Extrememly helpful!
This book is the most useful general psychological self-help book I have ever read. It is a comprehensive guide to overcoming self-defeating thoughts that lead to negative feelings and neurotic behaviors. It promotes the Rational-Emotive Therapy model, which posits that all negative feelings that limit human potential are based on irrational thoughts. Therefore, one must identify the these self-downing thoughts and systematically root them out and replace them with thoughts that will help achieve greater success and contentment. After a thorough introduction to the process in the first nine chapters, there is a chapter on each of the ten irrational ideas that plague people. Throughout the book there are examples of dialogs between the authors and patients struggling with various irrational ideas and neuroses. These examples serve to inform the self-talk of the reader, and show how to derail irrational thinking and replace it with more constructive thinking. The book may be bit too academic for some: the authors put their theory in the context of Freud, Skinner and primal scream psychologists and others, which makes more sense if the reader has some familiarity with those. The language is all 60s-ish, which does not detract from the essential usefulness of the message. I recommend the book for anyone, at any stage of life, who is struggling with anxiety, resentment, needs for approval, feeling out of control, depression, lack of discipline, fear of failure, or desperate unhappiness. While the book was not intended as a cure-all and the authors recommend using it in concert with counseling, I cannot see how it could do anything but help.
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