Learn to stop letting people and situations upset you and start enjoying life in this classic self-help book by a respected pioneer of psychotherapy.

Life can get tough. From unemployment—or overwork—to divorce or remarriage, the challenges of newly blended families, not to mention everyday hassles, stress can feel non-stop. To top it off, technology confronts us with a barrage of seemingly urgent tasks 24/7. It’s no wonder things and people can make you lose your cool. In this landmark book you’ll find a very specific, powerful skill set designed to help you keep any scenario from pushing your buttons—and it works.

Rational-Emotive Behavior Therapy (REBT), created by world-renowned therapist Dr. Albert Ellis, provides you with realistic, simple, proven techniques that will significantly reduce your stress levels and help you react effectively, whether the circumstances are professional or personal. Discover:
• Ten beliefs we use to let people and situations needlessly push our buttons

• A powerful alternative to the kind of thinking that upsets us

• The Fatal Foursome—feelings that sabotage you

• How to change your irrational thinking using four key steps

Whether you’re dealing with colleagues, parents, kids, friends, or lovers, How to Keep People From Pushing Your Buttons will show you how to enjoy an active, vibrant, successful life.

“No individual—not even Freud himself—has had a greater impact on modern psychotherapy.” —Psychology Today

Praise for How to Keep People From Pushing Your Buttons

“Don’t get mad or get even—get placid using these techniques for defusing difficult situations.” —Booklist

Reissued with a new foreword by Raymond DiGiuseppe, PhD, ScD, St. John's University

"New trainees often get the theory of psychopathology; they struggle to get the case conceptualization and the strategic plan. Then they ask themselves. "What do I do now?" Going from the abstractions to the actions is not always clear.

The Practice of Rational Emotive Behavior Therapy represents a compilation of years of theoretical and clinical insights distilled into a specific theory of disturbance and therapy and deductions for specific clinical strategies and techniques....The structure of this books focuses on an explication of the theory, a chapter on basic practice, and a chapter on an in depth case study. A detailed chapter follows on the practice of individual psychotherapy. Although the book is not broken into sections, the next four chapters represent a real treasure. The authors focus on using REBT in couples, family, group, and marathons sessions. Doing REBT with one person is difficult to learn. Once the clinician adds more people to the room with different and sometimes competing agendas things get more complicated. These chapters will not only help the novice clinician but also the experienced REBT therapists work better in these types of sessions.

So, consider yourself lucky for having picked up this book. Reading it will help many people get better." - From the Foreword by Raymond DiGiuseppe, PhD, ScD, Director of Professional Education, Albert Ellis Institute; Professor and Chair, Department of Psychology, St. John's University

This edition, involving a unique collaboration between Albert Ellis and the world's greatest Ellis scholar, Windy Dryden, modernizes Ellis's pioneering theories. The book begins with an explanation of rational emotive behavior therapy as a general treatment model and then addresses different treatment modalities, including individual, couple, family, and sex therapy. The authors have added material new since the book's original edition on teaching the principles of unconditional self-acceptance in a structured group setting. With extensive use of actual case examples to illustrate each of the different settings, and a new brand new foreword by Raymond DiGiuseppe that sets the book into its 21st-century context.

In his early life, Ellis was faced with a major physical disability, chronic nephritis, or inflammation of his kidneys, which plagued him and led to hospitalization. This experience helped him to develop ways to overcome anxiety. He also suffered from severe migrainelike headaches, which persisted into his forties. Active and energetic by nature, he gradually learned that the best way to cope with any problem, physical or emotional, was to stop "catastrophizing" and to do something to correct it.

As Ellis points out in all of his work, when faced with adversity, we had better realize that we have a real choice, either to think rationally or irrationally about the problem. The first option leads to healthy consequences - healthy emotions such as sorrow, regret, frustration, or annoyance, which are justifiable reactions to troubling situations. The second option leads to unhealthy emotions, such as anxiety, depression, rage, and low self-acceptance. When we recognize irrational beliefs as such, we can then use our reason to dispute their inaccuracy. Ellis goes on to describe how these techniques helped him to cope with many other adult emotional problems, including failure in love affairs, shame, anger, distress over his parents' divorce, stress from others' reactions to his atheistic conversations, and upset due to his attitudes about academic and professional setbacks. When he was close to ninety years of age, his rational philosophy helped him cope with a near-fatal illness.

Honest and unflinching yet always realistic and forward-looking, Ellis demonstrates how to gain and grow from life's challenges through rational thinking.

With a new foreword by Raymond DiGiuseppe, PhD, ScD, St. John's University

"Albert Ellis has written many books on his favorite topic Rational Emotive Behavior Therapy. Although he writes on that topic very well, he often does not write about generic psychotherapy. REBT is an integrative form of psychotherapy. Following this model, psychotherapists can incorporate many diverse techniques and strategies to change clients' dysfunctional behaviors and emotionsÖ. Much of what Al identifies as good REBT in this book is just good psychotherapy. Because people so universally identify Al with REBT, people may generally overlook his wisdom as a clinician. Having worked with Al for more than thirty years, I have been fortunate enough to learn from him. Much of the knowledge I learned from Al and cherish the most is not necessarily about REBT theory. They concern wise ways of thinking about clinical problems. That is why, out of all Al's books, this is my favorite. This is Al Ellis, the clinician."
-- From the Foreword by Raymond DiGiuseppe, PhD, ScD, Director of Professional Education, Albert Ellis Institute; Professor and Chair, Department of Psychology, St. John's University

Now available in an affordable paperback, this edition takes a look at the underlying causes of resisting cognitive-emotional-behavioral change and the methods used to overcome them. Written in present-action language, Ellis gives an overview of the basic principles of Rational Emotive Behavior Therapy and Cognitive Behavior Therapy. Ellis charts the changes in the field that have taken place in the 20 years leading up to 2002, when this edition was originally published. The book also integrates recent therapies into REBT, including psychotherapy, solution-focused therapy, and recent findings of experimental psychology.