Book Summary
In You and Your Emotions, written by Maultsby and Hendricks in 1974, the authors explain how people’s thoughts impact their feelings. In addition, they describe how rational thinking and control over irrational thoughts may improve emotional well-being and avoid impulsive and inappropriate actions. Generally, the creation of emotion involves three significant components: perceptions, thoughts, and emotional feelings.
Using multiple examples, the authors demonstrate that events, facts, and objects cannot cause emotional feelings. Instead, various feelings, such as joy, calmness, love, anger, sadness, nervousness, loneliness, depression, and many others, are caused by people’s thoughts and beliefs about these events, facts, and objects. As a result, knowing a person’s thoughts enables one to predict their feelings and actions. In the same way, an individual’s thoughts may be inferred from his emotions.
People frequently have emotions they do not want to experience. However, knowing that feelings are caused by thoughts, and controlling irrational thoughts and replacing them with rational ones, may help avoid negative, inappropriate, and unwanted emotions and associated actions. In general, rational thoughts have several distinctive characteristics: they are based on objective reality, life-protective, and help keep an individual out of trouble.
In addition, rational thinking leads to the quick attainment of desired things and prevents unnecessary emotions. Therefore, rational thinking constitutes the basis of rational behavioral therapy – think better before feeling better. Thus, to solve a personal problem related to irrational thinking and associated inappropriate feelings, the therapy suggests Rational Self-Analysis (RSA). It is a written analysis of thoughts in response to a particular situation and the feelings it causes. By applying RSA individually, people may assess the rationale of their thoughts and correct them to evoke desired feelings.
Self-Defeating Beliefs
Multiple personal self-defeating beliefs and beliefs belong to people around me, which I encounter often, and the first one is “People will not accept and love me as a flawed person.” Here, irrational thinking is evident in its inability to reflect objective reality. Under pressure to be perfect, people with low self-esteem, shaped by upbringing, aim to avoid mistakes at any cost, ensuring others will not accept them with flaws. Indeed, these thoughts are not true, and they lead only to anxiety, sadness, depression, and loneliness.
Another common self-defeating belief is, “If I am rejected, there is always something wrong with me.” This is another example of irrational thinking disconnected from objective reality. People with low self-love and self-esteem are often afraid of rejection because they perceive others as superior; thus, when rejected, they feel inferior and worthless. This self-destructive and invalid thought may have a highly negative impact on an individual’s mental health.
Lastly, another counterproductive belief is that one must avoid burdening others by showing negative emotions. This belief may occur in people with emotophobia, an extreme fear of emotions. However, in most cases, people with this belief were raised as “convenient” children – their parents told them they deserved less love and affection when they were angry, anxious, or jealous. Unfortunately, there are many such families; thus, these cases are common. All feelings are important, and hiding them may lead to misunderstanding and decreased emotional well-being.
Reflection
You and Your Emotions is a handy book for anyone considering their emotional health. In a very comprehensive way, it explains how emotions are created and how they may be changed. Although the impact of thoughts on feelings was not unfamiliar to me, I had an opportunity to deepen my knowledge of this topic. Moreover, I was delighted to learn about a complete guide dedicated to RSA. Thus, I may use it whenever I feel that my emotions are irrational, and the thoughts that cause them should be analyzed to assess their objectivity and usefulness.