Most Helpful Customer Reviews
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188 of 190 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
The Classic: Practical and Powerful, September 6, 2001
Albert Ellis is the grand-daddy of modern psychology, and this book is the classic. While many psychologists and authors focus on one or several "pet techniques," Ellis and this book show you how to adapt an integrated set of rational (cognitive), emotive, and behavioral tools to your personal situations. And Ellis writes this and many of his other books for us non-psychologists...not just for "professionals." The book starts by briefly summarizing the results of Ellis' ground-breaking work on what we do that causes us to feel and behave differently than we want. The author then teaches his general cognitive system...which includes very specific instructions...on how to change these feelings, behaviors, and thoughts. Ellis terms this system the "A, B, C, D" method of "disputing" irrational thoughts that are "irrational" because they (i) are not true and (ii) produce results that we don't want. The book then moves beyond this general system and shows you how to easily use cognitive, emotive, and behavioral tools to effectively stop your unwanted patterns. While the methods are extremely user-friendly, they do require work...beyond the reading. Because this book shows how to effectively tackle a wide variety of patterns...the following is a partial list of chapters:
1. Overcoming the influences of your past
2. Refusing to be desperately unhappy
3. Tackling dire needs for approval
4. Eradicating dire fears of failure
5. How to feel undepressed though frustrated
6. Conquering anxiety
7. Acquiring self-discipline
...and others. While many other psychologists/authors, such as David Burns in his "Feeling Good: The New Mood Therapy," use cognitive methods, Ellis shows how to use many of them far more effectively than most others. And he also includes emotive and behavioral tools, many of which he created years ago and that his non-for-profit institute has used successfully for decades. While Burns' book has some excellent additional tools, I strongly suggest that you start with "A Guide for Rational Living" and then move on to Burns' book if you want. I've gone back to this and a few others of Ellis' books several times during the last 10 years or so. After working through a new situation, I keep realizing how much this one volume still does for me. In my opinion, the book's only weakness is its stlye of writing. It's older style is less interesting than that in some of Ellis' newer books. I strongly recommend it not for its literary value, however, but for what it can do for you.
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156 of 163 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
The SIngle Greatest Self-Help Book Ever, December 30, 1999
I have in my short life have read maybe 200 or 300 self-help books. Thse books vary from "The Power of Positive Thinking" to "How to Win and Influence People." Throught all these books, I have never seen a real good method to be happy. TO be really happy.This book is the excpetion. This book can help almost any person to be happy. The basic idea of the book is this: People have certain beliefs about things. For example you might have the belief that you must be liked by everybody. Beliefs like this cause you to become very upset when you realized that this belief is being broken and twisted by the world in which you are living. For example, if you believe that the world should be fair, then anytime the world treats you unfairly, you will very depressed. Or if you believe that you must be liked by people, then anytime somebody insluts you, you might become depressed. So point A= Our beliefs cause our distresses and emotional problems. Eg. if I want everybody to like me, I will feel depressed when someone doesn't To stop these "irrational beliefs" you have to put in place of them "rational beliefs" such as "I want people to like but if they don't it's ok and I should rather accept myself as I am." When you have rational beliefs than you will not feel depressed at all. The book talks about ways to refute your irrational beliefs and uses examples from case histories on how this can be done. The point of the author is to make you understand these irrational beliefs and dispute them using various methods. Once you do that, then you'll be happy. The authors, want you to be rational in your living. I also recommend that you read; Feeling Good, books by John Sarno, and books by Aaron T. Beck and other Cognitive Therapists.
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74 of 75 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
A Revolution Begun., May 30, 2002
The revolution I refer to is the one that followed in the wake of the original publication of this book in 1961. Ellis formally introduced his REBT therapeutic model in 1955, but at the time, few knew and fewer cared. However, this book would change that forever. No longer would we have to settle for self-help pablum like "The Power of Positive Thinking", because now we had a piercing book for the masses that explained both clearly and thoroughly three things that no popular work had ever told us before. First, we don't just "get" upset, we "do" upset. Or, in other words, we make ourselves emotionally disturbed. Second, the authors plainly explain how we make ourselves upset. We create our own emotional disturbances mainly through our irrational (aka, unhealthy, self-defeating) thinking. And third, Ellis and Harper give us many effective techniques to combat these thinking patterns. The techniques suggested are divided into cognitive, emotive and behavioral categories, although in fact there is significant overlap for the simple reason, as the authors point out, that we don't just think or feel or behave in a vacuum. Rather, we are thinking/feeling/behaving beings, and this interplay, luckily enough, offers us many ways to a "profound philosophic change" in our outlook, which is the goal of this work. Easily, the most influential self-help book ever written and rightfully so!
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