT views the core of many problems to be due to the concepts represented in the acronym, FEAR:
• Fusion with your thoughts
• Evaluation of experience
• Avoidance of your experience
• Reason-giving for your behavior
And the healthy alternative is to ACT:
• Accept your reactions and be present
• Choose a valued direction
• Take action
ACT commonly employs six core principles to help clients develop psychological flexibility
1. Cognitive defusion: Learning to perceive thoughts, images, emotions, and memories as what they are, not what they appear to be.
2. Acceptance: Allowing them to come and go without struggling with them.
3. Contact with the present moment: Awareness of the here and now, experienced with openness, interest, and receptiveness.
4. Observing the self: Accessing a transcendent sense of self, a continuity of consciousness which is unchanging.
5. Values: Discovering what is most important to one's true self.
6. Committed action: Setting goals according to values and carrying them out responsibly.

CT

Cognitive Therapy was originally developed as a treatment for depression, and the emphasis was on shifting "distorted thinking" to "realistic thinking." As a support for this shift, Beck worked with his clients to identify thought distortions.

These included such things as:
Distorted Thoughts
Mind-reading: I’m sure they don’t like me.
Fortune Telling: The future wil be as bad as the past.
All-or-nothing thinking: If I don’t do a perfect job on this, I’m a failure.
Personalization: It’s my fault. I’m completely to blame.
Beliefs:
1. I’m a failure.
2. I’m worthless.
3. I’m hopeless.
Therapy focuses on replacing these core negative beliefs with positive and realistic beliefs.

MBCT

Mindfulness-Based Cognitive Therapy is designed to help people who suffer repeated bouts of depression and chronic unhappiness. It combines the ideas of cognitive therapy with meditative practices and attitudes based on the cultivation of mindfulness. The heart of this work lies in becoming acquainted with the modes of mind that often characterize mood disorders while simultaneously learning to develop a new relationship to them. MBCT was based on Jon Kabat-Zinn's Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction program. The aim of MBCT is not directly to relaxation or happiness in themselves, but rather, a "freedom from the tendency to get drawn into automatic reactions to thoughts, feelings, and events". MBCT prioritizes learning how to pay attention or concentrate with purpose, in each moment and most importantly, without judgment. Through mindfulness, clients can recognize that holding onto some of these feelings are ineffective and mentally destructive.

DBT

Dialectical Behavioral Therapy is a system of therapy to treat people with borderline personality disorder (BPD) . DBT combines standard cognitive-behavioral techniques for emotion regulation and reality-testing with concepts of distress tolerance, acceptance, and mindful awareness largely derived from Buddhist meditative practice.

Illusions II

Illusions

Stare at the middle and notice the change in one dot.

Ideo-motor reflex

The ideo-motor response (or "ideo-motor reflex"), often abbreviated to IMR, is a concept in hypnosis and psychological research. It is derived from the terms 'ideo' (idea, or mental representation) and 'motor' (muscular action). The phrase is most commonly used in reference to the process whereby a thought or mental image brings about a seemingly "reflexive" or automatic muscular reaction, often of minuscule degree, and potentially outside of the awareness of the subject.

The cognate term "ideo-dynamic response" (or "reflex") extends to the description of all bodily reactions caused in a similar manner by certain ideas, e.g., the salivation often caused by imagining sucking a lemon, which is a secretory response. Here, "ideo-dynamic" means "the power of an idea (over the body)". In the Victorian psychological terminology from which this concept derives, an "idea" may include any mental representation, e.g., a mental image or memory, etc.

The ideo-dynamic response became the original neuro-psychological theory of suggestion in hypnotism.

The term "ideo-motor reflex" or "ideo-motor response" was introduced in the 1840s by the eminent Victorian physiologist and psychologist William Benjamin Carpenter[1].
See http://goalhypnosis.blogspot.com/2011/03/adaptive-unconscious.html
Carpenter was a friend and collaborator of James Braid.


James Braid (1795 –1860) was a Scottish physician and surgeon, specializing in eye and muscular conditions, Braid was an important and influential pioneer of hypnotism and hypnotherapy. Braid adopted the term "hypnotism" as an abbreviation for "neuro-hypnotism" or nervous sleep (that is, sleep of the nerves), in his lectures of 1841-2, and it is from his influential work that others derived the term "hypnosis" in the 1880s. Braid is regarded by many as the first genuine "hypnotherapist" and the "Father of Modern Hypnotism".

In The Physiology of Fascination (1855), Braid wrote:
“In order that I may do full justice to two esteemed friends, I beg to state, in connection with this term monoideo-dynamics, that, several years ago, Dr. W. B. Carpenter[1] introduced the term ideo-motor to characterise the reflex or automatic muscular motions which arise merely from ideas associated with motion existing in the mind, without any conscious effort of volition. In 1853, in referring to this term, Dr. Noble[2] said, “Ideo-dynamic would probably constitute a phraseology more appropriate, as applicable to a wider range of phenomena.” In this opinion I quite concurred, because I was well aware that an idea could arrest as well as excite motion automatically, not only in the muscles of voluntary motion, but also as regards the condition of every other function of the body. I have, therefore, adopted the term monoideo-dynamics, as still more comprehensive and characteristic as regards the true mental relations which subsist during all dynamic changes which take place, in every other function of the body, as well as in the muscles of voluntary motion."
[1] The ideo-motor reflex. Diagram from Carpenter's The Principles of Mental Physiology (1874).
[2] Daniel Noble (1810 - 1885) was a Catholic physician. A friend of surgeon James Braid and physiologist William Benjamin Carpenter, he is distinguished for his contributions to the study of mental illness and epidemic diseases.

Be yourself. Everyone else is taken.

Some one mentioned hypnosis a while ago and seemed a little apprehensive. That’s not a good idea to do around a hypnotist so today I’ll talk a little bit about hypnosis.

Hypnosis is self hypnosis. It’s a relaxation state. You’re not forced, you don’t spill you guts and give out private information and you can’t be programmed to rob a bank. Unless you already do that. It’s also the power of suggestion working on the subconscious.

Stage hypnosis is different. People volunteer and they do what they’d do normally anyway.
I became interested in the 80‘s I had some pretty good tapes. Around that time NLP neuro linguistic programming was introduced. Developed by Bandler and Grinder it modeled the syntax of hypnosis methods of 3 hypnotherapists (Milton Erickson, Virginia Satir and Fritz Perls).

Milton Erickson could hypnotize someone with 2 words. “That’s right”. “That’s right”. He could also use hand gestures and body language to get someone under.

He didn’t necessarily use hypnosis. He sent one alcoholic to a nursery and told him to look at cactus plants for 3 hours. After 2 hours he got the message, went home and never drank again. A cactus plant can survive for days without water.

Hypnosis was first called mesmerism. And it was because of my interest in ancient history that I never watched the DVD the SECRET. Too hokey. But I did buy the book . The authors in the appendix intrigued me because I like to know the originator of something.

Of the 5 from the early 1900’s 3 were in it for the money. One Charles Hannel sold a course for $1500, that’s a first class ticket on the Titanic. Wallace Wattles may not have ever made any money. But two were legit. And they were part of the then self help movement called New Thought, Mental science or Mental Healing.

The father of that movement was Phineas P. Quimby . Inventor, clockmaker, daguerreotypist (the daguerreotype was the first commercially successful photographic process) and mesmerist.

In 1840 he saw a demonstration and decided to try it. It took 10 minutes to succeed , then he didn’t know to do next so he shook his friend out of it and bought a book. After that he found a 15 year old assistant who was a great subject and they toured New England doing demonstrations for 10 years.

From his work in mesmerism Quimby discovered the power of the mind, the power of suggestion and the power of one’ s belief system and the ego. This was all around 50 years before Freud.

Quimby had a great line , he said the “The more outrageous the notion the mind will go to extremes to prove it”.

He lived until 1865 healing 16000 people by changing their beliefs.

Thomas Troward warned of the misuse of power of suggestion in 1907, shop keepers were trained to prey on unsuspecting customers to sell what they didn’t really want and there were dubious ads with wild claims running in the newspapers.

Today we can ad the internet and infomercials to the list.

Quimby’s outrageous notion is still applicable today. The are groups that believe there’s a planetary alignment and the Mayan calendar running out in 2012 so the world will end. NASA hasn’t confirmed any alignment and the Mayan calendar starts a new cycle in 2012, the same as it does every 395 years.

Egypt has similar wild claims.

Power of Suggestion may also apply to theReconnection as the eyes flutter there in a similar manner to hypnosis. As Quimby said “The More Outrageous the notion the mind will go to extremes to prove it”.


One famous hoax was perpetuated before the American Spanish war by a newspaper man in Chicago. People still believe it today. Penn and Teller staged it years ago. Although a retraction was printed it went unnoticed and the legend still survives.

Quimby said there was nothing or no one that could affect you unless you let it.

Your own beliefs use the power of suggestion on you and no one else. You alone.

Your own beliefs, operating on your subconscious.

As Byron Katie has said: “Our concepts are based on a life time of uninvestigated beliefs”.

So change your mind and you change your life.

Be yourself.

Everyone else is taken.
From a speech I gave July 7th 2011

Denial, Denialism

Denial is a defense mechanism in which a person is faced with a fact that is too uncomfortable to accept and rejects it instead, insisting that it is not true despite what may be overwhelming evidence.

Denialism is choosing to deny reality as a way to avoid an uncomfortable truth: "It is the refusal to accept an empirically verifiable reality. It is an essentially irrational action that withholds validation of a historical experience or event".

see http://pvrguymale.blogspot.com/2011/07/leon-festinger-1919-1989-was-american.html