Fathers Day
REBT Self-Help Form
What is the situation that you are upset about?
Answer: People were/are… then a list…mean to me… self-centred… inconsiderate with intent…family was/is physically/emotionally abusive…restraining orders issued.
What are the unhealthy negative emotions that you are experiencing?
Answer: rage, depression, anxiety, hurt, guilt, and jealousy.
What self-defeating behaviours would you like to change?
Answer: withdrawal, unassertiveness…overeating
What demand are you making about the situation?
Answer: I must not be criticized… others must do the right thing at all times… treat me fairly… be nice to me or else you are a rotten horrible person…a moron. Life must be pleasant and convenient or I can’t stand it.
Dispute: where is it written that others must? Where is the evidence that I can’t stand it?
Rational Belief: they are that way so they must be that way…they aren’t ALL bad, THEIR INCONSIDERATE BEHAVIOR IS A PAIN BUT it's NOT AWFUL. I’m not going to die from it…a bad act does not make them a bad person… there is no law that says others must…just because I prefer not to be criticized does not mean that I must not be criticized.
What are your new healthy negative emotions?
Answer: annoyance, concern and sadness.
What are your new self-helping behaviours?
Answer: talking to strangers and asking for what I want.
Warning: This form should not be considered a substitute for individualized treatment with a mental health professional. If you are seeing a counsellor or a therapist, it is recommended that you print this page and discuss your responses with him or her.
Designed by Will Ross © 2006
Return to www.rebtnetwork.org
So, I’m sitting in the family therapist's office, raging at the world and this clown likes Survivor ‘reality’ t.v. for fucksakes, I can tell right away this is another in a long list of these offices, starting in my very troubled childhood, of incompetent social workers. This guy is obviously another moron.
Ya, no.
‘Just consider yourself an orphan he says’. This floors me. How did he know?
This is emergency psychiatric care at the Rockyview hospital, they got me in to see Dwayne Johnston and past the 6–8 month wait that they call mental health treatment in this province, Alberta, with the highest suicide rate in Canada. My wife of 10 years with the onset of Huntington’s disease had become unstable, her cult recruiter ‘minister’ aka donation aggregator, Fred Elford, had got divorced recently and he decided my annoyance at his furfooting around our relationship should be called abusiveness and I should go away so he could move in. The undervalue, dump, smear technique of ending relationships commonly employed by narcissists.
So people, even ill people with con-artist narc extramarital affairs have a right to live with whoever they want. I left everything to her as she was suffering a truly horrible slow brain death, she was going to need resources. I was age 50 and physically healthy, so I moved to a small, cheap, squalid apartment with hookers in the basement and lost my house, my painting art studio, my picture framing home-based business and my wife. In many ways my self-esteem and identity. I got a transitional needs job answering phones at a limo company and found a gig economy job photoshopping tits for advertisers. Any port in a storm, sailor.
I found an internet girlfriend for some pleasant distraction company until she announced she would like me to move to Australia, and pee in her mouth. Instead, I joined the bluegrass association and met Brenda who began to call my poetry, flowers, one true love preferences ‘vanilla’ and announced she’d like things more forceful and more anal. Ouch.
I couldn’t love bluegrass with its American evangelistic agenda and I couldn’t love giving and receiving anal pain with Brenda and me in dog collars, (that’s what they do after church)so I dropped music as a hobby and took up the camera, finding a real involving interest that became my predominant art form.
So, serial loss. I became so anxious I didn’t want to leave the house ever again and I cried for 6 months straight. I had sought help from the Huntington psychiatrist, Dr. True, as my brother had just brain tumour stroked out and my oldest friend Tref(Terry)Burnett was in a hospice with no skin or eyelids from his sun and cigarette addictions. The psychiatrist informed me he was a Deacon in his church and I should find purpose in God through the losses. So basically he was another cult recruiter preying upon his patients, trolling for souls with cash to ‘save’.
I called the Crisis Center where I used to volunteer when I was a kid and was told I was ‘just lonely’.
I sought help from the grief counselling at the hospital, more ordained incompetents, but the receptionist was no fool, she booked me into the emergency psychiatric thingy and here I was, staring at Dwayne and Not Happy, to put it mildly.
‘I bet you are telling yourself you can’t stand it,’ he said. It was my mantra, thousands of repetitions a day. All my life. How did he know?
When you tell yourself you can't stand it you are saying you will die from it.’
‘Are you dead?’
I burst out laughing. This was my Good Will Hunting moment, where Robin Williams says, ‘It’s not your fault.’
‘Your family abandoned you emotionally at birth, your friends aren’t your family, so just call yourself an orphan.’
‘You don’t fuck around, do you?’ I said. ‘We don’t have people come back forever, dependant for life on therapy,’ was his response.
The difference, in my opinion, between evidence-based psychology (the evidence is I’m not dead) and religious woo-woo is that these guys, the former, are governed by Do No Harm and when folks don’t come back they like that, it's called a cure.
Woo-woo religions don’t particularly care if they meet your needs for psychological and physical safety. In fact, the opposite is true as they want you to keep coming back, hurting seeking relief (distraction-based such as prayer, chanting, what have you), so they can rape your bank account and fuck your kids.
Based on the evidence of reading the news lately, 250 assorted kids bodies in a mass grave at a Catholic residential indoctrination school for First Nation kids forcibly taken there by armed police. This went on for generations so I suspect we are just getting started with the grizzly discoveries of the religious horror show. Also, watching the movie Spotlight, the Oscar-winning film (best picture, best screenplay, 2015) based on the story of how the Boston Globes’ reporting team in 2002 exposed the Catholic Church’s cover-up of child sex abuse by its priests. The Globe won a Pulitzer in 2003 for public service for its coverage of the issue.
So after 6 months of visits with Dwayne, homework, study and practise, I knew how I got depressed and anxious and how to get myself out of it with that little form thing at the top of this page. Sometimes 10 times a day, but it beats being depressed.
Dwayne Johnston did what my father was supposed to do, he took away my fears. Then taught me how to do it for myself.
So happy self-help-fathers day to me.
