How To Keep People From Pushing Your Buttons

I have borrowed this book from the library and was so impressed by the ideas that I decided I need my own copy for reference. I found it very helpful and applicable to the most difficult situations in my life. I feel much calmer after reading it and using techniques it offers.

Albert Ellis is the famous originator of Rational Emotive Behaviour Therapy. This new approach to psychology aims to educate the client to: (1) analyze their emotional thoughts, (2) challenge these troublesome beliefs, and, (3) replace them with more rational ideas. This approach works well with lesser psychological conditions such as anxiety, anger, depression and neuroticism. This book is aimed specifically at fear/anxiety/worry. It has plenty of exercises you can work through to help you learn the approach. Ellis teaches that there are three ways that worriers thinking can go wrong: catastrophic thinking, absolutist thinking and rationalization. Next we learn about the "ten nutty beliefs that we use to let people and situations needlessly push our buttons." While I found this book interesting I began to rebel when I found that I had to learn ten false beliefs that can send me astray. To be fair Ellis does say that only the first four are the most common, but the whole thing had started to feel a bit like preparing to sit an exam. I felt that these ten specific beliefs could have been the subject of a separate book. Another possible criticism is that this book contains absolutely no reference to experiments to demonstrate that this approach works. If you are the type of person that needs evidence to prove an idea to you this may not be the book for you.

The premise of this book is that events or people don't make up you angry or upset, it's what you think about them that does. WIth this in mind, Ellis and Lange lay out a simple approach that you can use to keep on a more even keel. The essence is that you can challenge your own thinking, which often has at its root some sort of irrational belief in the way things should be. Then replace those beliefs with more rational ones. It is a non-manipulative, ethical approach. You can practice this technique on "small" problems and gain confidence that you will handle larger problems better.

This book is a self help book that helps the reader by going through various scenarios and cognitive therapy. It gives you the right way of doing things and the wrong way (it's very black and white). Check it out sometime.