Nearly everything in this book flows from a single, simple fact: the way you feel, emotionally, arises from the way you think. Your feelings come from your thinking. For most people, this truth is usually overlooked or denied. Here are some typical statements from my clients:
- "I’m furious ’cause my eight-year-old didn’t get to bed last night until 1 A.M."
- "I’m awfully afraid Jim won’t show up for this appointment" (spoken by Jim’s wife while waiting for her husband in my office).
- "One impossible deadline after another. No wonder I’m so stressed out when I get home from work."
- "I’ve just discovered that my husband and my best friend have been carrying on for three weeks while lying to my face" (spoken by a wife, to explain her feelings of terrible injury and jealousy).
- "My husband never talks to me: I’m so depressed."
- "I was raised by two alcoholic parents. No wonder I’m an alcoholic."
All these statements suggest that when something happens to you, when some event occurs in your life, that happening or event is sufficient to explain how you feel about it.
What these people are really saying is that exposure to a keenly obnoxious, disagreeable Activating event (we’ll call this event "A") directly causes the emotional
Consequence (call this "C"). These clients-along with most people-are expressing their view that there is a direct link between A and C, the unpleasant situation and their upset feeling.
Your Thoughts and Your Feelings
This is a very popular theory, but it’s a false theory. Events do not directly affect our psyches the way a needle in the arm causes pain (even then the pain has to go through our brain before we can feel it).
To get a glimpse of the correct theory, imagine that you are about to enter a room where someone awaits you. Your emotions will be related to your preconceptions, your thoughts or Beliefs (which we’ll refer to as "B").
If you expect a violent criminal, you may very well feel afraid. If instead you anticipate that it’s your young child who has been missing for days, you’re likely to feel greatly relieved and overjoyed.
However, your beliefs, expectations, and anticipations-your B’s-are things that you generate and control. And it’s B that creates C: beliefs create emotions. A or the Activating event alone does not create emotions.
Suppose a hundred airplane passengers are unexpectedly given parachutes and instructed to jump from the plane (A). If a physical situation alone could cause emotions-if A could directly cause C-then all the hundred people would feel the same way. But obviously those who regard skydiving positively (B) are going to have a C very different from the others.
The fact that feelings come from thinking was known to the ancient Greek Stoics and to many Buddhist teachers. It has more recently been rediscovered by Albert Ellis and other psychologists and has been tested in practice by thousands of therapists.
Unfortunately, there are still many therapists and counselors who are either unaware of this fact or who continually deny it. It’s not surprising that most ordinary people also deny it.
Your Childhood is Irrelevant to Your Present Problems
Everyone knows that individuals respond very differently to similar events. Jane dreads her upcoming examination so intensely that she can’t sleep the night before, and walks into the examination hall shaking with terror. Her friend Barbara, who’s taking the same test, remains quite unruffled.
Clearly, a person’s response to events is not entirely explained by the events themselves, but owes something to the person. However, instead of looking at that person’s conscious beliefs, for example Jane’s beliefs about the test, therapists often try to explain the person’s feelings and actions through their "unconscious" minds.
Sigmund Freud developed this way of explaining human behavior early in the twentieth century, a method popularized by many Hollywood movies from the 1930s on. Freud believed that our feelings and actions are caused by "unconscious" impulses-things that are in our minds but that we don’t know about. Our minds are filled with dark, disguised forces of which we’re normally quite unaware. How did these mysterious forces get there? They allegedly originated in our childhood experiences.
Jane’s fear of the test might be explained by incidents in her early childhood. Freud believed that the way to cure Jane is to uncover the buried memories of those incidents, have Jane relive those incidents, and show how they cause Jane’s present anxiety about tests.
This excavation of Jane’s "unconscious mind" can be a long and expensive process. The therapist encourages the patient to reconstruct some childhood incident, and to accept the therapist’s theory about how this is related to the patient’s current problems.
This approach to solving people’s problems has become very well-known, and many people expect therapists to be interested in the details of their childhood. But there’s actually not a scrap of solid evidence that memories of childhood agonies have much to do with a person’s continuing emotional difficulties, nor that uncovering those agonies will do anything to help the person now. Even where a person’s current problems really are related to a past unpleasant experience, it’s the person’s present thinking about that experience that does the damage, not the experience itself.
The theory that our feelings and behavior are governed by "unconscious" forces is not only unsubstantiated--it could be harmful. If people with problems believe this theory, they could become demoralized. The theory suggests to people with emotional problems that they are the puppets of dark forces they cannot control or even recognize. Instead of encouraging clients to feel that they are responsible for their problems and that they can do something about them right away, the theory suggests that the individual is helpless, even possessed. The individual is, in effect, encouraged to give up the struggle to be rational and effective.
"Shoulds" and "Musts"
Your feelings come from your thinking. This doesn’t mean that if you tell yourself
everything is fine and you have no problems, then you will feel fine and your problems will disappear. The Three Minute Therapy method does not recommend "thinking positively," telling yourself to cheer up, or fondly dwelling on comfortable images that everything is wonderful.
The advice glibly offered to emotional sufferers-"Worrying doesn’t do any good, so why worry?"-is usually of little help because the anxious person doesn’t know how to stop worrying. Such a person has a definite system of beliefs, which has become a fixed dogma, and which automatically generates distress. Without attacking and changing that system of beliefs, there will probably be little progress in reducing anxiety. But the sufferer doesn’t think much about the system of beliefs, doesn’t consider that the beliefs might be questionable, and doesn’t notice how the beliefs lead to counterproductive and self-destructive behavior.
To start on the path to healthy thought patterns, it’s first necessary to identify the sufferer’s system of beliefs. This isn’t a lengthy process of excavating "unconscious" memories. Usually a few minutes of asking simple questions will elicit a person’s faulty thinking. If someone asks you whether you have a belief about the persistence of physical objects, you will probably be puzzled and hesitate to give a definite reply, or you may even reply in the negative. However, you don’t pay much attention to the possibility that the chair you are sitting on will suddenly vanish, causing you to painfully bruise your buttocks on the floor. In this sense, you do indeed subscribe to a belief in the persistence of physical objects, and this belief determines your behavior. In this case, of course, the belief is broadly true.
In the same way, the beliefs responsible for emotional problems are deeply-rooted, unconsidered assumptions. And these beliefs are false. Fortunately, when we wish to identify these beliefs, we start with an advantage. We already have a good idea, on the basis of the theories of Albert Ellis, and the experience of thousands of therapists employing his method, of the mistaken beliefs many people hold.
Such beliefs show a common pattern. They take the form of demands-"musts" or "shoulds." For instance, a person faced with a public speaking assignment may believe that he MUST not look foolish in public, and that to do so would be TERRIBLE. While it’s reasonable not to want to look foolish in public, it’s harmful to demand that this be guaranteed not to occur. Thus, the first step in curing public speaking anxiety is to accept, fully and without reservation, that nothing can possibly give you an iron-clad guarantee that you will not look foolish in public. You may possibly look foolish in public-to do so would be unfortunate, but not terrible.
The beliefs that give people emotional problems are evaluative beliefs. Virtually all emotion comes from evaluative thinking. Thus, if you just make a simple observation you will not feel emotion.
Let’s consider a statement such as "Jake admires me." That’s an assertion of fact only. By itself it does not spawn feelings. But if you add an evaluation, then you produce an emotion. For example: "I like Jake admiring me." "I love Jake admiring me." "I dislike Jake admiring me." "I loathe Jake admiring me."
The strength of any "like" exists on a scale from 0 percent to 99.9 percent. (You can never prefer something at the 100 percent level because no matter how strongly you desire it, theoretically you could always yearn for it even more.)
If you prefer to be admired by Jake only slightly (at the 10 percent level, say) you will feel mildly pleased that he’s admiring you and mildly displeased should he despise you. If, on the other hand, you prefer it at the 90 percent level, you will feel rather great when Jake admires you and greatly disappointed if he doesn’t. Thus preferences create emotions. Since the preferences are based on a scale from 0 percent to 99.9 percent, appropriate or reasonable emotions come from preferences.
On the other hand inappropriate or unreasonable emotions come from demands rather than preferences. What we call "demands" consist of magical, absolutistic, moralistic notions, and take the form of "musts" and "shoulds." For example: "Jake absolutely MUST admire me and it would be awful if he doesn’t!"
"Musts" and "shoulds" lead to dysfunctional emotions-emotions that eat away at you, such as anger, anxiety, depression, guilt, and self-pity. Demandingness also leads to self-defeating behaviors such as procrastination, violence, and addictions, including alcoholism, substance abuse, overeating, gambling, and compulsive shopping.
The key to the Three Minute Therapy method is that it’s perfectly rational and generally helpful to have preferences, especially quite strong preferences, but it’s irrational and harmful to turn these preferences into demands or "musts." The majority of emotional problems arise because individuals believe that something or other MUST be, or not be. For example: "I MUST do well at school" (instead of "I PREFER to do well at school"); "I MUST not feel anxious" (instead of "It’s UNFORTUNATE that I sometimes feel anxious"); or "My spouse MUST not behave coldly toward me" (instead of "I find it UNPLEASANT when my spouse behaves coldly toward me").
Allied with the judgment that something must (or must not) happen is the judgment that when it doesn’t (or does) happen, this is awful, terrible, horrible, shameful, or unbearable. In many different ways, we will show how these judgments lead to personal difficulties. Thinking in terms of "musts" is the essence of unrealistic, irrational thinking, as well as self-defeating behavior.
There are three kinds of "musts" or irrational demands. We will meet each one of these many times in the following chapters:
- "Must" #1, demands on oneself
- "Must" #2, demands on other people
- "Must" #3, demands on the situation (or on the Universe)
Many therapists try to persuade their clients to adopt only realistic goals and to give up unrealistic goals. But even unrealistic goals may be harmless, or perhaps beneficial, as long as they are viewed simply as preferences and not as demands.
Suppose you have an unrealistic goal, such as becoming the richest person alive. And you think, "I keenly PREFER to be the richest, and it’s unfortunate that I’m not." And you want that at the 90 percent level-very, very much.
Most therapies would say: "Holding that kind of unrealistic goal will cause you emotional problems. Think more realistically. Don’t compare yourself to others and just aim to do your best. Then you won’t feel so pressured." But such advice is wrong and could be harmful.
It’s wrong, because since you only have a preference, not a "must," you will not feel disturbed about not being the richest person alive. It could be harmful advice since high, lofty goals, no matter how unattainable-if viewed as preferences, not demands-motivate and add passion, challenge, and involvement to life. Great wonders have been accomplished by individuals striving for the impossible, and such striving doesn’t necessarily make those individuals unhappy.
In writing this book, our serious ambition was to have a national best-seller. Although the chances of this are small, such an unrealistic aspiration has helped keep us absorbed and engaged in our writing in a concerted, goal-directed way.
Disputing "Shoulds" and "Musts"
Merely pointing out to sufferers that their "musty," demanding thinking is
responsible for their emotional problems will rarely dispel those problems, even if the sufferers agree. They will probably still fall into their old demanding thought patterns-unless they take a further step.
The most effective technique is for the sufferer to identify the specific "must" or irrational demand, which causes her problem, and then to actively dispute that "must." The person could write out an exercise each day in which the "musts" are listed and the reasons stated why they are groundless. Often, examination of a person’s habitual judgments reveals that they are unwarranted demands, and looking closely at these judgments is all that it takes for the sufferer to see this. But sometimes it’s necessary to argue persuasively with the sufferer.
This brings us to another distinctive feature of Three Minute Therapy. It involves arguing or debating. As a therapist, I debate with my clients, appealing to their reason to get them to look at their situation differently. Anyone using this book had better be prepared to debate with themselves. Many therapists refuse to argue or debate with clients, not recognizing that the client’s own intelligent mind can play an active role in the cure.
It’s important to dispute your "musts" actively. Anyone who has tried to grasp or memorize material in a hurry (such as a student before an exam), knows that merely reading through the material is not very effective. It’s better to be actively engaged, for example by writing out the material. Then it’s more likely to sink in.
Three Minute Exercises
Throughout this book we will be giving Three Minute Exercises which follow an ABCDEF format. Let’s see how these exercises work. Suppose you feel angry that Jake doesn’t admire you:
- A. (Activating event): Jake doesn’t admire me.
- B. (irrational Belief): Jake MUST admire me.
- C. (emotional Consequences): Anger.
As we have seen, it’s the "must" that’s making you angry, not just the lack of Jake’s admiration. If instead of a "must" you had a preference, you would feel sensibly sorry and displeased, not foolishly angry and infuriated. Thus the question becomes: "How do you eliminate the ‘must’ and thereby eradicate your anger?"
Answer: Proceed to "D." We set up a hypothesis, then look at the evidence for and against that hypothesis. By using the scientific method, we’re merely employing a more systematic form of the commonsense method of trial and error. We do this as young children, who are always making guesses about the world-forming hypotheses-then modifying or abandoning these guesses as they get more information.
"D" consists of Disputing or questioning your "must," and involves asking "Why?" or "What’s the evidence for my MUST?" Or in our example, "Why MUST Jake admire me?"
The correct response often comes as a surprise. There’s no evidence for this MUST, or for any MUST. No reason exists that Jake MUST do other than he does, however desirable I might find it if he did. So now you have moved to:
- E. (Effective new thinking): I prefer that Jake admire me, but I can survive quite well if he doesn’t.
It’s true that you find it unpleasant that Jake doesn’t admire you, that you would like it better if he did admire you, and perhaps even that it’s wrong of him not to admire you. But the universe is not so constructed that people always do what’s right or what other people would prefer them to do. Therefore it’s unrealistic to expect that this be bound to occur, and unreasonable to demand that it MUST occur.
Furthermore, when people demand that something MUST occur, they tend to think that something terrible happens when it doesn’t occur, that this is intolerable or the end of the universe. They express this with words like "awful," "horrible," "appalling," or "dreadful." But the plain truth is that, although you don’t like that Jake doesn’t admire you, you can survive quite well without Jake’s admiring you.
Having replaced your "B" (your irrational demand that Jake MUST admire you) with "E" (your reasonable preference that Jake admire you) you will then begin to experience:
- F. (new Feeling): regret or disappointment, but no anger.
Practice, Repetition, Reinforcement
A common way to begin learning to swim is to first rehearse the correct strokes on land. That’s a useful useful preparation, but you will never become a competent swimmer by that method alone; you’ll just thrash about awkwardly in the water. When the correct habits have become ingrained, after much practice on land and in the water, then you can call yourself a swimmer.
It’s the same when learning a language-Italian, for instance. At first you speak Italian mechanically and haltingly. You don’t expect to speak fluent Italian after one lesson. You keep practicing and increasing your skill-programming your brain and body with the correct habits. After you become thoroughly familiar with Italian, you feel it and live it. Italian becomes "second nature" to you.
The stages you go through in order to think straight and feel good are comparable to the stages of learning swimming or Italian. At first you make an effort to perceive that your "musts" are irrational, illogical, and self-defeating. Later you will deeply believe and feel this to be true.
The way to improve is simple and clear-cut but not easy: practice, practice, practice. Continuous and meaningful practice is required. More is better.
As with swimming or Italian, once you’ve acquired the skill and really feel it and believe it, you’re not finished with the discipline. You’re sure to get rusty and experience setbacks if you don’t continue your reinforcement.
Compare this with brushing your teeth. Suppose you brush and floss your teeth conscientiously twice a day for a year and then visit the dentist and she exclaims: "No cavities!"
Do you abandon brushing your teeth? Clearly not. You know full well that if you do, the plaque and bacteria will slowly creep back in and start their dirty work. That’s because humans naturally and effortlessly manufacture plaque and bacteria as a never-ending process.
It’s the same with your "musts." As a human, you’re a "must"- and "should"-creating animal. You find it easy to take those preferences that rate as important to you and make "musts" out of them. It’s in your genes as well as in your upbringing. You don’t have to be taught either to build plaque or to invent "musts." True, you can make the plaque build-up worse by eating junk food, and you can make the "must" build-up worse by practicing and reinforcing your "musty" thoughts. On the other hand, you can halt and reverse the build-up of plaque or "musts" by brushing and flossing, or disputing and questioning, regularly.
Similarly, your facility in speaking English would start deteriorating should you move to Italy and speak Italian exclusively. Even with your native tongue, a lack of practice will make you rusty. If you don’t wish to get rusty, keep practicing.
If you just read this book through and nod your head in agreement, you may find it entertaining, and it will probably give you some slight help. But that is not applying the method of Three Minute Therapy. The big returns will come only from applying the exercises to your own problems, such as writing out the exercises, and perhaps then reading them into a tape-recorder and playing the tape back frequently.
When you learn the basics of Three Minute Therapy, it may not immediately translate into feeling and acting significantly better. But as you conscientiously practice, you’ll progress to a higher level of skill and the rewards will come. Three Minute Therapy will then become a tool for you to quickly think yourself out of emotional pain and turmoil.
People often come to therapy believing that they can be finally and permanently "cured," with no further work required on their part. For most, this is not realistic. People are naturally inclined to irrational, demanding thinking, and it’s advisable to combat this inclination by performing the exercises indefinitely, just as it is advisable to keep on brushing your teeth. Once the basic understanding has been gained, future analysis and correction of faulty thinking will usually require no more than three minutes as the occasion arises.