The art of not embittering life

One day, through a friend, also a psychologist, the book “The art of not making life bitter” by Rafael Santandreu came into my hands. She lent it to me saying: Read this book, you will learn a lot. I have improved my therapies thanks to him and I have also grown as a person..

I started reading it with enthusiasm and high expectations, and it certainly didn’t disappoint me, but rather impressed me. I soon realized that It was based on the rational-emotive therapy of the famous psychotherapist Albert Ellis, a therapy with which I felt identified. since I discovered authors like Ellis himself or Auger, but it was even more radical and profound. It was the cake in the face that I needed at that moment and it opened my eyes in many aspects of my life.

The art of not making life bitter is not your typical self-help book that presents you with what you want-or need-to read to feel good for a while.

It is a book whose main purpose is to make us strong on an emotional level. Is clean the dirt from your glasses, those that are so dirty that they are distorting true realitycreating a subjective reality based on the person’s own irrational beliefs and causing significant emotional discomfort.

When we talk about irrational beliefspsychologists refer to affirmations, evaluations, truths and subjective assessments that people form from early childhood about ourselves, others and the world.

It is the way we interpret what happens to us, the lenses of our glasses. If the glasses are clean, we will have rational beliefstonic, based on reason and reality that will be accompanied by healthy emotions.

If we have them dirty, we will harbor irrational, false beliefs that do not correspond to reality., which do not help us achieve our goals and cause great suffering in the person. Still, for those who have them, they become absolute and indisputable truths and that is when emotional problems arise.

The book then teaches us, as Epictetus already said, that It is not the situations that cause our emotional suffering, but it is us, With our irrational beliefs and internal self-talk, we create our own discomfort.

We tend to think that there is a direct relationship between situation and emotion, but if this were the case, everyone would react in the same way to the same situations and we can verify that this is not the case. Therefore, the equation is more complex than situation-cause-emotions.

There is an intermediate ingredient which is beliefs and thoughts. What good news! If with my thoughts I create my disturbances, I myself also have the power to feel good! It’s all up to me!

In the book we can discover that Some of these beliefs are demands toward oneself, others, and the world, needs that no one really needs, or terrorizations of what can happen to us or what has already happened.

When we think we need what we don’t need to survivesuch as the approval of others, success, a partner who loves us, the job of our dreams, We will create a lot of anxiety, because if we never achieve it, we will feel miserable, but if we do, we will always be distressed by the possibility of lose it, therefore we will not enjoy it either.

We don’t realize that the only thing that is really necessary is food and drink and that if we have that covered, we can already enjoy life a lot. The rest of the needs are a trap, things that we think we need, but it is a lie.

When we are sick with “terribilitis” we tend to evaluate everything that happens to us as terrible, unbearable, catastrophic, the most dramatic thing that could happen to us.. Something that could perhaps be evaluated as “a little bad”, we automatically classify as “terrible” without a reasoning process involved, so, obviously, we will provoke emotions in line with that way of processing reality: anxiety and depression.

Using reason we can realize that some of our thoughts and beliefs are false and unreal and that we are harming ourselves by “believing at face value” in something that is not true.

On the other hand, for not knowing how to accept with temperance and calm the inevitable adversities of life as well as for constantly telling ourselves that what happens to us is terrible and catastrophic.

The first step will be to identify what is going on in your head. What are you telling yourself to make you feel so bad? What do you need your mother’s approval? What if you don’t work on what you studied, are you a failure? If you never had a partner again, would life have no meaning?

Once you have identified your irrational beliefs, you will have to fight with them, combat them through questioning and confrontation. To do this you will have to prove to yourself that these ideas are unrealistic. Some questions that the book proposes are:

Are there other people who are happy in the same situation? (or in worse situations) Even with this adversity, could I carry out interesting objectives for myself and for others? In an infinite universe of planets and stars that are born and die incessantly, is there anything really dramatic? Is what is happening to me so important? Is it really terrible?

The more arguments we find, the easier it will be for us to establish the rational belief and deepen it until we make it ours.

Little by little they will become automated until they become your new life philosophy. It must be emphasized that negative emotions do not disappear completely Well, it is neither possible nor recommended since all emotions have an important function for survival.

What disappears are the maladaptive, exaggerated and unhealthy emotions. You can get out of the prison of unrest. You have the key. Freedom and happiness are guaranteed.