Robert Harper

Your present behavior largely stems from your thinking. So by determined rethinking and practice, you can regulate and control your activities of today—and also prepare for an improved future.

Can we really change such well-practiced mental attitudes? Definitely. Will it be easy? No—but those who diligently work with the cognitive, emotive, and behavioral “tools” of REBT have an excellent chance of success.

Difficult, however, does not mean impossible.

We achieve few outstanding gratifications without risk taking.

Sensible thinking, we contend, usually leads to healthy emoting.

Most people spend so much time and energy trying to do the impossible—namely, to change and control the actions of others—that they wrongly believe that they cannot achieve a quite possible goal—to change their *own* thoughts and acts.

Positive thinking... allows you to create rational coping self-statements and images that aid your goals and enhance your life. However, it is limited, and sometimes even dangerous, b/c you can easily use it unrealistically and polyannaishly. Thus, you can positively tell yourself, “I can accomplish anything I want!” But, of course you can’t. You can enthusiastically think, “Everything will happen for the best.” But, alas, it won’t. Positive thinking, moreover, often covers up and doesn’t really remove your underlying negative thinking.

Insisting that things *ought* to go smoothly, that mishap *must* not occur, and that the important people in our lives *should* behave as we have told them so many times we *need* them to behave... is fundamentally irrational. Yet, as a species, we naturally tend to think in these distorted and self-defeating ways.

Moreover, where frustration, sorrow, and unhappiness are frequently healthy feelings—assuming that you greatly desire something and are deprived of it—depression, despair, shame, and self-downing are practically never healthy and had best be minimized.

Emotional disturbance often consists of taking a healthy *wish* for approval and turning it into an unhealthy *demand.* Then refusing to do much to win it.